You see the problem here is that you accept the terms of argument of those people who want to discredit liberalism as factually correct without ever having learned of anything of the subject yourself to make up your own mind. Modern liberals have defeated socialism. There isn't any part of it that they have adopted. Claiming so just means that you don't know what either of them are.
Modern conservatives and libertarians reject classical liberalism. The modern liberal is the heir of the classical liberal. Because classical liberalism is based on reason. Conservatism and libertarianism are just emotional gut reactions with no evidence.
Geo-libertarians are the true heirs of the classical liberals. We are the ones who most focus on eliminating government granted privileges in order to allow the free market to best serve the poor.
That's what modern liberalism is. The adoption of policies to protect an inherently conservative system.
That much is true. It is a system of compromises (sometimes socialistic in nature, often paternalistic) adopted in order to treat symptoms without addressing the underlying problems inherit in the system. Rather than eliminate injustice, it seeks to mitigate the harm caused by the parasites just enough to keep the host able to support them.
The problems are not inherit to true capitalism, but are due to rent seeking. Modern liberals don't want to strike at the root to eliminate the harm caused by rentiers.
Because they are conservatives. And conservatism is at heart about the maintenance of traditional power. Having government intervene in the economy is a threat to the power of the elite.
The New Deal was more Fascist than anything. Mussolini was a big fan of Roosevelt, and was quite surprised that the US under him chose to be his enemy rather than ally.
Fascism does not have to have any racial component, but involves seeing society as a corporate body where different members must serve their proper roles to advance the health of the State. It allows private ownership of the means of production, but does not allow private owners to exercise significant control. It involves compulsory group mediation between boards representing the interests of labor unions and the captains of industry, forbidding private individuals the freedom to contract on their own terms. It involves draconian price fixing measures (like those imposed by Roosevelt's NRA) which will not allow goods or services to be sold either too cheaply or too dear. This of course leads to shortages and horrible inefficiency.
Having the government intervene in the economy may be a threat to the power of some elites, but is essential to the power of most of them. The richest of the rich in the world today are only rich due to government contracts, monopolies (patents, copyrights, titles over natural resources than cannot be considered legitimate property under Lockean homesteading, various licenses, etc), or regulations which impose fixed costs of compliance that makes it harder for new competitors to enter the market.
Big government and big business are not generally opposed to each other. They are usually codependent.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Something liberals do not want. Communism is more extreme down that path, with the very idea of ownership of the means of production gone. Populism has nothing to do with either. Populism is just governance by the will of the majority, whatever that might be.
Liberalism is the use of government and reason to correct the flaws in a market economy system so that it benefits all of the people, and not just the elite. But if you continue to refuse to accept actual definitions of terms as, you know, actual definitions of terms, then you make conversation impossible.
If you are defining liberalism as socialism, then you are not speaking the English language. And as that is the only language I speak, I can't communicate with you.
"The means of production" is a slippery term that obfuscates the important distinctions between the 3 factors of production: land, labor, and capital.
Marx did define the term socialism as state ownership of the means of production, but he was far from the first to use the term socialism.
Socialism is a broad term which originally applied to any system that attempted to address social problems. In this sense it includes a great many anarchists, libertarians etc. The term narrowed over time to systems in which the government bears the responsibility to address such social problems through regulation. It was widely used in that sense long before any of Marx's works were first translated in English.
Communism to Marx was an anarchic stage of society that could only occur once a socialist state had performed its role of abolishing private ownership of the means of production and then dismantled itself. The term had previously been used for many systems where groups held goods in common though, especially in monasteries.
True liberalism is "laissez-faire, laissez-passer," where neither the state nor rentiers can hinder the function of the free market. The state need only intervene to address acts of aggression or fraud.
Modern liberalism impairs the functioning of the market in many ways. It is not often as openly fascist as the New Deal was, but it is still far from Liberal.
