I think the difficulty in being conservative in the United States comes from the very origin of the nation, which was radical for the time. The very idea that an individual has certain inalienable rights and liberties (heck, the very word liberty itself) is in contradiction to the idea that the individual be suborned to things like tradition and order. Granted, these ideas did not emerge out of the blue, but are instead a conscious decision the arose from the fact that the Founding Fathers shared a love of Classical Greece and Rome, and an awareness that the compositional areas of the United States were derived of very different folkways, religious systems, etc (read "Albion's Seed" for more info on that), and needed some overarching principles to guide them together as a nation lest as various small states they all hang apart to paraphrase Franklin.
It wasn't so bad when we were a small mostly agrarian republic. You didn't like the community values of your neighbors or the bothersome tax collector? You fucked off West. Now, for a very long time, that hasn't been the case, and natural conservative starts off on the back foot when having to argue against a positive liberty, leading to the prioritization of defense of negative liberties. Given the raging bonfires turned trashfires of modernity and post-modernity and you have natural conservatives picking and choosing their battles, and seemingly losing all of them.
In my eyes, and this is completely an opinion, the purge of the paleoconservative strain of thought from the Republican party that began with that closeted toff Bill Buckley and triumphed with Reagan's celebration of economic, cultural and foreign policy excess was gasoline on the slow burning fire of critical theory (my preferred term for what current mainstream conservatives call Cultural Marxism), is why we are where we are today.
So, to ironically quote Lenin, "What is to be Done?" Well, I most certainly don't have a master plan, I'm just some fucking idiot on the internet who's read too many books and shitposts and I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims to have a plan. I have some intuitions. First and most importantly, this is going to take time. If you're really focused on the next couple of elections, well yes, it seems like nothing at all will change, particularly if you're looking at the top. You need to look local first and extend outward from there. Like I said before, think decades, think generations. Get involved in your local institutions, all of them, not necessarily political. Change won't come from shitposting here or anywhere else. Next, know this long fight will have its setbacks and temporary compromises. Bismarck said "Politics is the art of the possible." If you give up working towards something because your end goal is currently impossible, it will always remain impossible, find that which is possible in that direction and work towards there, even if it seems like surrender at that moment in time.
Be pragmatic. I voted for Trump both times even though on many levels I found him personally distasteful. One thing I did and still do admire about him is his own political pragmatism. Yes, in his oratory he was all populist sturm und drang, but when it came down to getting to work, he was a remarkably canny and flexible operator. Most of his failures to achieve much came from his own naivety about the way politics work, his apparent ADHD when it came to things that needed sustained attention and focus, and a dismaying susceptibility to flattery and fakers.
Be pragmatic. If you can't have a true conservative, take the MAGAtard, if you can't have the MAGAtard, then take the RINO who will side with you when you have points of alignment, if you can't have that, then take RINO who isn't going to commit political suicide to sell out, if you can't have that, then take the DINO, if you can't have that, and you're like me in a deep blue state, then you vote for the crazed dangerhair who will fuck shit up for the mainstream Dems, so they spend their time infighting rather than dealing with conservatives. You're probably never going to get everything you want unless you run for office yourself, so just deal with compromise. That's life.
