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Depends on how you define conservatism and who gets to qualify as within it. William F. Buckley, Jr. got a lot of physical hate mail when he pushed back against Bircher claims that Eisenhower was a secret communist. Buckley was actively interested in gate keeping the capital-C Conservative movement, which is why he wanted to exclude Birchers, antisemites, etc. But if the definition of conservative is wanting to preserve America and its traditions, the Birchers would tell you that’s exactly what they wanted.
Simple rule of thumb I use: A conservative loves and honors his parents, loves and honors the men and women who raised him and built the world he grew up in and lives in. So was it a dispute that our dad's generation were active in? My dad was seven when Eisenhower took office. The Birchers lost, Taft lost. Go back further than your parents, it isn't conserve, it is reaction, revisionism.
So essentially Douglas Adams conservativism?
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I don’t think your personal, temporal constraints on conservatism are widely held.
They are widely held, most people just use a lot more words and analysis to produce the same idea.
Conservatism is about the possible not the utopian, reality not fantasy, the tried over the untried.
You seem to have backed into a progressive criticism of conservatism: it’s about having reverence for an imagined past.
E.g. reverence for Eisenhower after nearly everyone who was a conservative and politically engaged during his presidency has died off. The view that the Republican Party was too liberal in the Eisenhower era was a motivating factor behind the launch of National Review, and Buckley’s lifelong quest to build an network of conservative intellectuals, that culminated in the Reagan revolution. The literal conservative movement that began by running Conservative Party candidates against Republicans to hammer home to the liberal, Rockefeller wing o the party that they could no longer take the conservatives for granted and remain electorally viable.
I don’t think Buckley would agree with you that conservatism is standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!”, where prehistory is defined by each individual and based on their parents’ dates of birth.
No, you've imbibed that same progressive critique of conservatism so thoroughly you can't recognize what conservatism is by nature. Keep in mind that my first post was defining Conservatism's border on the Right ("Go back further than your parents, it isn't conserve, it is reaction, revision[]."), the border between Conservation of what actually exists and works to whatever extend it works, and Reaction which tries to go back to an imagined past that might have worked a little better. The Left border of Conservatism lies somewhere else entirely. Conservatism is realism, it is Hobbes, it is found in the contemporary non-fiction heading in the library; the Left is found under Sci-Fi, the Reaction under Historical Fiction and Fantasy.
Let's start with Oakeshott's definition of Conservatism: "To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." The preference for the near past and the present to the far future and the distant past is contained within that simple definition. Oakeshott's definition was framed to exclude the 20th century utopian movements of Socialism and Communism, that pictured a future that was perfect and bright, and was more than willing to sacrifice the "actual, the limited, the near, the sufficient, [and] present laughter" in pursuit of a future science-fiction utopia.
But equally we can contrast those same attributes with those who fantasize about a distant past. Someone like Moldbug writes in his introduction to Divine Right monarchy fantasizing about:
Moldbug, of course, has never lived under a divine right monarchy, indeed the closest analogues to a divine right monarchy extant at the time Moldbug is writing are the UK and North Korea, and Moldbug would have (good) reasons for distinguishing those cases. Moldbug has (to my knowledge) never met or spoken with even a minor royal! His idea of what the court of Louis Quatorze was like is as much based in fantasy as AOC's idea of what America could look like in 100 years. We simply do not have the knowledge of what the distant past looked like in the same detail that we have for the near the past we have living connections with. My connection to a tradition that includes my father, my grandfathers, my uncles, my scoutmasters, my teachers is living flesh and blood humanity; Moldbug's connection to Elizabeth I is dead books, dry ink and electrons.
To use another conservative trope, from Chesterton:
That is as good a definition of Conservative policy as any. The Progressive, the overaggressive reformer, wishes to tear down the fence, because the world we live in is horrible and surely the fence is part of the problem, therefore tearing down the fence can only improve the world. The Reactionary has found archeological evidence that once there was a fence at this location, and because the world we live in is horrible and fallen and surely tearing down the fence was part of what made it so, we should build the fence forthwith. The Conservative opposes both these policies, believing that the world we live in is doing a pretty fine job thank you very much, that we should be grateful for the fences that have been built and those that have been torn down by our ancestors, and that without a thorough explanation of why fences should be built or torn down we should avoid overly hasty changes in pursuit of fantasies futuristic or historical.
Which, as I predicted, is a lot more words to say: What I know works, what the fathers knew worked in their day, not what I think I can guess about the past or the future.
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