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If you had to devise a test to decide who counts as a conservative in the classical sense, what would you check? Politics must count, and religion, and respect for tradition, but almost no one has all three of those in a way that makes the label "conservative" apply.
Politically, most people who apply the term "conservative" to themselves or others actually mean "classical liberal": someone who prefers less economic control/intervention by government and all the market solutions that such a position implies, and also favors no government position on The Good Life, leaving people free to choose whichever life they choose, from pious monasticism to squalid meth addiction. This often means "Red Tribe,' but also covers weirdo libertarians. It rules out nearly all Christians, because they would never say "the true Good Life is not sufficiently knowable for the state to take a position on it," which is why there is so much rhetoric about Christians coming for abortion rights or whatever.
But many religious people don't count either. True Conservatives, in the Burkean sense (not in the literal sense of "this is what Edmund Burke wrote," but in the sense that people mean when they say "I'm a classical conservative") are not supposed to want to change anything in society or culture that was working serviceably. On this definition, though, no American counts, because the Revolution upended a system that was working ok. No protestant counts, because Luther upended a system that was working okay (of course Americans and protestants disagree about that serviceability, but does everyone get a C-pass for their particular complaint? Was Lenin a conservative too?). So this rules out most anglosphere "conservatives." But this leads to the absurdity of going back further and further and finding that no user of bronze tools counts because stone tools were working okay, etc.
In terms of respect for Tradition, there is no definitional problem, but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture. Maybe in Europe things are different, but in North America very few people think about tradition at all, and many of those that do overestimate the age of most traditions. So there might be a respect for tradition, but it is uncoupled from ancestral traditions to a point where "I respect tradition" does not mean what anyone wants it to mean.
So my question is, does the term "conservative" mean anything at all anymore other than "red tribe" or "anti-woke"? If so, how would an alien zoologist classify someone as "conservative"? I suggest checking people's children (to check transmission of values) to see how many nursery rhymes they know or how many second-verses of Christmas carols they can sing, but I grant that this prioritizes traditional culture over religion and politics, and a relatively recent tradition at that. Nevertheless, I think that if you sorted people by how many of those things their kids could recite, you would be able to predict more about them than asking "should abortion be legal" or "what is the optimal income tax rate."
I don't think there is any set of necessary or sufficient political beliefs such that everyone who uses the term "conservative" would agree that an individual with such beliefs is properly classified as such. Especially if you intend this definition to stretch backwards into the past and possibly forwards into the future.
I think a prudent beginning to this line of inquiry is to ask: why care what "conservative" means? Did X call Y a conservative and one is unsure what X intended to convey thereby? Does one imagine one's self as possibly positioned in an intellectual tradition described as "conservative" (by whom?) but are unsure what that entails?
Once we understand what use we intend to put the term "conservative" the path to a meaning becomes clearer.
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