-exist because of the bad politics, failed policies, stupid practices, and shameless principles of the Right and their greedy, moneyed, and too much catered to masters all coming to a head.
Every big progressive era, and all the liberal policies and programs that have lasted until today because people in need still depend on them deeply, has come as a direct result of either the shamelessness of the rich, conservative overreach, and/or the intolerable status-quo reaching a point where life was unbearable as-is. When systems broke down and became unmanageable as a direct result of a failed status-quo. When real reform was the only possible option left for the nation to move forward.
Believe me, wingnuts, I'm a liberal and I am painfully aware that my voice and opinion is not on the list of voices that get heard first, second, third, or fiftieth. I have spent years with my guts twisted up into knots about the reality that you get to trash the place and trash the place and trash the place until the place is trashed so damned badly that there is no other choice but to listen to people like me for once. When people are forming lines outside of a leftwing thinktank begging and pleading for help, you know that something important is hopelessly on fire.
The most gobsmacking thing about Movement Conservatism, for me, is not the personalities, or the hate or stupidity, or the echochamber and its smears, but that it both completely assumes that eradicating the attempted solutions to a nagging problem is the same thing as eliminating the problem itself, and that that the liberal policies and programs that they hate did not rise up as last-chance last-ditch desperately needed reform, but because they all magically appeared.
Poof! Liberalism.
Out of the mist and ether here is Social Security, Unionization, Minimum Wage Laws, OSHA, the EPA. All magically appeared for no reason. Unneeded, unbidden, uninvited, and so unnecessary.
Social Security exists because once upon a time, if you lived long enough, you most likely lived in dire and destitute poverty or at the complete mercy of fate and the largess of your relatives. The minimum wage exists, and company script was outlawed, because companies, corporations, trusts, and robber barrons couldn't be trusted to reward their workers with a fair days wage for a fair days work. Collective bargaining and unions exist for the same reason, reasons tragically forgotten by millions that the early activists who attempted to form good unions, get paid a fair wage, and share in the profits of industry were shown stark campaigns of harsh brutal violence and repression. Throats were slit. Gunshot wounds were endured. Bones were broken. People's innocent wives and children were murdered in labor camps in the dead of night.
Medicare exists because the for-profit private insurance companies were completely unwilling to offer affordable health insurance and access to care to the elderly. Medicaid because the same was true for the poor. They were not profitable customers, so, they didn't get served at all by the marketplace. The government providing the services was a last resort because the sacred holy marketplace doesn't have a profit motive to save the lives of the expensive and poor.
Child labor laws exist because so many children were once routinely crippled and maimed in so many factories, mines, and worksites that it became unbearable. There are warnings on packs of cigarettes and billion dollar settlements with the tobacco companies because they all willingly poisoned their own customers for pure profit. The EPA exists because we cannot trust chemical companies not to push barrels of toxic shit into lakes, rivers, and streams. OSHA exists because we can't trust on faith that employers will consider worker safety. From painful past experience, not from some need to burden "job creators".
We tried it your way, we "let the marketplace decide", and the marketplace decided that it was okay if tens of thousands of people got sick, got injured, got poisoned, or got simply dead.
We regulate the manufactruing of food because somebody, or several somebodies, who owned a baby food factory or a dairy (or ten) was perfectly willing to let bottles of baby food or milk or mayo go out of its factory with broken glass in it, or filled with inedible goo, and the fear of the marketplace, of a punitive correction, was really no fear at all.
We have liberalism and a social safety net for the same reason that firemen have hoses, axes, ladders, and fire engines and cops have jails, handcuffs, patrol cars, and guns.
Painful past experiences.
If what conservatives say about how everything and anything works was true, from economics to marketplace forces to social dynamics, none of the things that they hate the most would actually exist today at all. There would be no need for them. Mindlessly preserving the past, like a cult that worships antiquity at all costs and demands we preserve the obsolete, doesn't serve the needs of the future.
Neither does pretending that liberalism exists for no reason other than guilt, a hatred of America and commerce, or a great enabling of collective laziness by do-gooders.
"If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook".
If conservatism worked as advertised, conservatism would work as advertised.