I hate to butt in, but the wording of 'conservative' and 'liberal'— rather, the way they've been misconstrued in American politics— is always something that ticked me off. On a traditional political scale, conservative means authoritarian and liberal means libertarian: i.e., conservative referring to traditional group-oriented politics, while liberal refers to progressive individualism. Oddly enough, in politics, it's noted that the scale got flipped 90 degrees, to which the authoritarian right is 'conservative' and the whole left is 'liberal', with no proper words left standing for the libertarian right.