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.
Good points. A conservative will respect history and learn from it. No so the Leftist.
Yes, and they conflate progress with change.
Most people inherently do. Look at the obsession with “technology”. Almost any new invention now is seen as progress. Sometimes successful, but inevitably overtaken by yet another. Sometimes look back and realize that last touted thing wasn’t so great after all, as they tout the next one.
Quote attributed to Lincoln: “People see as progress, what is nothing more than change.”