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Relatedly, one ideological gap between both most US/UK conservatives and Continental European/Asian/Latin American conservatives is said to be individualism. US conservativism in particular has long been low tax individualism: my choice, my way, my freedom. UK conservativism has always had that element and it came increasingly important from Thatcher onwards. At least in Continental Europe, which I know relatively well, conservativism has more of a "conform, do your duty, and adopt our Culture (with a capital C)" tendency, with a tendency towards caution and rules. These are rare things that Merkel and Le Pen have in common with each other, but not Trump or Johnson.
Personally, I prefer individualistic conservativism, but I'm a libertarian not a conservative. And in uncertain times, I can see why most people would prefer various types of cautious collectivism over daring individualism. To some extent, the older I get and the more I want to "settle down", the more I feel the same way.
One might argue that even individualistic US conservatism has often worked the best when its individualistic themes have successfully been recast as safety issues. Ie. opposition to gun control takes off once the argument becomes that widespread easy gun ownership actually makes the society safer (at an individual level - you can own a gun to keep your house safe from criminals - and at a societal level in a more-guns-less-crime way). Low taxes are, of course, always popular in their own way among individuals who pay a lot (or at least a fair amount) of taxes, but a low-tax policy can also be portrayed as an economically irresponsible economy-destabilizing budget-buster, especially if it is not coupled with also-unpopular cuts; however, this dilemma was momentarily solved once the argument was found that it was possible to cut taxes and increase revenues (whether that actually happened or not). And so on.
This definitely would make the argument for guns easier if it were true but then you're depending on something that may or more not be true for your coalition to hold together. And people like me who don't really care at all whether guns increase or decrease near term safety are stuck watching the policy hinge on a debate that seems entirely orthogonal to the actual reason 2A was put in the constitution.
And, as usual in the USA, terminal values partisans have hijacked the public debate and are now feuding with each other about who’s side benefits are more important.
You saw this in the school funding debate as well, where Youngkin promised large pay raises to teachers(what the public actually wanted) without also enacting the rest of the progressive education agenda(which is what the people writing education funding requests that talk about poor teacher pay actually want).
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