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John Quiggin's avatar

The answer is much simpler, I think. Conservatism, as you define it, is a viewpoint that hardly anyone in our society holds. In the US context, Catholic integralism as espoused by Vermeule and others is no more conservative than Trotskyism - it proposes upending the existing order and placing its own proponents in a position of dictatorial power, to impose beliefs that hardly anyone holds. If anything, views like this are over-represented in academic circles relative to the population as a whole.

There are plenty of people with a disposition to conservatism in the ordinary language sense of the term (me, for example). But they are mostly to be found on the moderate left (since the left has been in a defensive mode for most of the last 50 years), or else are apolitical and simply averse to change without having or wanting any philosophical basis for this.

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