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Thank you for writing this detailed reply. I get where you're coming from, I think. This worldview stands on its own merits perfectly well but my criticism of it is that it defines mainstream conservatism to be almost exclusively the group of people who want nothing to change, or at most want some stuff they dislike from the last few years rolled back. But in practice this means that conservatives are just progressives from five years ago. You can't write your own history if you have no ideology or motivating principle beyond 'old new thing good, new new thing bad, also stop putting up taxes'. That sounds condescending, it's not, I've been that guy. It's just that ten years later you look back and you realise that the status quo you wanted to defend was actually a rock rolling downhill, and at some point you have to decide where you want that rock to be and start pushing it there.
To put it another way, I think that any conservative with a brain sooner or later has to start asking themselves what they want to conserve; what kind of country they want to live in and what they need to do to get it back there. If you want to conserve Britain's ethnic makeup from the 90s, you are going to have to rip up huge chunks of the economy and undo a bunch of international treaties. Not very conservative! OTOH, if you want to conserve the welfare state, you may end up making decisions on the economy that produce huge societal changes, like taking on even more debt or lots of immigration.
I think that libertarians, neoreactionaries and neocons are conservative to the extent that they say, 'You know, the country used to be good because of XYZ, let's try to move back in that direction'. Whereas progressives say, 'Things have always been bad, but they will be good once we XYZ.' This isn't just a taxonomy, it has big consequences for how each group behaves, what it values and what it appeals to.
In my limited political experience, the left has a lot of institutional knowledge about how to play dirty that the right lacks, as well as the whip hand in polite society. Conservatives who care quickly find out that your life can be made absolutely miserable in various ways. A lot of the 'not caring' is pre-emptive self defence and an unwillingness to expose oneself to humiliation. A lot of it is also the lack of ideology - normie conservatives like some of my family have a political philosophy that's a mismash of mostly leftist memes from 10 years ago and aren't able to defend them against the more developed version, so they avoid politics to prevent their worldview from damage. I don't think not caring is the problem, the problem is pre-emptive cringe and an inability to translate caring into useful action.
Consider a case of entryism from the right: Musk's takeover of twitter. It's top-down entryism rather than bottom-up entryism, but a heavily left-leaning institution was taken over by a more right-leaning person and remodelled. The result is still fairly moderate: now much more supportive of conservatives but still with a lot of centrists and leftists. The left wasn't keen on this and tried to move to a more friendly alternative (Threads, Mastodon) but couldn't manage the switch because the moderates didn't move and the new alternatives were consequently niche and offputting.
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