The distinction is important though for the purposes of optics. No liberal will every say the right is evil and must be destroyed, and you'll get sideye from normies for suggesting that..
But
If you suggest that the liberals think that the right is obsolete and must be put away and prevented from realizing any power, the liberal has a much harder time arguing against that, and normies will likely intuit that its true on some level
Dude, as someone who was active in the leftist activist sphere for like 15 years, not only are they willing to say that, they'll tell you it to your face.
The difference (and it is an important one) is where this comes from. My generation grew up when the Moral Majority goons
were the designated anti-fun brigade. And while a lot of users on this site would love nothing better than to pretend it wasn't the case, too fucking many of the religious right back in my day were only too willing to own up to every negative stereotype you could possibly envision about them and then some. Everyone either knew someone who suffered something egregious because of them, or
was someone who had some particularly egregious shit happen to them because of them. The stereotype of them being joyless fucks who see Satan in everything didn't emerge in a fucking vaccuum, is what I'm getting at, and a lot of what you see now is a direct holdover from that time period.
But as
@Gehenna once pointed out, there is always more to every story. Many of the religious organizations that were cheerfully acting like assholes were actively being egged on by leftist groups at the time - or being paid directly by them. It's the reason you saw Jack Thompson happily jump in bed with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Lyndon LaRouche. Both sides were in on it, and only one of them was left holding the bag when public opinion finally slapped them upside the head. This does not, in any way, lessen the actions of the religious shitheads at the time. I have too many fucking stories of friends of mine that got disowned because they realized in their early 20s that they were gay, or fucking had all their belongings trashed because they liked PNP RPGs and Video Games, or got thrown the fuck out when they came of age because they dared to want a life that didn't involve complete supplication to their parents' sociopolitical leanings (hey, this sounds familiar).
It's been almost two decades since the Moral Majority ate shit, but the scars of what their supporters did are a direct contributor to why the left gobbled so many of my generation up. I have to wonder how much of that was by design, given historical context and what Gehenna said about the matter.
