A good part of the ideology of Conservatism revolves around resisting change. The name itself tells you that - it's nothing to do with conserving nature or biodiversity or anything as positive as that; it's about conserving the past.
A few snippets from current and recent political campaigns makes this painfully obvious, and gives an idea of what more thoughtful progressive parties are up against.
Take the Trump campaign in America, for instance. Here's a typical quote from a Trump supporter: "It's slowly slipping away from us. Anyone that's a Trump supporter wants an old America back, the best America back." Here's another (in reference to electic cars): "I don't trust them. I want it to be the way it always was, with a good old-fashioned car." As though nothing has improved over the life of this 82- year old Michigan voter...
Canada's Pierre Poilievre, with his particular penchant for overstatement and exaggeration (for political effect), is only evoking the conservative hankering for "the good old days" when he calls the country's carbon tax an "existential threat to our economy and our way of life", that will surely lead to "mass hunger and malnutrition", even, somehow, to "nuclear winter". I would assume that he doesn't actually believe this stuff, but he knows that it will appeal to his change-resistant political base.
"Traditional family values" is also a recurrent conservative article of faith, although many conservatives might be hard-pressed to say what exactly that means. In practice, it seems to mean opposition to expressions of individuality in sexuality (even though individualism is supposed to another core conservative tenet) and to anything vaguely connected to LGBTQ issues, trans rights, a liberal sex education, and support for what have become known recently as "parents' rights" or "parental rights" (the right to force kids to follow parent's rules and values).
The largely Conservative-led Brexit movement in the UK also relied on a hankering for a return to the old glory days of a resplendant British Empire (like cutting ties with all of Europe was somehow going to achieve that!), with slogans like "we want our country back", "take back control", "make Britain white again", etc. Most of it was disingenuous, misleading and hopelessly idealistic, but it deliberately and shamelessly leveraged a (largely spurious) nostalgia for better past times. It also demonstrated how Conservatives ARE actually willing to change things, but only in the service of undoing progressive advances and returning to more old-fashioned ways of doing things.
Anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is just another example of this denial of change. White Europeans in France Germany, Austria, Italy and many other places see their countries changing, and one of the most obvious manifestations of that is the colour of people's faces and the language they speak. Thus, the burgeoning hard- right parties are openly (and quite successfully) running on platforms of drastic immigration reforms and even the repatriation of existing immigrants. This, regardless of the fact that much of their economies, and much of their ability to weather turbulent economic times, relies on immigrant labour, particularly as birth rates in western countries continues to tank and populations skew ever older. *Sigh*
Change is sometimes hard, granted. But burying your head in the sand and pretending that the past was better than the present, or some envisioned future, is surely a poor response. That way, we would still have slavery, capital punishment, hymns instead of pop music, a coal-dominated power system, and unadulterated patriarchy. Change - constant change, even - is hard but necessary. Just don't expect a Conservative government of any stripe to provide that.
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