Jonathan,
While I applaud your efforts to make sense of the current chaos, throwing a bit of history at it won’t yield the desired results, as it is history and has been tried.
Think of reality as the dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. Galaxies are a cycle of energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.
People are the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system processing the information coalescing out, to further distill what is useful.
Motor and steering.
Societies are the raw social energies bubbling up, along with the cultural and civil forms coalescing in, giving them structure and definition.
Liberalism might be equated with the emotions, bubbling up profusely, all wishing fervently for fulfillment. While conservatism might be equated with logic; Having to decide which are to be encouraged, which to be tolerated, which to be frowned upon and which have to be actively prevented.
Obviously the conflicts are multiple, but those frictions do help to make reality real. Without the ups and downs, it would be a flatline.
Our problems do arise from having an ideals based culture. That there is some more perfect state, toward which we must endeavor, or prove unworthy.
Yet more is not always better, even with ethics, as the situations are often complex. Then when the specific forms have lost their potency, this striving for the ideal is diverted to more mundane desires; happiness, fame, wealth, etc.
The fact remains that nature is cyclical and reciprocal. There are reactions to our actions. There has to be a vital tension between the forms and the energies driving it. Otherwise, at one end of the spectrum is anarchy and the other is totalitarianism.