Why do we allow them to be called conservatives?

[abowsh]

7. The same could be said of liberals

liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others; but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.”



This is nowhere close to what people who claim to be liberals believe. FDR ran as a liberal. ""Our Federal extravagance and improvidence bear a double evil; first, our people and our businesses cannot carry these excessive burdens of taxation; second, our credit structure is impaired by the unorthodox Federal financing made necessary by the unprecedented magnitude of these deficits." That was 1932. FDR always called himself a liberal, and as a candidate, he was correct. However, he changed his tune as president, realizing that more government intervention was needed after the Great Depression, but continued to call himself a liberal. This is believed by many to be the turning point for Americans completely misusing the term liberal.

I'm not sure when we started misusing the term conservative.