"liberal" or "left" has primarily a social meaning, not an economic one. Over time in the West it's split from focusing on the role of the state to also include changing society's values at the individual level or fighting specifically for group-based identity and rights instead of individual rights. (There's not one "liberalism", as many of the spats on DU show.)
However it's perfectly possible for a leftist economic program to be wedded with a right-wing racial or values program.
Note what national socialism was like soon after its birth before WWI. It was originally anti-corporate and pro-distribution of economic power. Companies should be privately held, but held by small family units or small groups of workers who collectively owned the means of production. They'd profit directly from the work of their hands. Large organizations wouldn't happen, and few companies would have more than a couple of employees. Without corporate legal theory or some way of expanding the mangerial base beyond family, family businesses tend to break up and seldom get really large for very long. At the same time, those socialists were nationalistic in that they wanted a revival of folk identity, language, group cohesion, and a preservation of their own culture without having it assimilated by others or altered from outside, something that many Latino-American and Native American activists can identify with. The focus wasn't on keeping others out so much as a resurgence and preservation of indigenous culture. In other words, their "socialism" wasn't some sort of mockery of the word. It was a type of honest to goodness socialism, and far closer to the classical view of communism than most socialists hold. All such nationalisms are easily warped from ethnic pride into ethnic chauvinism.
Over the next 20 years it morphed into Nazism as the state controlled more of the economy and nationalism went from pride in one's own culture and advancing it to hate for others and destroying or dominating theirs. It was a small movement and easily co-opted into something much worse when issues of national pride and humiliation were at stake. (Notice that with Svoboda and some Ukrainian parties, it's gone the other way: They started far more fascist in the mid '90s than they are now--having a lot of moderates made them reposition themselves to retain power, and even then it ain't much. And there are still good "Communists" in Russia that are fervent nationalists, even calling for two-tier citizenship and rights inside Russia itself for native-born Russians versus non-Russians or non-Slavs.)
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