I think it's more like the system is built for the oligarchy, and liberals want to preserve the system. They'll often support things like taxes on the rich or worker protections - but they don't like the idea of something more direct

Neo-liberals do directly serve oligarchs, because they're liberals who operate under myths about how capitalism works - the efficiency of corporations, billionaires as innovators and job creators, voting with your wallet. They think if you fix the economy, everything else will work out, and for every social service they make sure to send a pile of money into someone's pocket. Thank God this seems to finally be declining

I think what makes this topic so complicated is we're taught a lie - that the political spectrum is a line. It's not two dimensional or a horseshoe - tankies are leftist authoritarians, but they're not further left than anarcho-communists. On some aspects they're pretty close to christo-fascists, but it's not because they went so far around that they're curving towards the far right. They just also want their end goal enforced from above, and also are willing to overlook a little genocide of the "enemy"

Meanwhile, anarcho-communists are on the other side of a different spectrum. They don't believe in a large system of enforcement from the top down, they believe in building community from the ground up. They don't believe in a system of rules, they believe in social bonds

The end goal is the same, but the methods couldn't be more different

My point with all this is that the left want change, the right wants the status quo. Conservatives want a hierarchy under de facto aristocrats, liberals want a system of rules, and anarchists want community rule

This doesn't all fit on a 2d spectrum, but it all makes sense when you break it down in more dimensions - you can nail down any coherent political stance to a point in this multifaceted graph space.

American liberals are different from liberals elsewhere, but what they have in common is they hold the legal framework as sacred. We already live in a world managed by English common law, they all want to perfect the laws, but resist anything that threatens the status quo