The basic purpose if liberalism is CONTROL! A key deficiency in liberalism is an immature sense of personal responsibility. Liberalism starts in childhood where everyone is immature on responsibility and liberalism sounds great! Liberals devise social programs with great benefits that are wildly popular but are financially unstable and discourage personal responsibility.
The liberal will soon get the idea that something is needed in the area of responsibility or their popular programs will blow up. However, they believe responsibility is something which must be placed on others to get those people to behave correctly. A liberal's two favorite words are "mandatory" and "forbidden".
The totally opposite purposes of these two groups continue to grow and fester until they eventually become the evil party and the stupid party. As the young liberal becomes more aware, they realize that the controls they believe are necessary for their popular programs will be very unpopular with the general population, so they devise ways to have it look like the conservatives are doing it. The liberals then attract the attention of the conservatives to the problem and get them to see that the controls will fix the problem. Naive conservative agree that the controls are needed and Viola! That completes the circle.
The classic example of this is Social Security. Everyone is forced to join it. The funding and payout schedules are patterned after a classic pyramid scheme, which would be illegal if anyone besides the government proposed it. When republicans point out that the trust fund would run dry in several years, democrats and the media scream that republicans are trying to take away grannys social security check. Faced with this onslaught, the repubs cave, and agree to raise FICA taxes to extend the trust fund a few more years.
So the liberals are called the evil party because they sponsor unworkable programs and are trying to exercise hidden control of the populace. The liberals eventually cant deny that their popular programs are destructive, but those programs keep them in power. They want the controls, but they maneuver to blame shift so they can avoid the responsibility. The conservatives are the stupid party because they keep falling into the clever traps set by the liberals; accepting false premises, trying to deny the false charges, and looking like they are guilty. Well they are not guilty of evil but they are certainly guilty of stupidity.
Go back and argue for freedom and dont get pushed off it. Stay on offense. Say the other side is the "mandatory" party. Dont agree that controls are needed on social programs; that accepts the premise of the unstable programs. Point out that these programs and controls are destructive because they eventually blow up financially and they also destroy peoples integrity. At least then you will stop stepping in the same old traps.