Fascism and Modern Liberalism

Recently, on a warm summer evening I used the term "liberal fascist" in front of an American liberal; a NYC American liberal no less. She quickly said, "liberal fascist?" The moment instantly passed, presumably because she thought I had misspoken and because, I, upon seeing the startled look in her eye, didn't think the occasion suitable for attacking what is almost a religion among NYers.
But, had it not been a romantic, warm, summer evening and instead an occasion for truth telling I would have explained that liberalism historically has emphasized the fight for individual liberty against the state which had, generally, functioned somewhere between brutally oppressive and genocidal. This fight culminated in the most liberal document of all time: The US Constitution. In the mid 19th Century, however, Karl Marx struck back with the notion of a friendly socialist/communist but very powerful state. Modern liberals embrace this concept on the theory that a friendly state has power which can be used to secure individual liberty faster than it can be secured otherwise. Conservatives stick to the historical definition of liberalism which holds that the state is always the feared enemy. Indeed, they cite the entire 20th Century as a prime example. Further, they believe that whether the kind of statism is Nazism, Maoism, Leninism, Fascism, Fabian socialism, Stalinism, the devine right of kings, or modern European liberalism, all share the same statist flaw which is: inefficiency at best and genocide at worst. Modern liberals claim to realize the dangers of the state and say they seek a smaller state than did, for example, HItler, but to modern conservatives this rings hollow since the state of America has grown dramatically over the years and modern liberals still stands almost exclusively for a still larger and larger state with no defined end in sight.