That’s just how liberalism has always functioned. It is fundamentally a settler-colonial set of politics that seeks to objectify human action as commodity; any claim to social justice is a result of forced concessions and long-term appropriation tactics. Neoliberals do not pretend to be progressive, they use language that they know will appeal to liberals who are too illiterate to understand their own bigoted internalized values. Conservatives (the PC party as well as conservatism in the twenty-first century) are not fundamentally opposed to liberalism’s basis of hierarchal material wealth and capitalist economics, they mostly differ in the audiences they target.

Fascism and liberalism are also not fundamentally opposed by any means, and fascism is more accurately described as a liberal tool than anything else since one is far more durable than the other. It is a philosophy that depends on the subordination of other groups to exist and the creation of an arbitrary privileged group to benefit from that subordination (such as how poor white men will confuse their racial and gender identity as a level of solidarity with wealthy white men and how whiteness can shift depending on how it benefits the maintenance of this hierarchy). Liberalism emerged out of white-supremacist, patriarchal settler-colonial states and very much still operates under the imperatives created by that social order, which is where fascists get their notions of race and gender from and why their criticisms of liberalism are more often oriented around its failure to effectively benefit naturalized privileged groups like men and white men especially. It’s more difficult to explain how these ideologies are different and yet cooperate in a nearly identical way as seen in Germany, Italy, and Spain during the early- to mid-twentieth century than it is to identify their common material interests and motivations.