I agree with this. In a sane world, it would be we (you and I) who call ourselves liberal. The progressives took over(stole) the word “liberal” in the 1930s. This is how we get the oddity over who’s a liberal and who’s a “classical liberal”, a nearly nonsensical distinction. I understand why we have come to call ourselves “conservatives”, but that’s not actually what we are.
Herbert Hoover wrote in his books at the time and he was FURIOUS about the hijacking of that word “liberal” by the statists.
Interestingly enough, this word hijacking is also where we get the confusion around “libertarian”, which always was synonymous with anarchism. Because the progressives moved in and hijacked the word liberal, Rothbard decided he should swoop in and hijack the word libertarian.(The Betrayal of the American Right, 1971, page 83)
I would be very interested for a battle over words, I think this would be a very worthy battle, but it would require a high profile leader to start it up and put its value on display. That’s not something that you nor I could do, not that I can see. Maybe you have alternative thoughts on this?
If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII. 😀