YUROP

I appreciate you taking the time to write all of this, but you're buying the bullshit. The question that you haven't answered is the crux of my point. "Conserve what?" And the answer is always the same, for every conservative, everywhere, since the first conservative: "Whatever I think is important." That's why they are constantly shifting their positions, why they seem hypocritical or paradoxical when they say one thing and do another. It's how they criticize their opposition for the same choices they make themselves. They rail against abortion and have abortions. They complain about immigration but demand freedom to travel where they like. They want low taxes for themselves, government spending on their preferred programs, and strict regulations that benefit their businesses.

It's not ideology, it's narcissism. And there are zero exceptions.

I've never met anyone who called themselves conservative who wasn't actually a radical extremist. They don't want to conserve, they want to destroy the current institutions and somehow "return" to a dreamt up idolised past that never existed.

I feel like this is a good attempt at a description of what conservatism is, but I'd like to share my own - conservatism is the natural political philosophy of people living in danger and scarcity.

Hence -

• Valuing stability, order, and predictability. When the outside world is violent and chaotic, you want your home and society to be as non-chaotic as possible. So, strict gender roles, supporting police and military, sacrificing individual expression for social predictability.
• Deference to authority and strict heirarchy. In times of crisis, having an obvious chain of command makes it easier to get things done. So, patriarchal family structures, authoritarian governments.
• An emphasis on practical or traditional knowledge over theoretical knowledge. Anyone who has done hands-on work can tell you how often theory falls short of practice. So, distrust of academics and dislike of book-learning.
• Belief in a higher power. When you have no control over your life, you try to find that control by believing in god(s) and prayer.
• Distrust of outsiders. Your family and tribe can be trusted - outsiders should be kept at arms length until proven trustworthy. And along with this - hostility towards members of enemy tribes. So, racism, xenophobia
• Lack of empathy for outsiders or social "parasites". When resources are limited, you must ration them, and giving away resources to people who give you nothing in return will hurt you and your tribe. So, hostility towards immigrants and the homeless.

And of course, the conservative response is driven by belief, not reality. So if someone believes that the world is dangerous and their way of life is precarious, they will quickly adopt conservative attitudes. So it doesn't matter if you yourself are actually safe and your way of life is quite robust - if you get sucked into a fearmongering news cycle, you can become conservative.

It’s a naïve world view based on a lacking understanding of how society changes

Or they dislike how things have changed. Like the Ron Paul types who think medical costs, housing bubbles, university prices, etc.. are due to government interference and control of the money supply. Theres a lot of believers in austrian economics as well, and they arent unsympathetic to the poor, they just believe the good things in society are due to technological progress and overwhelmingly more bad things due to government involvement.

Which isnt illogical or crazy, its very probable. Its also very probably we need more government intervention. In the end there are far too many variables to be definitive, and our economy isnt flexible enough to even change, as every tweak rewards one group and punishes another. Which I think is why we have bailouts after every recession, attempting to quell changes to the status quo and existing wealth distribution, which then leads to further moral hazard.

I'd also say many people think we can simply take money from the wealthy and distribute it with no side effects, without taking into account the velocity of money or interest rates. If you taxed the rich 90% and distributed it you'd obviously have massive inflation, rising interest rates, and people with a mortgage would default like they did during the Volcker shock. We arent on the gold standard, fiat moneys value is dynamic, the wealthy are only nominally wealthy given the current velocity of money.

Conservative means what it means - people who want to conserve rather than change, and are comfortable with how things are and, in their opinion, have always been.

One might argue it is about maintaining constants through change.

Most ideological conservatives that I know are well aware change is inevitable (and probably the most constant thing out there). What separates and divides them are what constants they seek to maintain, and some systems are categorically more damnable than others.

What happens when conservatives lose this constant, or are threatened to lose it, is when they become reactionaries or fascists respectively.