One person’s conservative isn’t another’s.
Conservative means to conserve. Now, conservatism in a philosophical sense is merely a term employed by a variety of people. It means to simply preserve a set of traditions or a traditional way of life.
The simple common sense logic of old simply accepted that the term conservative would have diverse meanings depending on what a person wants to preserve. Thus, conservative would mean different things to differing cultures, generations, religions, and much else.
The term conservative in Iraq has a big difference from its meaning in the USA. An Iraqi conservative would probably talk about maintaining Islamic religious Sharia law and an economy reflective of the holy Quran’s teachings. In America, conservative means a return to the Constitutional understanding of 1776 and maintaining an economic libertarianism born out of the revolt against the tax on tea which led to America’s independence from Britain.
In some areas of the world, there is a competing vision of conservatism. Germany is a prime example in which we can see a clear divide between the Christian Democratic Union party and Alternative for Germany. Both want to preserve distinctive features of Germany’s traditions.
The Christian Democratic Union party aims to maintain constitutionalism with soft-core Christian social teachings established post-World War Two, which, however, has deep roots in the old German Parliament in 1848.
While the Alternative for Germany looks back to a Germany before multiculturalism, found in pre-World War One Germany, in which the German people were overwhelmingly German-speaking and mostly held a similar shared ancestry group.
Both these conservative views are different from America’s. The difference isn’t even confined to culturally distinctive brands of conservatism. There is also a difficulty of distinctive generational understanding of what we mean by conservatism.
Someone born in Victorian times in the UK would hardly see Victorian values as traditional. Instead, they would see them as new and modern, rejecting the lapsed morals of the previous Georgian era.
While someone born in 2025 UK would strangely, maybe because of heavy American influence, see the 1950s as a traditional time to conserve, even though the period was mainly confined to repairing the damage of World War Two. The period belonged to a silent generation who were known for being apolitical and faced some economic hardship in the UK.
So, the hard thing is noting how nuanced and diverse the conservative political family is. This causes a problem when many speak of conservatism: we believe our version is the one everyone else has.
Especially with a new pronouncement and affirmation of the idea of a united Western world in a shared spirit of holding similar values, the difficulty with the claim is that the values of the philosophical enlightenment, capitalistic market economy, and muscular Christianity may be an American tradition as a nation born in the 1770s.
While nations like France, which were founded in 848 AD as a medieval kingdom, can’t pretend the idea put forward out of America isn’t modern. While Norway, which was founded in 828 AD as a pagan and tribal nation of separate Viking lords, also would have to admit that American conservatism is a modern invention.
The difficulty of Western civilization is that one person is traditional and another is modern, which leads to natural divergence in distinctive kinds of conservatism, which may share a dislike of the modern formulation of the world without agreeing on much else.
This is something all conservatives have to recognize and navigate, especially as the Left begins to fragment into a similar diverse range of groups outside of America. This means conservatives’ biggest competitors may not be the left but other conservatives. A situation where conservatives have to compete against multiple political forces of many kinds of left and other conservatives is particularly unavoidable in Europe.
American conservatives alone have a unified understanding of conservatism, generally based on facing a coalition of Liberal and socialist (unimaginable elsewhere in the world) in the Democratic party.
In the UK, the diverse base of the Democratic party is represented by three center-left parties: the Labour party, Liberal Democratic party, and Green party. Conservatives are divided into supporters of Reform UK and the Conservative party.
The unique unity of different kinds of conservatives in America creates an illusion that conservatives agree and it’s natural, despite major differences, to live under the same roof in politics. This can create the false impression that conservative always means the same thing to everyone who claims to be conservative.
The assumption is dangerous as it can mean assuming, especially for American conservatives, that those who claim to be conservative share their hopes and dreams without seeing conflict points or places where their agenda conflict
