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I think this is a very high-level take to explain outcomes that are much more readily explainable by the simple fact that conservatives (that is to say, people with a broad set of conservative values and positions) in the West are a small minority, comparable to the number of people that are libertarians by nature. Because of this, the conservative parties tend to be rag-tag coalitions of various groups that are exiled from the Actual Governing Party of Polite Society for some particular view they refuse to cede on, such as abortion, racism, guns, immigration or some specific industry regulation such as farm regs.
This also contributes to the fact that the base of these parties is typically a combination of unsuccessful people who were already excluded from polite society (such as the wignat right) moralists (e.g. religious evangelicals), actual libertarians (lol) and autistic men (this forum). This inherently creates a leadership problem, because none of those groups are really dispositionally fit for leading a political movement in 2026, so you get way too many grifters that rise to the top. Even worse, each of the groups has their own pet issue that are at times directly contradictory (immigration and the small business coalition or farm lobby).
Meanwhile the Actual Governing Party of Polite Society has a much more functional system of being headed and funded by The Elite of society in the broadest sense, who share most views and are built to lead, and supported by a huge number of people that are happy to follow the beliefs set by the natural leadership class of society and receive material and social rewards for doing so.
The Civil Rights Act is powerful because it is immensely popular. Immigration continues because it is broadly quite popular (less so in countries that have received large amounts of bad immigration like Britain, but in the US at least), despite quibbling on the details. The budget remains mostly welfare because welfare is immensely popular. These structural barriers you mention are real, but they are not particularly meaningful because there isn’t even a 51% amount of support for almost any conservative issue. There is frequently a 51% of support for “let’s not have this extreme version of a progressive policy” but that is not the same.
38% of the US wants to ban abortion in “most or all” cases per Pew. 52% think Trump level deportations were “too much.” 64% think illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country (with certain conditions.) 11% think marijuana should be illegal. 57% think it should be recreational. 65% think false information should be restricted online (55% think the govt should do the restricting) 58% want stricter gun laws.
Conservatives lose directionally on basically every issue. And that’s only looking at some current issues! If you look at past progressive changes from a few decades ago, you’re looking at supermajority support for things like gay marriage, interracial marriage, use of contraception, marital rape, no fault divorce etc.
But this applies just as much to left wing parties. The Democrats are also a ragtag coalition with often contradictory single issues and leadership that is composed of the useless or corrupt.
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If this was actually true, Trump wouldn't have been able to be elected even once. If a conservative can not only get elected, but get elected on a platform of not-very-polite opposition to the liberals, he has to have enough support that this can't be true.
(Unless you say 'I was just talking about the base, not all supporters', in which case something similar could be said about liberals.)
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It’s not that there aren’t many conservatives, it’s the difference between defense and offense, offense only has to get past the defense one time to score. The defense has to stop the offense every single time or they lose. So if im watching a game and one team is trying to run out the clock on defense and the other is trying to score, I’ll always predict the team on offense to win because again, they only need to get past one time, the other team can shut them down for 99% of the game, but that one goal in tge last ten seconds means they lose.
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My intuition says you’re somewhat right. But it wouldn’t explain why we see such a backlash of rightwing populism up till this point. Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in a while. Same thing we are seeing with thing like the AFD parties
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You can’t say both “a lot of people libertarian by nature” and welfare is broadly popular. If I had to guess 95% of voters are conservative by nature but differ on what they want to conserve. Boomers want to conserve that ‘90’s to 2004 America nirvana before neoliberalism problems surfaced. NYC want to conserve their communities which is why rent control. Same with Cali and property taxes. The rest of America is some kind of tribal enclave that is voting for what is best for their tribe which is often the lefts easy immigration. People forget that NYC and Cali real estate policies are essentially a super powerful ICE keeping non-rich whites from moving there.
There are basically no libertarians. Argentina style welfare state you are correct and it’s quite popular. We haven’t done that because America was Weird.
He didn't. He said that conservatives are like libertarians-by-nature, i.e. very rare.
This is not a meaningful category of voters. Yes, pretty much everybody is 'conservative' in a strictly etymological sense. Everybody has something they want to conserve or protect. In the same way pretty much everybody is 'progressive' in the etymological sense, i.e. having something they want to progress or advance. But 'people who want to conserve something' and 'people who want to progress something' are not demographic you can appeal to.
