lmao what is it with people trying to map abstract political concepts onto geometric and spacial shapes?

The colloquial meaning of “liberal” used by some Americans does not align with how it’s used in political theory. That’s okay, words have different meaning in different contexts.

“Left” and “right” stem from the French Revolution (1789!) where the people who sat on the left of the National Assembly were progressives that supported the revolution and people who sat on the right were conservatives that wanted to preserve the old system. Liberalism (as defined in political theory, not colloquially) is the dominant global ideology and thus is no longer progressive or radical. It may have been progressive when monarchy was the main form of government, propping up feudalism as the main economic structure. But that’s obviously not how the world works 200+ years later

Liberalism was “the left” in the 1700s and has desperately tried to maintain that label ever since, all while doing anything it can to preserve the status quo with violence.

Government itself arises out of conflict between classes, and the fundamental mechanism of capitalism is accumulation. The former means without pretty intensive upheaval and reorientation of governmental systems, the institutions are unlikely to interfere with the core function they were designed to protect. The latter means that no matter what protections you put in place, by the very nature of how it works, capitalism will trend towards monopoly.

Seems like a pretty reasonable semantic shift to me.