It’s kind of a loaded question, and I’m not saying you intended it that way, but people have become increasingly more aware of how slanted the frame around the political spectrum has become – there’s an unwillingness to engage with discussion within that frame because to do so is to accept ideological and rhetorical handicaps that have been purposefully constructed to put non-right wing ideas at a disadvantage (not constructed by you, but more as a systematic result of right-wing media and politicians).

The question of “are conservative ideas welcome” is a discussion that requires a lot of unpacking due to implicit ideas that are buried deep under layers of history and lots of incremental changes to what we accept as normal in political discussion.

To give an example of what I mean by “framing”, consider two people have agreed to debate about public healthcare. We’ll say this has been a very publicized event, people have been watching a lot of pre-debate media coverage. Suppose the person with the anti-public healthcare position has been using this publicity not to outline their position for private healthcare, but has spent a lot of time recounting crimes and atrocities committed under communist regimes, and repeatedly substituting “socialism” for communism as if they were synonymous words. They perhaps even get their interviewer to accept and use that language, further legitimizing it.

Now the day of the debate comes and when the anti-public healthcare figure says “Public healthcare is socialist” his audience will hear “Public healthcare is communist, and communism leads to atrocities”. He doesn’t have to state that explicitly or make an argument because he has primed his audience and created a frame in which his opponent now has to either derail into a debate about the differences between socialized medicine and communism and risk losing the audience, or they let the implication go unaddressed and work within the frame created for them even though it’s fabricated from misinformation that puts them at a rhetorical disadvantage.

So what does this have to do with conservative ideas being welcome or not welcome? Right-wing media have been the absolute masters of this tactic for decades. Here in the US it was shortly after Nixon was impeached that they really leaned into it. Up to that point the government had more or less a deference to academia and experts to inform their policy creation. When Nixon was impeached, people like Roger Ailes immediately began constructing a parallel political infrastructure to that academic institution (which tended by its very nature to lean towards progress), from which they could frame things not from a scientific and academic basis, but from a corporate and conservative one.

So people have begun waking up to the consequences of allowing that machine to run rough-shod all over our society, and now they’ve started rejecting the entire notion that they should have to engage with the products of that dishonest right-wing political machine or to accept it as equally legitimate to academic and scientific institutions. Some people may express that unwillingness in a more hostile, impatient way than others.

I saw you mention some British public figures – I don’t know if you’re from the UK or US, but Jon Stewart had an interesting discussion with Ian Hislop comparing the effects of the Murdoch media empire on both the US and Britain. They touch on some of the stuff I’m talking about. Some food for thought maybe.