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The first order of business is to decide how to define liberal and conservative. There seem to be two good ways of doing this. The first is to discuss the liberal and conservative parties: the Republicans and the Democrats.
Under this conception, the results have been decidedly mixed. The Democrats' greatest victory was the New Deal, which revolutionized the way government provides substantive benefits for its citizens. Democrats also are winning the battle to legalize abortion, although it should be noted that many Republicans are pro-choice. Finally, it appears as though Democrats will succeed in greatly increasing the rights of homosexuals, perhaps even to the point of allowing them to marry.
On the other side, the Republicans' most lasting impact on the country was their work in abolishing slavery against an entrenched Democratic party willing to break the United States in half rather than give blacks their freedom. Additionally, Republicans have rolled back the 70% income tax bracket to a more reasonable 33% (I think that's the current figure...). The death penalty was declared unconstitutional for a mere four years before the Supreme Court reversed itself. A Democratic President of the 1990's announced that, "The era of big government is over."
Big victories on both sides, I daresay. But, some will respond, the parties have changed their ideologies so many times over the years that using parties to represent liberal and conservative is pointless. In response, consider the following definitions:
Classical liberal: the government should reduce regulation of both social and economic activity.
Classical conservative: the government should increase regulation of both social and economic activity.
By these definitions, the classical liberals have scored great victories in terms of freedom of speech. The amount of things protected by the first amendment has grown considerably. Additionally, racial, sexual, and monetary regulations on voting have been abolished, allowing virtually any adult in our society to exercise the franchise. Recently, the tax burden has been reduced, another liberal goal.
On the conservative side, the New Deal greatly increased regulation of virtually everything in the economic sphere, from taxes to retirement to banking practices. Minimum wage laws have taken away the individual's "choice" to live in perpetual extreme poverty. The Supreme Court has resisted efforts to be made more democratic (directly elected, e.g.).
On this score, it looks as though classical liberals have by and large won the culture war, although not as decisively as some might think. It is certainly fair to say that the United States become SIGNIFICANTLY more conservative from 1920 to 1937. We went from a society that valued individual freedom and choice more than anything else to one that deprives citizens of choice in order to benefit them. If you don't believe me, try telling the government that you don't want to receive social security benefits and want to stop paying into the system.
Fundamentally, my point is that your statement has little basis in fact. Republicans and Democrats have both enjoyed major victories over the years. Alternatively, although the country has become more liberal since the Founding, the New Deal was a giant leap towards conservativism.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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