A lot of things we take for granted about the modern liberal/conservative divide originally came from the early days of post-revolutionary France. Even the term

A lot of things we take for granted about the modern liberal/conservative divide originally came from the early days of post-revolutionary France. Even the terms "right" and "left" came from which side of the aisle French politicians sat on. The conservatives were trying to preserve the power of the aristocracy and as much of the pre-revolutionary social and economic order as they could. The liberals had a bunch of different factions, many with very different ideas for what a modern pluralistic secular state based on the notion of fundamental human rights and democracy should look like. Some of those ideas would make sense to us even today, and some of those ideas were utterly batshit crazy (like turning Notre Dame into a temple to actually worship a made-up god of Reason, or executing people who had slightly different ideas about things). But anyway, that's a long winded way of saying you are correct. The term "conservative" refers to conserving the norms, values, economics, and power structures that already exist, and resisting changes that would challenge them in any way, or at least being naturally skeptical of anyone proposing big sweeping changes, both to protect the old order and out of a fear of unintended consequences going forward. It doesn't refer to conserving nature in any way, even though Teddy Roosevelt was a champion of conservation and Nixon created the EPA. However, in the US at least, "conservative" now seems to mean whatever the GOP wants it to mean. When things like decades-long commitments to free trade or international security or even domestic security can fall by the wayside seemingly on the whim of a human random number generator, you know Edmund Burke's hands are completely off the wheel and have been for a long time.