What you are saying is only applicable for North America/ Europe. Liberalism is already the status quo there, which is why liberals defend it. However what is liberalism in the first place?
Liberalism: "Regulated capitalism is the least bad economic system. Also, the state shouldn't encroach upon the personal matters of an individual."
Leftists: "Capitalism is the cause of all problems. Fuck capitalism. The eventual goal should be to have a stateless, classless society. However, we disagree quite a lot on how to achieve this goal. This goal is called communism. Some of us say that we should do a violent revolution. Some of us believe that we can abolish capitalism using democratic processes. Some of us believe that to achieve communism, we need a temporary powerful state led by smart people, intellectuals, etc. to achieve material conditions necessary for communism. Some of us believe that the previous idea is absolute dog shit, and instead, we can achieve communism slowly, using non state actors like cooperatives, unions, syndicates and so on."
Conservatives: "Capitalism is good. The morals and traditions of our ancestors were better than the ones coming up now, and deviating from them would cause a lot of harm. We need to take steps to conserve these ideas."
Fascists: "All problems in society are because of group X. We need to get rid of group X by either converting them to our ways (if possible), deporting them from our borders, or cleansing our country of them entirely by killing them. Democracy is a slow and inefficient process. We should give power to a strong, smart leader who can get things done a lot more efficiently."
You find hypocrites in all groups. That's what I meant when I referred to exceptions. However, if u look at raw ideology, liberals and leftists don't want to encroach in personal matters, while conservatives most definitely do.