Why are socialist or left-wing people called liberals in the US, when it means the exact opposite in Europe? What caused this weird terminology shift?

The colonies predate liberalism as a policy and most American politics were formed around basically being completely ignored by Britain and dumped in the US. Meaning the US never had an anti British financial meddling party because that's the entire US identity. Americans look at neoliberals like anarcho capitalists and nod because that's essentially what Adam smith preached. But they're not going to call themselves liberals over it, that's simply "the facts". Liberalism was re-coined in the 1930's during the rapid building of the US nanny state to mean socialist imperialist foreign interventionist policies and anti-state domestic policies in order to foster as strong as a us military industrial complex as possible. It helps that during this period tens of millions of actual socialists from Europe has entered the us and were turning us major cities into embezzlement projects anyway

>>17866738 (OP)
There are two types of liberalism: social liberalism and economic liberalism. In the US, "liberal" refers to social liberalism and in Europe it refers to economic liberalism.

In what way do you not get it? Do you want a specific googlable explanation of how the meanings evolved? Political terms tend to have very slippery meaning in general. "Socialist" and "left-wing" are equally ill-defined. Part of it is manipulation but part of it is that the terms frankenstein a bunch of separate ideas into the same term and then some groups end up fixated on one aspect of the term. Nobody who just throws around words like "liberal" and "socialist" like there's a stable social agreement on what they mean is being clear and specific enough to have a serious discussion.

From what I understand, Americans use "liberal" in this way because it invokes permissiveness; let gays fuck in the ass, incorporate foreign cultures et cetera, in contrast to conservatives who want to maintain, conserve Christian cultural traditions. In Europe, "Liberal" refers more to market economy, privatization, permissiveness for corporations and so forth.

In the English language, we conjugate the Latin "lib" referring generally to freedom but it's not fully a synthetic language so we end up tossing "Liberalism", "Liberty", "Liberation" around like they're simply separate words.

>>17866833
"Liberal" is a term unironically used by talk show hosts and radio personalities that are Catholic stock to describe people they don't understand in a secular society. Basically they're the people that haven't been able to figure out what liberal means in 90 years