DivinePaladin said:
I think this comes down to a difference in opinion on the phrasing of European vs. American ideologies. In my eyes, historically European parties until recently stuck to the rate of change, not the idea behind the change. European conservatives are accepting of change so long as it is gradual; American conservatives generally speaking are by and large against change. It helps that our conservative and liberal parties have to be completely blanket parties because of FPTP in America while in Europe you can get away with having several parties that are functionally different because of the execution of policy rather than the policy basics themselves.
Whereas you see America as more liberal, I see it as far more conservative. Even American ideology fits that in my view - we're functionally a very liberal country until it comes to actually enacting change. Once we have to consider giving something up or the actual ramifications of change, we back down but on paper Americans are almost always seen as supporting progressivism. First thing that comes to mind was when people were asked about ACA policies and shown to be in agreement until they were told that the ACA is Obamacare, at which point they shifted towards disagreement.
Essentially Americans are stupid. Which isn't a uniquely American thing obviously, that's true of everywhere with a public voting system. But I digress, my point was that one can simultaneously (and validly) argue that America is both more conservative AND more liberal than Europe, depending on how one views things.
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There is tons of change that American conservatives want. For example, the GOP has a platform on reforming government, taxes, immigration ( https://www.gop.com/platform/reforming-government/ ) in it there are dozens of other platforms that qualify as "change." From what I've seen of European conservatives, if there is a change by the opposing party and it works in the benefit of the population, they just accept it as a new thing to be conservative about, but I don't think they are more or less interested in change than American "conservatives", just accept it when it happens and by the nature of their political structures more sweeping changes can occur.
By the way, seeing America as being more liberal than Europe does not necessarily mean it isn't also more right-wing (on average) than Europe. Liberalism is usually positioned as a center position, for no good reason other than they tend to band with both conservatives and social-democrats/socialists. In the U.S, as I said, it is just the case that we have very few social-democrats (today) and very few true conservatives, and even fewer fascists/nationalists (all Americans are nationalist in a way, but only in a very superficial way: flag waving and inward looking, nothing really political.) It is important to remember that liberalism has nothing to do with change, inherently. At its core it is an ideology about individual rights. While it can be radical, it is hardly the only radical ideology, nor does it have to be (in the U.S it is the norm and status quo, since the country was founded on liberalism.)
I agree with the bolded. This was a huge semantic discussion really, I just found it funny how bastardized the term liberal is in the U.S that somebody called a "neoliberal" is not considered an actual liberal.