Because the commies won in the 30's, infiltrating most aspects of American society. Then they won again when Americans tried to investigate and oust them, during the Red Scare.
Consequently the American conservatives, and in a way global conservatives, are only as conservative as their leftist masters allow them to be. They're all about bullshit like being the 'doomed moral victor' or 'losing with dignity'. On the rare case they do win they just introduce leftist policies at a slower pace.
Sadly the ideals of being the martyr'd moral victor seems to have caught on, and it's a particularly poisonous one. It means right wing people won't do what they have to to win, and when they lose they can ease the bitter taste with "Well at least I fought fair!". It also works especially good considering right wingers tend to be more religious.
But 'losing with dignity' is still fucking losing, and eventually people need to smarten up to that fact. Only winners get to debate the moral high ground. Losers are buried beneath it.
This goes back to the 1830s. Look up Robert Peel and
the Tamworth Manifesto. Basically Robert Peel was a British conservative who quit the actual, legit conservative party (the Tory Party) and made his own Conservative Party (the same one that still exists) which unlike the old one promised "the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances" after a "careful review of institutions." The context of the Manifesto was liberals managed to get a bunch of reforms passed, and instead of doing anything about it, the Conservatives simply accepted it and moved on.
This is the broad template on which modern Western conservatism is founded on, and although American political trends historically differed from British or European political trends, it's not surprising this sort of conservatism eventually appeared in the United States too and has been the dominant trend since Richard Nixon's era (remember, Nixon created the EPA and appointed justices who "discovered" the right to abortion in the Constitution). Conservatives are 100% a form of liberal, and like all sorts of liberalism, it inevitably leads to leftist lunacy.
It's very rare to find real conservatives, and Peel did have a point since most actual conservatives support cringe ideologies like "traditionalist Catholicism" or are unironic absolute monarchists which even in fucking 1834 you'd have trouble getting electing if that was the ideology you espoused. I think the only conservative-esque ideologies that ever figured out how to maintain tradition while also being realistic and maintaining a working society are ideologies like third position, fascism, and national socialism. It's not a surprise that supposed "conservatives" viciously attack these ideologies and leftists smear everyone right of Mao as fascists. They really don't want people researching it on their own.
Real wages in America have actually risen substantially since the 50s. The real cause of lack of ownership is individual spending on everything that isn't a house, property or car. Like the newest product to consume.
Yes, real wages rose from the 50s until the mid-1970s. But then you had a chain reaction of the oil crisis and unions getting too entrenched and stopping innovations which allowed the people who run the world to ship all our jobs to China and Mexico then further gut our industry by letting Japan, and then China and Korea, cheat the system. This was both Democrats (Bill Clinton is the big one, his NAFTA shit cost everyone big time) and Republicans (liberal scumbag Ronnie Raygun, the worst president of the 20th century) You'll see libertarians claim that "free trade" makes everyone rich, and this is true to a degree since the GDP has risen quite a bit, but an actual look at economic equality shows the middle class has been hollowing out since the late 70s.
Now that wasn't ALL bad, since the unions really were fucking things up and weren't supporting innovation, like cars in the 70s were absolute shit compared to 90s/00s cars, since a cheap Ford or Chevy from that era is far safer, more fuel efficient, and reliable than a shitheap like a Pinto or Gremlin. And nowadays cars are more expensive because they all have pointless electronics in them AND Obama did the retarded Cash for Clunkers program which destroyed the used car market. Conservatives have done little to fix either problem, and will probably consider the repeal of the "all electric car" BS which even leftists are moving away from due to being so unrealistic as a "win" and sit back and do nothing else.
Need more proof? Let's look at housing prices. In 1970,
the median house price was $17,000. This is raw data from the US Census BTW. That's $134,000 in today's money. Minimum wage was $1.60 in 1970, which is $12.57 in today's money. Remember that like today, not many people made minimum wage, but not because it was unlivably low but because most people had a union that ensured them regular pay raises and a high school degree could get you a good job. Do the math--a minimum wage worker could own their own house if they worked hard for a few years. Not today, where you could make twice the minimum wage and you will never afford a house (
median house price in 2023 is $412,000) unless you bust your ass at two jobs for a decade.
And you wanna talk about consooming? Look at the collections people had. All the boomers could assemble their spoon collections. They'd buy their kids shit like baseball cards and comic books and GI Joe. They'd regularly go to baseball games and drink beer (if you've ever heard of "Ten Cent Beer Night", baseball tickets were that cheap that people crowded the stadium just to have a drink). This country is absolutely fucked compared to what it was before 1973.
