Comic Strips

Yeah "Liberal" as an insult from a Conservative from the leftist perspective is very funny and also sad. Conservatives often utilize the wrong terms for things which muddy the waters and make it harder for their flock to swap sides because messing around with diction makes following leftist discussion impossible if you have an understanding of the terms gleaned from a non-academic source.

Take the term "neo-liberal" the right uses it in its most literal translation to mean "new liberal" and uses it to evoke the far end of the progressive spectrum of the left.

In actuality the term was coined in the Reagan/Thatcher era to mean the sort of generally conservative policy of privatizing swaths of government services entirely, defunding government social programs, removing regulations/ depowering regulatory bodies and practicing so called "trickle down economics" policies. The philosophical term is frozen in time just the same way terms like "neolithic" or "neoclassical art" is. Republicans are literally more Neo-Liberal than the Democrats (who are sort of more passively status quo preserving liberal. Neo-liberal mostly by virtue of inaction. )

Linguistically the well is very poisoned. The left wing could try adopting new terms but the right wing is faster to disseminate their counter to that by just creating new bastardized meanings of the terms because the right has a more unified media structure. The left is fractured. It deals often with trying new things rather than preserving status quo which means it exists in a lot of subgroups.