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Notes -
What is the classical sense?
I suppose my feeling is that all political labels are inevitably somewhat vague, and refer to clusters of people who associate together for particular causes, and therefore whose borders tend to be blurry and mutable. This means that definitions tend to be provisional and mutable. I can point to, say, Kirk's ten principles and say "a conservative is someone who agrees with most of these" - maybe to preserve a little wiggle room, you need to hold at least seven out of ten to formally count as 'a conservative'? But it's always going to be a bit wobbly.
I think you also need to clearly distinguish between American and other conservatives here. In the United States, conservatism generally means some sort of adherence to the principles of the founding, or the American Revolution, and because the American foundation is paradigmatically liberal, that means that American conservatism is a form of liberalism. This is not necessarily the case in other countries.
For me, I find it most useful to define conservatism in terms of an overall disposition or posture. In general, I think, that somebody whose overall politics are marked by a sense of deference to tradition or obligation to the past, and a preference for organically evolved systems over top-down plans, and who is moderately opposed to change (that is, small incremental changes, or changes to respond to specific identifiable problems, may be good; large-scale reforms are usually bad), would qualify as a conservative in the broad sense.
But this does mean that, for instance, there are people whose names loom large in the right-wing political canon that I would not consider conservative. Re-litigating Trump is boring, so let me take another example - I don't think Ronald Reagan was a conservative. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a conservative. They were both, in a sense, progressive leaders, in that what they had was an organised theory for how society ought to work that they tried to impose via top-down reform, and for which they claimed a popular mandate. That is how progressivism works. Reagan and Thatcher both clearly belonged to the right-wing coalition in their countries, but it seems odd, to me, to call them 'conservatives'.
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