Liberalism in the classic sense draws upon and inculcates the concept that a free individual may draw from all of human experience to live a life not of ease, but of full satisfaction as a human being.
Liberalism in the current sense is a perversion of all of the above, seeking instead to nullify individual pursuits in the interest of a collective morass.
Conservatism is a more recent concept. It does not suffer a harsh duality, but its varying definitions tend toward the preservation of healthy institutions and traditions whether individual or corporate in nature.
Thank you.
I like your start on Conservatism as “tending toward the preservation of healthy institutions and traditions.”
I suppose the next question would be the challenge of who defines whether something is healthy or not. For the Left, nothing about America is healthy. Any unhappiness, in anyone anywhere, means that the whole set of institutions and traditions must obviously be flawed and we should start from the ground up, manufacturing new ones out of bits and pieces of reactive philosophy from Marx to Te-nehisi Coates.
For a Conservative, that tendency to preserve healthy institutions should best also contain a willingness to consider occasionally just how healthy they really are, for all. For the Leftist, the tendency to tear down the past seems to rest on a flawed assumption that the next step, no matter what it is, will certainly be better than the previous one, and history of revolutions shows that rarely to be the case.