Conservatism is my salvation from 'Neurotypical oppression'

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Disclaimer: I take neither side, I just seek to understand them for myself.
Personally I feel like Conservatism and Liberalism actually mean and meant different things, but the definitions of these words have become cultural identities. Someone who shares a range of ideas which are more conservative is also pro capitalism and pro economy, which never made sense to me because that was what more liberal people have strived for hundreds of years. On the other end, someone who is more liberal desires environmental protection and a stronger government, but throughout history when a conservative party takes control over govts (this excludes the US obviously) they've strived for stronger govts which can control a population more effectively. Isn't death penalty a policy that would be administered by the government? What about less economic restrictions that were originally placed by a monarch or high officials in states of the early modern era?

So essentially, it's all a confusing mess. The more I study political philosophy the more confused I get. I understand conservatism and liberalism in their current definition, as well as the terms Republican and Democrat, but I feel like you'd only see this sort of thing in the US. Historically and even today, conservatism and liberalism around the world stand for vastly different things.

Two examples of words which have had their meanings changed in what I feel is the same way. The first one is Gay. It use to mean light hearted and carefree, and now it is used as (oftentimes vulgar) a designation for someone who is homosexual. Or another example, the Middle east, which use to represent south Asia and more accurately India, as it was in the middle of the east in proportion to the main European powers. When the US and the USSR came they revised the term middle east so it now means a collection of countries perceived to be hostile to western democracies (which indeed some of them are but that's something else entirely), when in reality many of them have nothing to do with each other, and its an almost entirely artificial region. People even think there's a middle eastern race, when someone from Egypt may be very close to someone from Palestine or even Israel and yet are sometimes considered part of a different race by some of the more ignorant among us. These words change and I feel that the same sort of thing has happened to our political process.

Sorry for such a long post. I was just confused so I posted this to try and clear it up for myself and I just want to know if anyone knows how to actually comprehend the political system. It's one of those things that gets bigger the more you research.

I always was appealed more to conservatism, but more leaning to the libertarian side on issues like privacy or big-government bureaucracy. This is what I think American people threw out the window a long time ago and forgot. I embrace a limited scope and size of government, but I am not against all government. I just want control of things like healthcare and education more in the hands of the people and local governments, not a bloated Washington-D.C. bureaucratic government. The problem is that Trump was our only hope left against liberalism in 2016, problematic as that may be, but he succeeded anyway.

Why,yes. I do realize that mistake.