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It's my observation that people who don't keep their covenants often think it's "mean and drives people from the church" when you talk about keeping your covenants.

No, he was not, not in any sense in which that word is used in American political discourse today. That is not a feature of today's American liberalism, unless you're saying that Jesus would call for the freedom to destroy your unborn baby if you feel it might inconvenience you. Pretty sure you're not saying that. Certainly not any sort of feature in modern American "liberalism". This is simply false. We as Latter-day Saints are familiar with this general idea. It's an application of the law of consecration; early latter-day efforts were generally called "united orders", were entered into only by covenant, were always voluntary, could be left at any time, and were administered in all cases by leaders called of God and not by agents of profane governments. To compare such small, private, religiously motivated efforts to "a type of socialism" is way beyond the mark. I think it's worth noting that even with divine guidance, the early covenant Saints failed to get those societies to work as they were intended, until the effort was ultimately abandoned. As he has always done. Note that he did not call for Rome to care for the sick or for the nominal Jewish king Herod "to feed the poor and care for the sick so that none would be hungry and all would have basic necessities." Jesus' call to action was an individual charge, to be fulfilled individually and not to be abrogated to a government (profane or otherwise) to enforce such feeding and caring. I think you overstate, or simply misstate. Please outline which of "the more conservative ideals of the time...were alarmingly closely aligned with many of the [conservative] ideas of today." This is not even slightly true unless you intend the word "liberal" in almost the opposite sense to which it is normally used in America today.