I think the confusion here is mostly coming out of comparing US stances to globally expressed stances - both US parties are pretty right leaning on the global scale, but within the US left is democrat and right is republican - while people at the more extreme ends of the spectrum complain that, on the right, the republicans are too liberal and, on the left, democrats are too conservative.

The sort of interesting thing is it's really hard to be objective about this, if you were to measure where parties have stood on minority representation over history both parties today are astronomically to the left of any parties in the 1800s. I think the main thing we can sort of examine is where policies lie in relative comparison to the voting base and under that measure I'd expect that we have far more conservative and corporate representation today from both parties than the people voting - in a large part due to the political corruption existent in our system.