Socialism was seen as a working-class, or under-class, movement and Liberalism was then seen to be the ideology supported by the wealthy elite class and capitalism. Fascism was based on a middle-class movement and gained its initial base of support largely from middle-class workers and small business owners, people who both opposed the "Left" and also opposed the existing wealthy establishment as well.

The Liberal revolutions had effectively separated the realms of Church from State and Commerce from State. That was what the Liberal revolutions were all about - eliminating the State control over commerce (feudalism and mercantilism) and State control over religion (theocracy) (or religious control over the State).

American politics today is very much shifted to the Right economically and socially, yet American society in general is relatively liberal in the social sense.

"Conservative" citizens who support right-wing politicians are in fact contributing to the very problems that they are trying to oppose, and the result is that as the economics shift more and more to the Right, the social situation becomes more and more liberal. The conservatives then keep pressing more and more to the Right, thinking that that is the answer, but in fact it is not.

The fact is that social liberalism is beneficial to corporations. The more liberal that society is, the more opportunities there are for making money, and, as Marx stated:

Under private property... every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of enjoyment and therefore economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need.

This is where the fundamental break between American society and religious conservatism occurs.

Most major religions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others, are based on the idea of limiting an individual's desires. Fundamentally, religious societies are typically societies where people are encouraged to control their desires and limit their possessions and worldliness.

Capitalist society, though, is based on the exact opposite of that. Despite the fact that FDR's New Deal appeared to be anti-business on its face, and despite the fact that the Keynesian economics of the post-WWII era in America relied on government intervention in the economy, this intervention was all designed to promote capitalism, and the means of doing that was through the promotion of consumerism, as the 1995 article If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down? states:

But the biggest change was in who "the people" now were. Because the Keynesian approach saw consumption as the drive train of prosperity, Washington collectively looked at the public in those terms as well. They were no longer primarily farmers, workers, businesspeople--that is, producers. Rather, they were consumers, whose spending was a solemn national duty for the purpose of warding off the return of the dreaded Depression. Our young men had marched off to war; now Americans were marching off to the malls that eventually covered the land.