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Notes -
Your Victories are Temporary, Theirs are Permanent
The most important thing lesson reified by recent political events is that while conservatives can win by democratic means, they cannot rule by them.
This is the single absolute lesson of the last fifteen years of democratic populist conservatism, from Meloni to Orban, from Bolsonaro to Trump. Progressive victories are eternal and irreversible, conservative victories are limited and ephemeral.
Understanding why requires only a cursory glance at the underlying constitutional mechanics of every major Western or Western-adjacent democracy (the same also applies in large part to many non-Western democracies, like India, although they have their own local differences).
The 20th century saw the construction of a number of constitutionally protected edifices that make conservative governance effectively impossible. These include, but are not limited to, the ECHR and European Union and the integration of the first or both into the constitutional structures of pretty much all European countries, the CRA in the United States, the emergence of supremely powerful progressive Supreme Courts in Canada, Italy and elsewhere, forms of devolution that strip precisely the powers from national governments required to implement conservative policies, and the emergence of a vast legal sector - particularly in the Anglo countries - designed to stymie policy implementation by using much of the above.
For example, adding a new citizen requires only that a single administration (which probably didn’t win the support of an absolute majority of voters even once, depending on where we’re talking about) admit and naturalize - via work or family visa, refugee status, legalizing illegal migrants, whatever - a single individual. Stripping someone of citizenship almost always requires constitutional change, in some cases unambiguously (eg second gen birthright citizenship in the US) but in many other cases (many EU countries) practically, because appeals to the ECHR, constitutionally enshrined, will almost always be won by appealing parties except in - and sometimes even in - the most egregious cases. This is occasionally possible for actual terrorists but certainly not for large migrant groups. This inherent imbalance - progressives can easily add a million citizens, conservatives can never remove a million citizens - cannot be addressed by democratic means, because national-level extreme supermajorities are very unusual in democracies. It is coup-complete not because reactionaries can never get into power, but because they cannot exercise the power that their democratic majority should rightfully give them.
Even where legislation was passed by the regular process rather than constitutional amendment, the entire construct above allowed for the insertion (as in the CRA) of vast amounts of new and powerful law into the existing constitutional framework in a way that became impossible to reverse. Additionally, longstanding small-c conservative norms like the US senate filibuster, an unwillingness to repeal previous passed laws, the existence of ‘economic conservatives’ who don’t care about culture, crime or safety and so on, prevented the reversal in any case of radical laws passed during times of bizarre, panicked or propagandized national sentiment. Squeamish quasi-conservative politicians winnowed majorities into minorities on any possibly radical piece of legislation that even sought to temporarily or partially reverse anything.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
Sometimes, in countries with systems in which the left has alienated a huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons (Turkey and India) an ambitious leader can somewhat accomplish some things democratically, or quasi-democratically by preserving an absolute legislative majority for 10+ years, which is enough to finally hack away at the aforementioned. But the Anglo countries are not Turkey or India (yet anyway), populations are too fickle, they have longer democratic traditions, and the center and left are more powerful.
Future conservative movements must therefore consider very carefully what they can and must do, after winning power legitimately by democratic means, to ensure the neutering of non-compliant institutions and the ability to rapidly consolidate extraconstitutional power to effect significant change, by whatever means.
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.
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.
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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