Conservatism is the idea that we should preserve social institutions, processes and land, and improve them gradually because life is complex and we don’t know how things mesh together, or every (or even what) function they might have. Moving quickly is always high risk, and any improvement has to be done with care.
Conservatism has a great respect for historically developed ‘checks and balances’ and for varied sources of power (so that one power cannot become dominant and bend everything to its will). It is also suspicious of fanatical adherence to ‘ideologies’ as they can blind people as much as help them.
As a failing, they might be a bit oblivious to violence which protects the system, but they certainly will object to violence that attempts to overthrow the system.
Conservativism is a perfectly coherent political philosophy that is a vital part of any political system. It constrains people from rushing ahead without thinking or feeling.
However, the Modern Right (as a movement) is not conservative at all, and constantly rushes ahead destroying checks and balances and obeying ideologies, rather than thinking.
The modern Right has acted rapidly to break down the post-war compromise between capitalism and socialism which developed to protect the population from the vagaries of capitalism, and to curtail boom and bust cycles. Rather than proceed cautiously with care, it destroyed checks and balances and followed an unproven ideology that the free market always knows best and that governments are always useless to provide help for people who are not part of the wealthy.
The modern Right has rushed to concentrate power and wealth in the hyper rich corporate class, turn democracies into plutocracies, and aimed to destroy any opposition to this concentration (unions, left wing thought etc. Most people now do not know what left wing thought is, any more than they know what conservative thought is).
It has rushed to destroy land, air, and water, and has boosted climate change by being reluctant to move against the plutocracy it created. It has no love of its country’s nature.
It is now rushing into scapegoating people for the social collapse its policies have generated. These people have had no provable role in that collapse, and the Right appears to be trying to undo civil rights for everyone who are not officially supporters.
It is now rushing into trying to discredit (not improve) vital social institutions such as systems of Justice. This would be more or less incomprehensible to a conservative, as they would know that once social discrediting of systems of justice happens, we are headed towards ‘justice’ as violence and justice at the whim of the tyrant. There is no longer any rule of law.
Likewise attempts to discredit the electoral system (rather than improve it) are also attempts to destroy the basis of the legitimacy of the government. And indeed we see this in Trump’s attempts to steal the election by intimidation and fraud. Again this would be completely incomprehensible to any genuine conservative, because they know that these actions will lead to chaos, violence and tyranny.
The Right is also trying to bring pro-corporate (ie non-traditional Christian) religion into power, to support the plutocracy, and thus end any separation between Church, State and Business.
In all, any person who considers themselves conservative, should carefully distinguish their position from that of the pro-corporate, or neo-fascist, Right.
Real Conservatives will get mowed down by it as much as anyone else
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