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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.
As I've pointed out here in the past, conservatives do not actually want to achieve anything - they don't have a grand utopian vision that they want to realize. They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.
The problem isn't that conservatives don't want to actually achieve anything, it's that they are much less ideologically consistent than liberals. Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves left, from libertarian types who believe in individual liberties to evangelicals who desire a God-centric government to business owners looking for less regulations to lower middle class complaining about taxes. The modern conservative group is more against anti-woke ideology than they are a cohesive voting block; this makes actually constructive policy much harder to pass (see the recent McCarthy voting fiasco because conservatives congresspeople could not agree on a vote).
Can you give some examples of "constructive policy" enacted in Conservatives' absence? Perhaps at the state level?
Maybe constructive policy isn't correct - I just meant policy in general simply because there is a lack of uniformity of opinion
I've been arguing for a while that what people generally think of when they hear the term "policy" doesn't, strictly speaking, exist. Laws get passed with some frequency, but it seems to me that there's very little observable connection between the laws being passed and the outcomes those laws are supposed to generate, and that this fact doesn't actually seem to have any impact on either the people writing the laws or the people voting for them. Having watched this process for more than two decades now, I find it impossible to maintain credulity that the standard model of our political system is descriptive.
When you talk about "policies", I think you're referring to a planned intervention in our social systems to try to improve some specific thing. We make all the cops wear body cams, or we start teaching the 1619 curriculum in fifth grade, or maybe we start allowing prayer in school, and each of these is supposed to improve metric x or y or z. Can you think of such interventions in your lifetime that have clearly worked? Where has policy been a clear win, to give us an idea of what obstruction is costing us?
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