In practice we understand that when we use the words 'conservative' or 'progressive' in a political context, we refer to groups of people with particular ideological visions.
When SophisticatedHillbilly says that 'conservatives' are a small group, well, I think there's room for some debate around what the word 'conservative' specifically refers to, but in broad strokes I think he's undoubtedly right. Whether we're talking about movement conservatives, social conservatives, economic conservatives, national conservatives, or any other term, it's clear that these are small tribes that can win only by finding a place for themselves within a larger coalition. That coalition then tends to limit what they can do.
2rafa is correct that there is a kind of left-leaning civil infrastructure in Western countries that shapes and defines what's politically possible, but notwithstanding, Hillbilly is correct on the larger point. The reason that 'Western conservatives' in 2rafa's top-level post are unable to achieve lasting transformations of the country is because they really don't have that much support. They can join winning coalitions, but if they try to pursue transformative agendas, they run into not only institutional but popular backlash, because their goals are genuinely unpopular.
On a broader level, I think that American politics ever since the 50s onwards has been something like a "coalition of the hegemony" vs a "coalition of the dissenters", with the parties essentially switching sides in this dichotomy at some point during the 70s and 80s. The challenge for the former group is to try and hold the line on their relatively unified consensus without splintering apart over the tyranny of small differences, whereas the challenge for the latter group is to try and piece together a generally coherent and cohesive group out of many little ragtag bands of dissenters with different objectives and interests.
Much ink has been spilled over how incoherent and all-encompassing intersectional critical theory is, and having read the absolute trash that counts as scholarship in these circles I have to agree. But it makes more sense when conceptualised as an attempt to build a coherent coalition with a shared goal; before then the political "left" was full of different unpopular dissident groups that didn't necessarily agree with each other or believe they were optimising towards the same thing, and were pretty much unified solely by their opposition to whatever they considered to be the political and social hegemony at the time. Due to the big tent nature of the early movement, progressives hung out with people one would see as persona non grata now (e.g. in France progressives were deeply entwined with existentialists and postmodernists who were a little too into pedophilia for comfort, and gay rights parades in the US at times featured the presence of NAMBLA).
This big tent later started to be standardised into a more overarching worldview which led to all the causes being associated with each other in a way that would ensure more ideological consistency and agreement regarding end goals, which led to impressively befuddling things like the "war on drugs" being folded into the larger omnicause of "racism" and the emergence of concepts like the intersectional stack and the Superstructure (the White Cisheteropatriarchy); these concepts were not created to be logically sound but instead existed as a consensus-building tool to convince everyone they were actually fighting the same thing and that all their goals were inextricably tied up with one another. Progressives love to say that there are "many different progressivisms" but a while back a user here posted a political typology with results that indicated "leftward progressives" were far more homogenous in their opinions than any of the other groups, largely due to this manufacturing of consensus.
I don't think right-wingers currently have anything resembling a shared vision; there's no sweeping conceptual framework like intersectionality that would unite all their causes under one banner and create widespread cross-group support for a constellation of dissident opinions all at once. Most rightists here are very prone to disagreement and are in a sense part of the problem - I for example care most about opposing identitarian politics and oppression narratives I view as corrosive, yet break ranks whenever someone does the whole jingoistic American Exceptionalist, foreign-interventionist, China-hawk stuff that is very common among certain strands of the right, and that kind of internal disorder is not something you can tolerate if you want to enact sweeping reforms that stick.
At the moment, conservatives are just too fractured and divided to actually be able to enact a transformative agenda the same way that the Counterculture did in the mid-20th century, and there is no rallying cry that will make them all unite around each others' causes.
The flip is later than that. Obama is the first Democratic President to successfully run as head of the "coalition of the hegemony" and Trump is the first Republican to run as head of the "coalition of the dissenters".
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Yes you’re right I misread the libertarian comment. I thought it meant we still had a lot of liberals in America today. They were dominant for a long time, but seem extinct on the left and right now.
Edit: personally I think conservative/progressive are not the dominant ideologies today. I think it’s much more identitarian political breakdown us versus them. Boomers think we are still playing left/right games
Boomers and fancy-shmancy Marxists and Austro-libertarians. There are enemies of the revolution and enemies of liberty. That's it.
To say nothing of the fact that identitarian politics is itself left/right. White identity = right, all others left.
Male identity politics is right wing as well just subdued.
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