pseudoai:
I’ll start with one:
It seems that progressivism taken, at least, at face value, aims at changing things.
Conservatism seems to keep things as they are.
Now, what conservatism now wants to maintain was, at some point, something that was an aim of progressivism.
There are whole topics that are weird part of both, like ecology (mantaining what’s there) being a conservative issue, backed up by progressivism.
K: AS I am rather liberal, I shall take a crack at this:
Yes, we want change, and yes, conservatives want to maintain or
keep status quo, but the reality of this is more nuanced…
Why do liberals want change? but being liberal is a lot like a joke
that was old when I was a kid, “” I don’t belong to an organized political
party… I am democrat… and that is very much the liberal way…
our ‘‘tent’’ is far larger than the conservative tent…Liberals tend to
hold far more and diverse ideas than conservatives…
many liberals are single issue liberals… think Greta Thunberg…
and many are large issue liberals, think ‘‘defund the police’’ crowd…
but every single liberal begins with the idea that this world
can be made better in some fashion… and quite often, the means
to this ‘‘betterment’’ is just small changes…for example, here in
California, there is a move to remove bail from people being charged
with a crime… and why? because we have heard about people being
unable to pay bail and thus spending months on end in jail, for no
other reason than being poor… the crime being committed is just
being poor… and that is wrong… at least to a liberal… for our
operating principle is justice/equality…and how is being in jail
for months on end because one is poor, how is that being just?
where is the justice in that? How are we to equalize this, as Justice
is really about being equal in all areas… politically, economically,
judicially, socially…one of the points about liberals and conservatives,
is that liberals accept, as axiom, the declaration of Independence,
and it’s one sentence which is really a liberal, Enlightenment ideal,
is that
‘‘All men are created equal’’
If I were to reduce liberalism to one sentence, that would be it…
and another Liberals might disagree with me and say something else…
and the point is that we are both right… that is the big tent of Liberalism…
Conservatives operate on a much narrower band width…
conservatives believe in god, and hold to an hierarchical
belief system… that there is a natural order to things,
and god provides that order… and they believe that in
the past, there was a golden age, to which they strongly desire
to return to…exactly as the Romans believed in the past being
a golden age and the current time, a silver age… and they want to
return to this golden age… for example, Raygun believed in
the magical properties of the 1950’s, that was the golden age…
and everything he did, was an attempt to return to this golden age
of the 50’s…Which NEVER existed… and many conservatives
pine for the ‘‘golden age’’ that was Medievalism… they openly
call for a return to the Middle ages… this includes far-right nationalist
and traditional conservatives… what they pine for is they see the
Medieval times as being anti-modern, with its rigid hierarchies
with its racial unity…conservatives are continually talking about
culture… that the Middle Ages as a time period, had spiritual
certainty and a traditional social structure… Hitler for example
used the Medieval times to promote a nostalgic historical
nationalism… to return to greatness requires us to return
to the values and beliefs of the Middle Ages…or so he said…
for conservatives, the historical event they truly hate, is the
French Revolution…and they blame much of the modern ills
on the French Revolution…they foolishly try to rewrite the past
to fit modern needs…or to say this another way, conservatives
have a innate need for order, for structure, for the ‘‘system’’…
and they see, wrongly of course, the ‘‘order’’ of the Medieval times…
whereas Liberals are not as entranced with order as the right is…
the values and beliefs of the left are not in line with order
and hierarchy, as the right is… I hold with liberal democracy,
which is far messier than a monarchy or a dictatorship…
Liberals are far more confortable with disorder and chaos, than
conservatives are… we accept the fact that life itself is chaos
and disorder and full of chance and probabilities…
and Liberals are ok with that… conservatives are not…
Those are some of, some of the factors that separate liberals from
conservatives… there are plenty more difference between the two,
but I am pointing out some factors…
Kropotkin