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Notes -
I don't think this right. It is true that progressivism contains illiberal beliefs and values, but that is generally true - virtually every political movement in the US synthesizes liberal and illiberal beliefs. Very few people can be said to have abandoned liberalism, but everyone accepts compromises on liberal values. Sometimes this is directly ideological (something which applies to progressives, populists, religious conservatives, leftists, etc...) and sometimes it is the consequence of disagreements about what liberal values mean in practice or an attempt to reconcile internal ambiguities within liberalism. (Or ideology making contact with reality).
The suggestion that all the principled liberals are on the right is belied by the reality that the modern American right is a coalition of religious conservatives and right-wing populists. These people are not totally illiberal, but their policy preferences center on illiberal goals. The center right, which one would expect to be the standard bearer for conservative liberalism, is functionally dead.
Tellingly, while there is a lot of policy conflict between left and right on culture war issues, the intellectual side of the culture war is almost entirely center left vs far left. The right doesn't have much intellectual firepower to bring to bear, and what it does have tends to be either too spicy for public consumption or too lacking in clout due to misalignment with the broader conservative movement. The latter functionally operate at the right tail of the center left (e.g. people like Lyman Stone or Tanner Greer, who are smart and interesting and also totally untethered from operational conservatism). This is a major reason why conservative illiberalism doesn't get much discussion.
This linguistic shift is decades old (older than me, certainly) and conservatives were enthusiastic participants. The modern progressive movement didn't even exist at the time.
Beyond that, I stand by my initial point: self-described classical liberals are very likely to be people with right-wing views who do not want to describe themselves as conservatives. Not always, certainly (sometimes they are embarassed liberals instead), but someone with conventionally center-left views will probably describe themself as a liberal without adjectives (or maybe a neoliberal if they're terminally online) rather than a classical liberal. The consequence is that professing seemingly anodyne, cross-spectrum beliefs becomes right coded (and 'professing' is the key word here).
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