Why do right-wingers bother?

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Just finished having an argument with another poster. To me, it seems so obvious that "the right" regardless of what faction you're talking about always loses out. Or at best, wins maybe 1 out of 10 times. Cultural issues are just considered a waiting game for "progressives," assuming we even have anyone to represent us. Not even this forum would dispute that. Economically the US government just continues to spend and subsidize and regulate more. Every western government until recently has just continued to increase spending more in some capacity, at most just slowing down the rate of the spending. Nobody has any imaginative tactics or solutions. I just don't see where left wingers are coming from when they talk about this right-ward drift, to me it seems a tad bizarre.

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President Obama touched on the right-ward drift today in his speech.  He outlined how his positions on healthcare (the individual mandate), the budget (returning to Clinton era revenues), and climate change (cap and trade) were all Republican ideas.  Now, the far-right is mainstream right-wing and centrist ideas are demonized as socialism.  

Republican /=/ right wing, as I've said before. But you're missing my point. What social issues have conservatives had major victories on the last 30 years, other than maybe 'law and order'? Banning abortion, gay marriage (not even a conceivable serious issue 20 years ago now taken as a given for everywhere at some point in the future), immigration reduction/balancing (never mind amnesty), affirmative action, etc. The hard-left direction is pretty obvious. Economics, to the extent you can even separate them, aren't really much different either. Just look at "moderate" Bob Dole, who advocated abolishing whole departments, and compare him to Mitt Romney who is supposedly running "to the right."

It's also why Marokai was unwilling to discuss shifts in actual first-world countries' policies (almost invariably leftward except on some tariffs) in your discussion and why he kept coming back to the rhetorical shifts of leftist parties since the collapse of Marxism.

Tariffs can be reflective of a nationalistic (i.e. anti-egalitarian/universalist) world view and hence right-wing. Though that's contextual.

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The problem is the assumption here that "more spending" = "left".

^^^^^^

Non-military spending has increased beyond rate of inflation. That seems like a fairly good metric, particularly given that this spending is primarily in things like entitlements or education. And it's not just the US where that's held true either, although we're a particularly glaring example. What else would you go by? What have "small government" conservatives succeeded at other than some token cuts/reforms to programs like ADFC in the 1990s which accounts for fairly little of the budget compared to all the other expenditures?

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It's pretty important to remember than Mint isn't your average conservative and views things like free trade, globalization and neo-liberal reforms as negative

That's not exactly a minority view among self-IDing conservatives. The open borders, cosmopolitan mentality of the WSJ/Economist crowd seems pretty self evidently hostile to traditionalism and nationalism anyway.