Well there is a side that wants to control everything from what kind of laundry detergent I can use to what kind of car I can drive, and it's not the conservatives. Liberals have done a pretty good job getting people to think conservatives are the authoritarians. But if you look at who is really trying to pass laws that limit how you live your life, they're not coming from conservatives.
That really is the disconnect in a nutshell.
Liberals see conservatives angry about Robert Mapplethorpe gallery displays and they want to de-fund the public money going to "Pissed Christ" and the big black and white poster of a guy with a bullwhip handle in his ass, and they scream "CENSORSHIP!"
(pats the liberal on the head), "No... we just don't want public money going to that "art". Any private gallery that wants to can put it on display."
Yet the way that Liberals tend to emote just makes them blind to the distinction.
Honestly, other than illegal aliens, new drugs, and sometimes getting their dander up about extreme pornography, conservatives rarely "ban stuff". Most of the things that you could say are banned by "conservatives" have been on the books for ever, like the states that still have sodomy and sex-toy laws on the books. And even then, that usually goes back several decades to when both parties were usually pretty much in lock-step on social issues, and differed more on fiscal policy and labor and international involvement.
As others have said, it's the liberals that are ban-happy. Banning salt, banning soda, banning guns, banning "offensive" speech, banning smoking, banning industries.
And the liberal definition of "oppression" these days usually means "
The state not giving us stuff we want."
Even if I don't like them 100%, well armed, and keeping more of my money and well employed under Conservative control, seems a much better position to fight any Conservative excesses. As opposed to disarmed, taxed to death, or on welfare, to fight any Liberal/Leftist excesses.
In a nutshell, if things under Conservatives turn nasty in a right-wing way,
I and a bunch of my buddies can kill them. Or if we lose, we go down swinging and making it damn painful/expensive to take us down.
If things under the Liberals go bad in a left-wing way, it's the cattle cars and the showers.