[Gormo]

> Present day conservatives are just awful people in general in my experience.

I don't think I've seen any conservatives involved in mainstream politics in the past 15 to 20 years. I see people using the word "conservatives" to describe something else entirely, but few actual conservatives.

[wat10000]

I see it the other way around. This is real conservatism.

Conservatism as an actual movement was formed after the French Revolution when monarchists found that “deus vult” was no longer sufficient justification for wanting a king. The core principles are just rationalizations for the main idea: there should be a king.

American conservatives got swept away by democratic ideals and focused on the rationalizations, but now they’re getting back to their roots.

[Gormo]

> I see it the other way around. This is real conservatism.

It's really not.

> Conservatism as an actual movement was formed after the French Revolution when monarchists found that “deus vult” was no longer sufficient justification for wanting a king.

In fact, conservatism in the Anglo-American world has no relationship whatsoever with the French revolution; the sort of reactionary monarchism that informed the royalist factions during the French revolution was already all but dead in the UK and America by the time of the French revolution -- it had already been driven to the fringes by the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution, and in the aftermath of the Whig ascendancy and the American revolution, was utterly gone by the 19th century.

Modern conservatism descends from the non-radical side of the Whig philosophy, as exemplified by Edmund Burke, and is characterized by preferring stability and continuity rather than forceful change, within a context of limited, balanced government, rule of law, and respect for the individual. Many of the people referring to themselves today as "conservatives" are collectivist, authoritarian radicals, and have much more in common with the extreme left than with traditional conservatism.