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The American right doesn't believe in its own ideology of individualism and therefore is stuck in a losing spiral of hypocrisy.
The US was largely founded when groups, not individuals, moved to north america to build their own communities. The US was not a free hippie-town when it was founded, it consisted of strong communities with strong levels of collectivism. A puritan community was in many ways highly collectivist with clearly enforced social norms, values and expectations. The idea of keeping the state out of people's business wasn't about freeing the individual as much as it was about freeing the congregation or town from the King. Towns and communities who didn't like the British king moved to the US to build towns with their values. However, in these communities norms were enforced and the individualism that is common in the American right wasn't really represented. Taxes were low, there was little government regulation and people could bear arms. However, men were men and women were women, my body my choice views on abortion would not have been accepted. People may have legally been able to dress like they wanted and pray to whatever god they wanted but in practice this wouldn't have been tolerated in a Puritan town. These towns were not morally relativistic and policed behaviour of their members.
The ideology was formulated in individualist terms yet was practiced in collectives. This worked since there were homogeneous communities that stuck together naturally and people didn't really use their right to identify as whatever they wanted and engage in moral relativism.
However, in the past couple of decades, the people have started to practice the law as written in the sense that they are engaging in true individualism. Gay marriage, feminism, multiculturalism, transgenderism etc do in many ways follow from true individualism. The American right have had a difficult time arguing for social conservatism from a truly individualist standpoint. If the legal system is built around the freedoms and rights of the individual it becomes difficult to enforce social norms and values that are cultural. If the US is a country of individuals doing as they wish multiculturalism is more difficult to object to and in a more multicultural society it becomes harder to enforce social norms implicitly.
What many conservatives actually want is to enforce their values, norms, and culture on society. They may say they want a separation between church and state and that they think that religion is up to the individual. However, many of them do not want to live in an atheistic state in a society in which Hinduism and Islam have the same standing as Christianity. Most conservatives want to live in a society that enforces traditional christian/European American values, culture and norms. Much of the conservative movement has had an incredibly difficult time defending what they want and getting what they want since their ideology isn't in line with what they want. Instead, they end up being hypocritical, making unnecessarily convoluted arguments and not promoting what they want since they are bound by an ideology that isn't inline with their goals. When people make arguments that aren't inline with their intentions or true beliefs they often face great difficulty in debates.
One winning strategy I can see is to stake out a piece of land and establish a zone in which norms are enforced. A common way of handling diverse countries is to allow different groups to have their own autonomy. In India, much of the middle east even in Indian reservations there are local governments that enforce the norms of the people who live there. Russia is an atheist state, however, Islam is enforced at a local level in Chechnya and the federal government in Moscow isn't really involving itself in their internal affairs. Without imposing Christian European American values in a geographic area it is going to be difficult for conservatives to get what they actually want. In order to do so they need to realign their ideology with their actual desires.
Conservatives have on the one hand almost uplifted a constitution and political system built around the state as a neutral arbitrator between individuals to a third testament while at the same time often showing a desire to live in a state with a clear culture, religion and moral foundation.
This is meant to be taken as a thesis, and as a start of a discussion of what conservatives actually want to achieve rather than soap-boxing.
This is true for all societies at all times. Moral relativism is an unstable solution long-term, and gives way sooner or later to a moral consensus. This is because there is a non-trivial level of values-coherence needed before the negotiation and cooperation required for a complex society become possible. No non-collective society of any appreciable scale has ever been observed. Sooner or later, people come together to coordinate around a shared understanding of the good, and to punish those who defect from that good.
That certainly was the claim. It does not seem to me that such a claim can be sustained post-2014. Once the old conservative social consensus grew weak enough, the resulting absence of a coherent value framework invited alternative ideologies to make their play for hegemony. The Libertarian ideal of "true individualism" is simply incompatible with human nature.
...Except that all of these find themselves enforced by collective action and, increasingly, state power. Christian desire for unrestrained hegemony can at least be pushed back against with the "separation of church and state" meme. Progressive ideology doesn't see itself as a religion, and so accepts no restraint to its ideological demands against dissenting individuals, first through social pressure and then through explicit force of law. Libertarian ideology has proved entirely powerless to arrest such enforcement.
To a first approximation, everyone wants to do this. The constituency of truly-principled libertarianism is vanishingly small. People want to work together to solve their problems, and they want to solve defection by coordinating overwhelming punishment of the defectors. If I murder my neighbor's kid, he doesn't want to have to do calculus on whether he personally can coordinate enough force to hold me accountable. Why prefer that to the nigh-omnipotent collective force of the entire United States of America turned against me?
Many conservatives were willing to accept and even adopt this line of thought, when it could be plausibly claimed that a stable libertarian détente was possible. That argument is no longer credible, and probably never will be again within any of our lifetimes. Call it religion or ideology, common sense or The Science, but some form of values coherence will be enforced by the majority on all dissenting minorities. Far from being dystopian, such enforcement has been the basis for every good thing we've ever gotten out of society; people need such enforcement to work and live together in peace.
The hypocrisy is certainly real, but I see no evidence that it's limited to conservatives, or is indeed much the fault of most of the hypocrites in question. Our entire society is founded on an incoherent ideology, and what you are seeing is simply that incoherence unavoidably expressing itself over and over again. The Enlightenment believed that people were fundamentally good, and that commonality of values would naturally emerge from the primordial ooze of liberty if only stultifying social control systems were removed. When those systems are removed and things reliably get worse, people rush straight back into imposed social controls, only usually in a far more arbitrary and less workable fashion than what they had before, trading long-evolved and highly fit mechanisms for naïve solutions derived from the local groupthink and labeled "reason" and "science".
Why allow such a patchwork to exist? Value of diversity for its own sake? Epistemic humility? Neither seem common enough to be a basis for meaningful social structure. Fear of the destructive results of runaway conflict is the classic answer, drawing on the example of the Peace of Westphalia. But of course, the peace of Westphalia was instituted in the exhaustion following one of the most destructive periods of protracted warfare in human history, and was instituted in an environment of relative values-homogeneity. Even with such favorable conditions, it could not last indefinitely, and the concepts it was founded on now seem quaint.
To a first approximation, no one is ever going to accept a bunch of rapists founding Rape Town just down the road. A generation of serious liberalism can generate sufficient values-drift to make equivalent disputes over values inevitable. Truly diverse peoples will, in fact, adopt values sufficiently and mutually repugnant such that there's not enough room in the country, continent, or solar system for the both of them. Social controls keep regenerating themselves because they solve this problem proactively, by counteracting values drift and keeping the vast majority in pleasing accord with one another. Such societies still have diversity, still have individualism... just maybe not as much as committed Libertarians might prefer.
This, on the other hand, is entirely correct. The primary failure of Conservatives is a belief that long-standing social structures are in some way immutable and omnipotent, that rules self-enforce somehow outside the will of the humans involved. Having had their desires effectively constrained by appeals to the Constitution, they imagine that the Constitution constrains everyone's values equally. This is obviously a stupid inference to draw, but their experience and social setting left them ill-equipped to grok postmodern language games and other forms of adversarial social engineering. The resurgence of the illiberal right demonstrates, I think, that they're catching on. Time will tell.
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