Conservatism
According to Alan Ware, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom retained viable conservative parties into the 1980s. Ware said that Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, Spain and the United States had no conservative parties, although they had either Christian democrats or liberals as major right-wing parties. Canada, Ireland and Portugal had right-wing political parties that defied categorization: the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada; Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Progressive Democrats in Ireland; and the Social Democratic Party of Portugal. Since then, the Swiss People's Party has moved to the extreme right and is no longer considered to be conservative.
Vast right-wing conspiracy
After the release of a deposition Bill Clinton had given to the Independent Counsel in which he perjured himself, some conservatives began to adopt the VRWC phrasing ironically. In 2004, conservative lawyer Mark W. Smith wrote the "New York Times" Best Seller "Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", which came with a "membership card" that made its owner an "official member of the VRWC." Similarly, a number of newspaper, magazine, and website articles have used the phrase to report on left-wing politics. Eugene Volokh's blog The Volokh Conspiracy is said to have derived its name from as a reference to the "Vast right-wing conspiracy" statement.