> This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right. If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conserv

> This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right. If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conservative that wanted to protect traditional social relations against the social dislocation of early capitalism. The problem is, the people doing the social dislocation, the people doing the enclosures and clearances, were also those who benefited the most from the traditional social relations, aristocrats, etc. So the idea developed in two divergent directions: the first, the conservatives, who tried to protect traditional society by moral education, enforcement, entreaty, etc, the second, the early socialists, who tried to protect traditional society by protecting traditional social relations (usually land rights) through politics. As you can imagine, this cuts in opposite directions: the first group would want to protect, for instance, traditional aristocratic privilege, while the second might want to abrogate it, in order to prevent an aristocrat from taking their land. Both sides would be seeing themselves as 'conserving' the status quo. This was all about three hundred years ago in the UK, or much less in Spain, or Mexico, or Russia. The current dominance of 'conservative liberals' in all nations shows that the first direction, where you protect the veneer of tradition while allowing unfettered capitalism to trash its innards, won out. The last socialist revolutionaries of the old sort were people like Zapata, protecting their societies against the encroaching Haciendas. Today, there is nothing left to protect, so that's why modern socialists don't have much truck with whatever shreds of traditional culture remain.