Incidentally, all the Christian Democratic parties morphed into fervently neoliberal parties. So there does appear to be a connection between the ideologies, no?

Yes and no. Conservatives lost relevance in a world of meritocracy, most of their points were on a losing side eventually. People who come to power now, on the backs of conservative voters, don’t even try to be factually correct and therefore offer a way to continue ideological left-right war (hence the post-truth moniker used by some people). The hard pill to swallow about this is that maybe extreme meritocracy is not sustainable, or at least not sustainable in a system that doesn’t benefit the largest possible majority in practice. And maybe that politics can’t be means of changing societal norms as those have to happen naturally. A political force attempting such thing would need to have high legitimacy and current elites don’t have it because they usually prioritised interests of the largest businesses over regular people.

What I’m trying to say is that no matter which perspective you use to try to look into the future, there’s no positive outcome if neoliberalism is involved. I’m arguing with people online in an effort that sometime in the future they’re not deceived by neoliberals pretending to be right or left wing politician and that’s why I insist on making the distinction.

Quite honestly – is there a person or historical system to exemplify this?

Christian democrats in Western Europe adapted many things from social democrats, mostly on welfare state which is critical element of societal cohesion. Those parties were since then eaten from the inside by neoliberalism that corrupted both right and left but for a time whole world aspired to European quality of life. We might not agree on societal norms with Christian democrats but things like Catholic social teaching is solid stuff to build upon.