Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, you did not help me come up with a better word. I also don't agree with your reasoning for the word asymmetry. "Progressive" is the word that would be symmetric to "conservative". I purposely do not use that word, though, for reasons I've already explained. Also, I fail to see how the word "rightist" not being in use, as opposed to "leftist", is caused by, to paraphrase you, the Republican party being stupider than the Democrat party.

Incidentally, there's a whole Quora thread on this topic: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-term-leftist-more-common-th...

It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."

That leaves "liberal" not having an opposite. I think that's the case partially because the word doesn't really mean anything or has too many meetings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liberal-meanin...

The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.

As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:

* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.

* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.

* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.

* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.

* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.

And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?

Edit: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.

They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on
average rated as much more untrustworthy than Democratic users, based on either the fact-checker ratings or the politically-balanced layperson ratings."

This is nothing but a glorified credentials argument wrapped in a research paper! This is the kind of "intellectual" superiority" that you find on the left, unfortunately.