Words don’t have different definitions because you’re in fucking guns-and-mcdonalds-land. That’s just what “liberal” means, including here.

Liberal traditionally gets paired with conservative, in the US, because these are the two poles of the local political system.

It's sort of like how "Left" and "Right" derive from the two wings of the French Parliament prior to their first big revolution. If I said "You're only on the Right if you're a Monarchist. You're on the Left if you're a petite bourgeoise merchant who wants to do secular capitalism internationally" you'd look at me cross-eyed. But that's technically where all this shit is derived from.

Words do, in fact, have different definitions based on the context and the speaker and the historical moment.