I'm certainly not. In the US, there is a significant overlap between libertarianism and conservatism, due to American political traditions themselves being rooted in constitutionalism and suspicion of centralized power.

Rather, I believe it is you who is confusing "conservative" vs. "progressive" political philosophies with whatever haphazard accumulation of policy positions have coalesced in the Republican and Democratic parties due to the tactical incentives of the immediate moment.

> "We're going to give the government absolute power in order to best benefit everyone" comes from a very different belief system than "We're going to give the government absolute power to benefit the dictator, or my position under him".

I don't think the latter statement applies to any particular political ideology -- rather, it describes the incentives of a particular type of functionary that exists under all dictatorships; all dictatorships are publicly justified by some doctrinal system aimed at improving "society" in some way, and all institutional systems consist of a mix of people pursuing the outward-facing goal of that ideology and those pursuing their own aggrandizement while paying lip service to that ideology.

And if your starting point is a constitutional system that's designed to avoid concentration of political power, and one that draws clear boundaries around the state and its role in society, then it's impossible to classify any ideology that aims to wear down those boundaries and use the political state to force any kind of social change as any sort of "conservatism".

This is the definition of radicalism; there are many flavors of radicalism, and those may be at odds with each other on account of pursuing different ideological goals, but the lack of regard for the established order them puts them on the same end of the left-right axis, only distinguishing themselves from each other on another, perpendicular axis.

> Under your model of the world, Anarchists (the communist ideology) and Libertarians (the radical free market ideology) occupy the same place on the left-right spectrum.

I don't quite agree with that, on account of the "radical free market ideology" you're attributing to libertarians not actually being a prescriptive ideology at all, but rather a defensive posture against other people's prescriptive ideologies. The communist "anarchists" you're referring to have a detailed vision for how everyone else should live, and aim to impose that vision through force, while the libertarians are fundamentally just opposed to anyone forcefully imposing any particular vision. So that pretty clearly puts the communists on the left and the libertarians on the right.