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There's really no reason to be surprised that utilitarians could be right-wing if you accept that some people will genuinely end up having different terminal values by which they calculate utility.
There is also a strong intellectual tradition of objecting to centralized government actions on the basis of their pure inability to deliver superior results compared to simply leaving things alone and declining to act at all. On top of the occasional tendency to genocide, wage wars of conquest, and steal from their own population. China is currently doing a genocide, Russia is doing a war of conquest, and seems both Lebanon and Sri Lanka governments were robbing their citizens blind, so these are clearly not relics of the past.
Some observed problems that government programs tend to contribute or be vulnerable to:
Increasing fragility
Black swans
Unintended consequences
Calculation problems
Lack of skin in the game (i.e. who suffers consequences for failure?)
Principal-agent problems
Regulatory capture
to name a few. Most of these have to do with the pure lack of reliable information about the sectors they're trying to govern and the inability to effectively use that information towards the best ends.
Most of these can be solved or mitigated by decentralizing and localizing governance, rather than depending on a single 'point of failure' which can drag everyone down.
In short, there's a fallacy that often occurs when analyzing most government-sponsored programs where the costs are hidden but the benefits are obvious. One of the scarier things about government is it's ability to shove those costs into the medium-term future so nobody in the present notices them OR to slough them off onto one particular subset of society so that anyone outside that subset doesn't really care about the costs and ignores them. Governments which have to periodically win elections particularly have an incentive to do this so as to maintain their rule.
Lets use the obvious example with all those direct 'welfare' payments during COVID, where money was sent out directly to everyone, and many employers got 'free' loans to maintain their payrolls.
Back at the time I'm sure you'd say "The utilitarian case for making direct payments to citizens and employers is strong on its face!"
And then two years hence, we have 8-9% inflation which eats up everyone's wages and makes EVERYONE poorer than they would have been otherwise.
Whoops? Are you, the good and faithful Utilitarian, tallying these costs up against the previous welfare program, or are you treating these new problems as completely novel and utterly unrelated to the earlier actions the government took, and thus still believing that the previous programs were obviously the correct and best action?
Utilitarians should care about ALL costs and benefits, even (especially?) the hidden ones.
So if you're being an honest utilitarian, and you are doing an honest assessment of a given program, it is completely possible to conclude that the overall impact of a given program was in fact a net negative and the world would have been better off had said program never been implemented.
This is especially true if you're a Free Market fundamentalist and believe that in the alternative scenario where the market had been allowed to act we would have landed on a vastly superior solution.
So perhaps the right wing utilitarians are doing a very comprehensive census of all of the detectable pros and cons in our current system and are seeing a very, very large locus of dis-utility centered around the government where it becomes clear that almost all of the functions it serves are throwing off negative externalities and causing dead-weight loss and only gets worse over time.
And thus, the conclusion becomes that if most government programs are a net negative and should not exist, this logic also applies to the government as a whole.
Honestly, I'm increasingly surprised and disheartened that utilitarians have lived through the years 2020 and 2021, got to observe the government interfering and bungling EVERY SINGLE STEP of the pandemic response, from lying to people about the nature of the disease to delaying deployment of vaccines to shutting down schools even after danger had passed.
And some of them still somehow conclude that Governments ought to be primarily responsible for disease and pandemic response.
I'm not a utilitarian, libertarian, or marxist, so your arguments do not convince me.
In pure curiosity, what sort of evidence or argument do you find convincing?
Establish your facts and construct a reasonable argument that can be derived from those facts without needing to make leaps to conclusions.
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