The Butcher, The Faker, & The Disinformation Maker

 Americans have always been center left, they just no longer believe they are.
The cause of this is largely that language has been systemically sabotaged to manipulate and deceive.

America has a particular version of liberalism that has always been divergent from the norm.

It's always been a term that is a little puzzling. This is true of "conservatism" in America as well frankly. 
The words have particular meanings in the US that are dissimilar to the rest of the world's understanding.
It seems if you nonchalantly ask folks to describe their political views, many respond with "conservative".
What they really mean has more to do with with the broader meaning of the word 'conservative", rather than the meaning of a political conservative which is primarily about strengthening and protecting an existing social hierarchy. 
  In Europe, the word "Liberal " has traditionally meant a preference for things like limited government, separate private and public spheres, freedom of the press and association, free trade and open markets — this is often described as ‘‘classical liberalism.’’
But the United States had many of those inclinations since the birth of the nation.

By the 20th century, American liberalism had come to mean something  more distinct.
The focus on individual liberties was still there, but the vision of government's role in society had become sharper.  We expected our government to act more as a referee, to intervene when it could make a difference. We were ready to regulate markets, bust monopolies and use monetary policy as a way out of economic downturns. American liberalism was once robust, with immoderate presidents and spectacular waves of legislation like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. 

After the end of World War II, this version of liberalism  triumphed in the United States. The great writer, essayist, and teacher-critic Lionel Trilling called it the country’s ‘‘sole intellectual tradition." Liberalism legalized unions, created Social Security, and brought older Americans a bold new health care system -Medicare.

Why is it a dirty word today?  Why is it used as  an insult?
Well it's always been a bad word for the right.
To them,  liberals are, basically, everyone who leans even slightly to the left:
big-spending Democrats with unisex bathrooms and vegan latte coffee.
This is still how polls classify people, placing them on a neat spectrum from ‘‘extremely conservative’’ to ‘‘extremely liberal.’’ With nothing but empty space between.

In 1980, the victory of Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism set in motion the villainizing of American liberalism supposedly for being soft on crime and communism, bloating the government with social programs and turning American universities into hothouses of fetid radicalism.
Sadly the demoralized liberals responded by abandoning the label completely.

The nasty 1988 presidential campaign may have been a watershed. In one debate, Bush demanded that his opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, explain ‘‘some of these very liberal positions.’’ Dukakis’s reply, a weak ‘‘Let’s stop labeling each other,’’ only confirmed the word as an insult. A few weeks before the election, dozens of distinguished figures — from novelists to editors to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — bought a full-page ad in The Times to print a letter titled ‘‘A Reaffirmation of Principles,’’ expressing their alarm at the use of ‘‘liberal’’ as a term of ‘‘opprobrium.’’ But their own definition of it was oddly vague: They called it ‘‘the institutional defense of decency.’’ All those attacks on liberalism seemed to be weakening people’s sense of what liberalism even meant.
Until today, for the post truth generation; it's completely broken & lost.

Liberalism is not without fault, but the faults are not with policy.
The faults are stylistic. Criticism of liberalism cite arrogance, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, the insulated superiority of what, in 1969, a New York mayoral candidate called the ‘‘limousine liberal.’’ In other words, the features they use to distinguish liberals aren’t policies so much as attitudes.
The policies are generally sound. 

I suggest liberalism really is America’s core.
It is America's hegemonic intellectual tradition.

It’s easy to see how today it has become the word we use to deride the status quo. For the left, that’s a politics in which government cravenly submits to corporate power and cultural debates distract from material needs. For the right, it’s one in which government continually overreaches and cultural debates are built to punish anyone who isn’t ‘‘politically correct.’’ But in both cases, ‘‘liberal’’ points to the gutless compromise position, the arrogant pseudo-politics, and the mealy-mouthed half-truth.
This of course should NOT be. 

Each side has drawn tremendous energy from opposing this idea of liberalism. At the same time, the space occupied by liberalism itself has shrunk to the point where it’s difficult to locate.
What is needed is a liberal renascence. A recognition of the merits and willingness to purge ourselves of the  weird stylistic faults that have plagued liberalism. 
They are annoying, I'd agree. But they are not important at all. 
It's policy that matters. 
If we need to "conserve" something uniquely American...it is American Liberalism 
After all, by definition Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.

Does anyone outside of Nazis or KKK cretins oppose this?
I say not. 

For further reading check out "Liberalism - The Most Successful Idea Of The Last 400 Years"