When you see "conservative" you're making the mistake of looking at what they say, not what they do. In the US at least, "conservative" and "business" got lumpe

When you see "conservative" you're making the mistake of looking at what they say, not what they do. In the US at least, "conservative" and "business" got lumped together (or merged) while "progressive/liberal" and "labor" got lumped together as the other end. There's also the question of corruption in both areas, where on the business end you get people perfectly willing to have the government spend billions of dollars of other people's money as long as it's possible to skim a few million of profits off it. On the labor side you (used to?) end up with the historical corruption of union politics (e.g. Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime), though I'm pretty sure the backlash against that has resulted in things being a lot cleaner. The corresponding backlash against the business side's issues (e.g. Dodd-Frank after the financial crisis) has been less successful and many measures have been rolled back. Social Security privatization has kind of been a holy grail for the business side, with the concept of all.that.money being invested in stocks (and the fees! think of all the fees! skimmed right off the top!) rather than remaining as US Government bonds. Edit: I'm not sure how a different lumping would work out - there's obviously huge ground for combining of "conservative" and "labor", but I'm not as sure about "progressive/liberal" combined with "business."