This is a good question to ponder. I think of "conservatism" as protectionism that tries to hold on to the processes and beliefs that worked to put people in power historically. Power over places, power over people who depend on those places, and power to extract value for anthropocentric "greater good" that usually involves building cities on good farmland and calling it "progress".
American "conservatism" is about protecting a system that is destroying the future of human life and justifying it with numbers that represent the growth rate of that destruction. Minor opposition to this system is dismissed as "unAmerican" while our two political brands are both working against life itself.
The difference is that one brand actually wants to establish physical control over the value of everyone and everything through intimidation and extraction, while the other wants to talk about it and pretend they don't profit from all of the advertising (every idiotic event on the news becomes an advertisement for spending more money on so-called 'education' that conditions people to status quo). The all-too-public debate between the greater evil and lesser evil ignore the real evil: that collective humanity was turned into a useless rabid beast by civilization itself (city-state based power over Nature). We are all so busy patting ourselves on the back for inventing electricity and airplanes that we don't even bother to put our fertilizer on the soil anymore (and, thanks to technology, we can't, because the concentration of plastics, drugs and metals in sewage renders it toxic).
Conservatism is great in a world where there are only about 100 million people without engines or electricity, and they each have their own puny gods to worship and kill for. Under those circumstances, they still have to pay attention to the lessons of nature's risks and response abilities, so ego is physically limited. In globally interconnected cities, everyone is just another fattened piece of deluded beef fighting over how much corn is in the trough. Our Shining Cities on hills are just Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations owned by banks and drug producers (legal or illegal doesn't matter as long as the corn and the cash keep flowing, and the cattle keep eating and driving to the feed troughs).
So, when I criticize a particular brand of bullies in the System of systems built by the mean Mean, it doesn't necessarily follow that I support another brand.
It's all just marketing now. Humans have become so accustomed to theft of their time and attention that they are actually selling themselves as a brand to their friends.
