Political labels are pretty junk, especially after centuries of mass media and propaganda in the mix. I find it helps to learn to convey your values specifically if you want to avoid that whole mess.

The 'left-right spectrum' is subjective and relative which makes it pretty useless without having a ton of context. "Leftist", by itself, is mostly a meaningless term. To socialists, a progressive liberal is usually considered center or even right wing. Some socialists even call other socialists right-wing. It's just pointless.
What the US mass media calls 'liberals' is a progressive liberal in political science. What the US mass media calls a conservative is usually a conservative liberal aka right-liberal, that's why they constantly prize liberty and freedom. The US libertarian is simply a classical liberal. They're all liberals!

Useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k - "Why the political compass is wrong", explaining how vague and ultimately ineffective the left-right auth-lib models of politics are.

[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I don't like progressive used that way because historically progressivism was just about an ideology that was results driven and often independent of other labels. There were progressive conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt and the Nelson Rockefeller Republicans in America (though the progressive conservatives in Canada are anything but). They were fundamentally centrist liberals though, essentially a watered down evolution of the historical French radical liberalism/radical whigs. Merkel, for example, called herself a progressive and she was a Christian Democrat.