A common claim about conservatives is that they are losers, they don’t want to “win”, etc, etc. All of this is misunderstanding the core situation. I am as guilty as anyone on this front, not being a child of the frontier myself.
Conservatives, or really the descendants by blood of frontier settlers who never civilized, are trapped in a frontier mindset that leaves them endlessly vulnerable to incursions on their ability to live, work and form families. They cannot protect each other because pathological individualism is inherent to the frontier personality. They can only come together under the influence of a strong personality for specific tasks for extremely limited periods of time. They are under-civilized, yet dependent on hyper-civilization to have the tools and resources that allowed their ancestors to farm hundreds of acres almost entirely solo.
As far as culture war stuff and economic warfare by liberals, it’s all of a piece. Cake shops are frivolous and unnecessary, since you can bake your own cake, so you ought to no matter what. Same for flower shops, why pay someone to pick flowers and put them in a vase? They’re everywhere, after all. So there is sympathy for someone having a hard time from mean city folks, but really, they’re also city folks, so, well, you know.
Same for people getting fired from retail work and high-wage work (or any non-political job) by hyper-progressive liberals. They’re not working their own land, they’re working for a wage, it’s really their own fault for not having a homestead to live off. They should have just done that. None of this is remotely conscious or deliberately cruel and small minded. It worked really well for millions upon millions of Americans for many, many decades to think this way and live accordingly. The rapid urbanization of the 20th century was a curveball they didn’t really adjust to well.
The Practical Conservative: Civic-minded Natalism 