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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.
'Yet anyway' except not in the way you mean.
The American red tribe is the largest group in the developed world which is replacing itself. Over a long enough timescale, this becomes your 'huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons'.
And the left cannot simply adapt to the red tribe; their own children are joining its culture as a higher percentage of teens and young adults are from a red tribe background. This part is already happening, by the way- look at the pop charts. SEC football is the hot new trend, even in pretty blue tribe areas. A baseline level of hostility is the bare minimum for keeping their own children from defecting- and as the demography gets more and more tilted, they need to ramp up the hostility more and more. This is structural.
No, it's not — replacing itself, that is. It may have above replacement birth rates, but youth retention, though better than in the past, is still too low. Most of what high-fertility Reds are doing is the job of producing future Blue Tribers that Blues themselves won't do.
I'm struggling to be charitable and not call you outright delusional, but this is nonsense. At best, you appear to be living in an incredibly unrepresentative bubble and mistaking a few superficial aesthetic trends for a serious cultural shift.
First, it ignores the single biggest and enduring trend in intergenerational political migration: the widening sex gap. Young women age 18–29 have gone massively to the left. (It'll be hard for Red Tribe to keep up those above replacement birth rates when >80% of fertile women are solidly Blue Tribe.) And, as many have noted, the corresponding 18-29 year old men haven't so much shifted toward Red as they've shifted to being anti-establishment, going in all kinds of directions, many swinging between "centrist," Red-Populist, and Blue-Populist. Yes, there may have been a brief Red "cultural ripple," driven by tech-adjacent young men using online platforms that bypassed the MSM, and which successfully rebranded elements of conservative or traditionalist mindsets as edgy and anti-system; and, instead of adopting classic religious conservatism (which, as you well know, is the actual Red Tribe core, and where its fertility advantage comes from), embraced skepticism of institutional "wokeness" and aggressive anti-establishment rhetoric… which mostly turned into an aesthetic of fitness and financial independence. To the extent this was even a "cultural moment," it peaked in 2024 — as we're seeing right now.
Watching college football and listening to Tyler Childers or Darius Rucker does not a Red Triber make. And the stats I've seen simply do not support your claims in the slightest. Your fantasy of Red Tribe simply outbreeding the Blues is just that: pure, deluded fantasy.
It doesn't, unless you carve out high-fertility religious sub-populations - and as far as I can see the only such group who are both fiscally and demographically sustainable are Mormons. No state has statewide fertility above replacement - the red states are just dying out more slowly than the blue ones.
No, a regression analysis of fertility vs thé Republican base gives a white Republican TFR of about 2.2, regardless of how you input the numbers. There are no states above replacement because even the reddest states are not 100% R(and democrats in places like Oklahoma and Utah are disproportionately from very low fertility parts of their coalition, like LGBT).
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