I appreciate the lengthy and well written response. But I don’t really agree.

When the current state of things is bad, pushing to conserve it is also bad.

Sometimes things can seem good from the perspective of the hypothetical conservative, but actually be pretty bad from a more zoomed out one. For example, someone might want to “conserve” their suburban lifestyle. They might not realize the racism that went into establishing it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Law is a pretty good book.) Worse, they might support the racism. “Our parents fought to keep people of life ancestry together. That’s just how the world is. Those people should live somewhere else.”. There are countless other examples. “My dad employed children in his factory and my golly I want to do the same.” Something being a tradition doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Conservatives do not have a lock on keeping good laws. Progressives do not want to change things for the sake of change. No progressive is going to look at a law that says you have to be 18 to work dangerous machinery and be like, “This is a good law, but we can’t leave it as-is because then we’d be a conservative.” Progressives would also support a law against dumping mercury in the river, because the underlying values (“don’t poison people for profit”, i guess?) are progressive values.

I think the underlying value system of conservatism is hierarchy. The world must have hierarchy. You see this with like monarchy and nobility, you see this with the rich being treated differently than the poor, and you see this with racism. Other ideas like “Oh, we should preserve our traditions” are mostly paint jobs on top of “There must be outgroups to bind and ingroups to protect”.