What you call liberalism today is proof of the absolute stranglehold of the New Left and post-modernist ideology over Western intellectuals. Allan Bloom wrote about it in "The Closing of the American Mind" discussing how Frankfurt School nihilists such Herbert Marcuse and Michele Foucault and post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida burrowed into the Ivy League (later the rest of academia) beginning after WWII, fully taking off in the 60s.
New Left liberalism and post-modernism are unfortunately the bastard children of Nietzschean Nihilism. The belief that truth is relative is contrary to Enlightenment values of reason and fact based observations. Of course, post-modernists believe that Enlightenment thinkers were racists because they were white Europeans and math is racist because Europeans systematized modern math (never mind that the founding fathers of Algebra and Trigonometry were mostly Persians). Be that as it may, please spare us the lecture about how Liberals "believe in science" and conservatives are close minded.
There is nothing Liberal about mainstream American culture, as it is the product of Frankfurt School ideology (Please read Herbert Marcuse essay on A critique of Pure Tolerance)and what you call "Conservatism" is actually classical liberalism. So dear Alice, welcome Through the Looking-Glass aka America in 2022!
I think a deeper look shows that liberal ideologies are built out of reverence to a set of ideals while conservative ideologies are built around seeking power.
It turns out if you don't have any power, your ideals don't matter at all, this leads to the problem that liberal folks don't want to confront, which is that without conservative's sense of power, which can lead to value violating, yet pragmatic policy, liberals would not be able to push any kind of agenda.
China was eating our lunch and it was conservatives that pushed back on that relationship while liberals were getting taken advantage via China's exploitation of liberal values and liberal desire for pacifism.
From a purely game theory perspective, I think it's clear that conservative ideologies are prone to defection, while liberal ideologies prefer cooperation. Sometimes defection is necessary and you will lose if you do not defect.
So the reality is more nuanced than blue good and red bad. I would definitely rather live in a predominately blue society than a red one.