I did the Republican thing for the first 25 years of my life with continually lower levels of enthusiasm before moving to libertarianism and then to anarchism, and I've seen many cycles.

The ugly fact is that the nature of politics favors progressivism. It's in the best interest of Democratic politicians to promise bigger government and then deliver it. It's what they want and what their constituents want.

It's in the best interest of the Republican politicians to promise smaller government and then fail to deliver it. All of the graft comes from bigger government. There is litereally nothing at all, whatsoever,to be gained for the moneyed interests there to shrink anything. You'll get the an occasional outlier movement that will be absorbed by the system (the Tea Party movement was a great example of this). You'll get occasional loudmouthed outliers like Justin Amash or Donald Trump, and they'll get chewed up and spit out. There will be the longer-term muckraking survivors in safe seats like Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and, of course, the incomparable Ron Paul. They make for great red meat for the base while being too statistically insignificant to actually accomplish any intra-party reform. This is all that will be tolerated, and this is not going to change.

The straightforward, undenialable fact is that the last Republican to meaningfully reduce the size of government was Warren G. Harding, and that was a hundred freaking years ago. A century of abject failure is more than enough.

I don't consider this to be a black-pilled take. I do believe that we will win, but we will not win through partisan political reform. We do this by making the government a laughingstock and ignoring as much of their rules as we can reasonably get away with, and then pushing the boundaries of what rules we can just flat-out ignore. There is plenty of this right now. People ignore speed limits. States ignore federal drug laws. The best people ignored the COVID mandates as much as they could.

The biggest problem that conservatives and Republicans have is their devotion to law and order. Forget the law. You don't need a bunch of corrupt sociopaths to explain what's right and what's wrong to you. You don't need their jackbooted thugs to keep you safe. You don't need their manipulative demons conducting psychological and medical experimentation on your children in the guise of "education." Stop respecting the system, and start getting comfortable ignoring it when you can. Be a good person without being told.

Don't agress against others, keep your word, and help others to do the same. Don't lie, don't hurt, and don't steal. It's pretty straightforward. There is nothing the government does that we can't do a thousand times better. Look for and create ways to replace the government as best you can. Find like-minded people to work with you on this. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been written and thousands of hours of video have been recorded on implementing this, from people like Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Jeffery Tucker, Tom Woods, etc. All of your questions are already answered; just seek out the answers. In the meantime, start getting comfortable.