I see very often people use the label 'conservative' to generalize about a group of people. But what does conservative really refer to?
Does it refer to:
– Founding fathers' principles
– Religious/Puritan/Temperance principles
– Protestant/Stoic/Rugged Individual
– Family values (i.e. one man who works, one woman who stays home, married once, with several children)
– Status quo (It ain't broke, so don't fix it)
– Pro-business / economic growth above all else / at the extreme, a Fascist outlook (Govt and business should be bedfellows)
– Fiscal restraint in government
– Foreign policy (Conservative here can either refer to nationalism or to isolationism)
Only once you have figured out what they mean when they say conservative, you can then determine whether or not you disagree with them.
I think it is pretty safe to say that anyone who voluntarily labels themselves as a generic “conservative” these days is simply expressing allegiance with the Republican Party. Which, by most measures, is not a party with conservative
policies, though when trying to push their self-gratifying policies through they tend to appeal to people who self-label as conservative, either through the label itself or through as many of the above listed values (traditionally associated with the label conservative) as possible.