It’s more useful to think of political conservatism as an impulse rather than as an ideology. Specifically, it’s the impulse to preserve what is good about our present social, political and cultural arrangements, or at least to limit harm when those arrangements inevitably change.


In my sense, then, there are no conservative beliefs as such. “Abortion is wrong,” for example, is a belief that a person might try to use to influence society in either a conservative or non-conservative manner.
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