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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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