When your unruly daughter won’t even sit still for a measly 30 hours to have her picture painted, so you have to sit in for her

G

You are confusing conservatism with fascism, and I don’t blame you or anyone else for not being able to tell the difference at this point.

It’s important to first understand that conservatism is a descriptor for a concept rather than a grouping of people. Yes, I know you can categorize certain people as “conservatives,” but doing that has the pitfall we are seeing now, where they start describing themselves as such and then proceed to degrade ideologically over time until their beliefs and actions do not even resemble the original meaning, all the while clinging to this tribalistic, meaningless word that they choose to identify as.

Conservatism is supposed to be about conserving values that, ideally, you or your parents fought to establish in the first place. Things like “regulation that prevents mercury from being legally dumped in rivers,” and “you have to be of at least a set minimum age for employers to be allowed to hire you” are laws that prior generations bled for to bring to reality. These are, by definition, conservative values because someone else established them before your time. We want to conserve them, because the benefits they bring us are still very relevant to us today. They are worth holding onto.

The second thing to understand is that conservatism, and its converse liberalism, are both relative terms. “Conservatives” do not actually have an objective hard set of views or dogma, otherwise they’d still be clawing at the dirt in caves while praying to the sun, and “liberals” do not have some sort of objective hard set of opposing views either, otherwise they’d be conservative by definition.

A healthy society utilizes both of these concepts in delicate balance–even down to the individual person holding viewpoints rooted in both preserving some values, while simultaneously working to change or enhance others. Again, conservatism and liberalism shouldn’t be seen as belonging to opposing groups of people, but as concepts that we all use every day without even thinking about it.

Conservatism is a neutral stance. It represents stagnation, which isn’t always bad if used to protect the right things. Liberalism is the progressive stance. It moves us forward and helps us understand what is good and what is better.

However, conservatism can also (and often does) start moving backwards instead. That is called regression, and is exactly what you were referring to with that list of regressive ideas. Most of those were defeated long ago by progressives of the time, many of whom paid dearly to make sure that their kids wouldn’t have to suffer the same way they did. Spitting on their graves by rolling back their hard-fought victories is not “conservative” at this point, only regressive, and it should start being correctly identified and called out as such before it’s too late to stop it from regressing further into the worst case scenario.