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This is true for all societies at all times. Moral relativism is an unstable solution long-term, and gives way sooner or later to a moral consensus. This is because there is a non-trivial level of values-coherence needed before the negotiation and cooperation required for a complex society become possible. No non-collective society of any appreciable scale has ever been observed. Sooner or later, people come together to coordinate around a shared understanding of the good, and to punish those who defect from that good.
That certainly was the claim. It does not seem to me that such a claim can be sustained post-2014. Once the old conservative social consensus grew weak enough, the resulting absence of a coherent value framework invited alternative ideologies to make their play for hegemony. The Libertarian ideal of "true individualism" is simply incompatible with human nature.
...Except that all of these find themselves enforced by collective action and, increasingly, state power. Christian desire for unrestrained hegemony can at least be pushed back against with the "separation of church and state" meme. Progressive ideology doesn't see itself as a religion, and so accepts no restraint to its ideological demands against dissenting individuals, first through social pressure and then through explicit force of law. Libertarian ideology has proved entirely powerless to arrest such enforcement.
To a first approximation, everyone wants to do this. The constituency of truly-principled libertarianism is vanishingly small. People want to work together to solve their problems, and they want to solve defection by coordinating overwhelming punishment of the defectors. If I murder my neighbor's kid, he doesn't want to have to do calculus on whether he personally can coordinate enough force to hold me accountable. Why prefer that to the nigh-omnipotent collective force of the entire United States of America turned against me?
Many conservatives were willing to accept and even adopt this line of thought, when it could be plausibly claimed that a stable libertarian détente was possible. That argument is no longer credible, and probably never will be again within any of our lifetimes. Call it religion or ideology, common sense or The Science, but some form of values coherence will be enforced by the majority on all dissenting minorities. Far from being dystopian, such enforcement has been the basis for every good thing we've ever gotten out of society; people need such enforcement to work and live together in peace.
The hypocrisy is certainly real, but I see no evidence that it's limited to conservatives, or is indeed much the fault of most of the hypocrites in question. Our entire society is founded on an incoherent ideology, and what you are seeing is simply that incoherence unavoidably expressing itself over and over again. The Enlightenment believed that people were fundamentally good, and that commonality of values would naturally emerge from the primordial ooze of liberty if only stultifying social control systems were removed. When those systems are removed and things reliably get worse, people rush straight back into imposed social controls, only usually in a far more arbitrary and less workable fashion than what they had before, trading long-evolved and highly fit mechanisms for naïve solutions derived from the local groupthink and labeled "reason" and "science".
Why allow such a patchwork to exist? Value of diversity for its own sake? Epistemic humility? Neither seem common enough to be a basis for meaningful social structure. Fear of the destructive results of runaway conflict is the classic answer, drawing on the example of the Peace of Westphalia. But of course, the peace of Westphalia was instituted in the exhaustion following one of the most destructive periods of protracted warfare in human history, and was instituted in an environment of relative values-homogeneity. Even with such favorable conditions, it could not last indefinitely, and the concepts it was founded on now seem quaint.
To a first approximation, no one is ever going to accept a bunch of rapists founding Rape Town just down the road. A generation of serious liberalism can generate sufficient values-drift to make equivalent disputes over values inevitable. Truly diverse peoples will, in fact, adopt values sufficiently and mutually repugnant such that there's not enough room in the country, continent, or solar system for the both of them. Social controls keep regenerating themselves because they solve this problem proactively, by counteracting values drift and keeping the vast majority in pleasing accord with one another. Such societies still have diversity, still have individualism... just maybe not as much as committed Libertarians might prefer.
This, on the other hand, is entirely correct. The primary failure of Conservatives is a belief that long-standing social structures are in some way immutable and omnipotent, that rules self-enforce somehow outside the will of the humans involved. Having had their desires effectively constrained by appeals to the Constitution, they imagine that the Constitution constrains everyone's values equally. This is obviously a stupid inference to draw, but their experience and social setting left them ill-equipped to grok postmodern language games and other forms of adversarial social engineering. The resurgence of the illiberal right demonstrates, I think, that they're catching on. Time will tell.
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