But that all started to change in the 1980s. And now the scale has completely flipped upside down. I very much appreciate their work from the turn of the 20th century beyond WWII. It saddens me what the current party is doing.
I think conservative didn't imply conserving nature as much as conserving social norms and policies.
I think a conservative then and now is someone intent on preserving the structures that enable their revenue stream.
Social issues merely correlate with conservatism (purity concerns mostly), but are side issues to the monetary concerns.
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.
Liberals tend to live in cities, where there is very little nature. Conservatives tend to live in rural areas. They are more often farmers and hunters and fishermen. They're more likely to drink unpurified and non-treated water. Surely keeping nature as pristine as we can make it should mean more?
If we poison the groundwater, my well becomes useless. If we poison the lakes, I can't fish. If we cut down the forests, I can't hunt.
Even though I live in the city now, I grew up on a farm and I consider myself to be a conservationist, and I can't for the life of me figure out how any rural American could feel otherwise. Destruction of natural environments impacts rural America far more than anyone living in a city.
1) Environmental regulations and property rights are frequently viewed as in conflict by the rural population, examples of government reach onto the property owner's perceived absolute rights upon their own land.
2) The view that the wilderness exists to be made use of- which, really, is a view that's quite in line with what the rural population is generally living out. Farms can look beautiful and green from the outside, but they're generally intensely managed little plots of nature, where every year is a fight against Nature's encroachment.
3) A feeling that life is hard enough in those areas and those lifestyles without further restrictions on what you can and can't do, or more work that has to happen just to keep doing the same thing that you've been doing for generations. These are generally not the people who feel like they are (or actually are!) really getting ahead in life, and anything that makes it feel like they've got to run faster on that treadmill isn't going to go over well.
I think a lot of city-dwellers idolize the wilderness, it being something that is not at all part of their daily life, to a much greater extent than the rural dwellers who can walk out into acres of forest with no one around practically whenever they feel like it.
I'm city to rural transplant who's very much conservation-minded, but it's important to acknowledge where people are coming from, too. These are certainly not the only reasons, nor are they reasons that every rural citizen is going to agree with, but they're certainly some of the reasons that I've encountered.
As an example: when I was a teenager a water bottling plant went in a few miles from our farm. Almost immediately our well stopped producing water. We had to get a drilling service to come out and drive our well deeper. There's no regulation in the area on how much water any one property owner can consume which is great for farmers who are just keeping their crops alive but catastrophic when someone comes in to pump that water out of the ground for the sheer purpose of pumping as much water as they can.
Logging was big in the area back then too. Very little regulation about logging on your own property, which is great when you need to clear a bit more farmland or keep the wood stove running. But when the property is bought for the specific purpose of clear-cutting, now area farmers have to worry about the wind blowing topsoil away. That's exactly what happened in the Dust Bowl, and it's happening again now. The only reason we haven't had a farming collapse is our fertilizers are so much better now. But fertilizer is expensive, and it's just one more thing farmers have to buy.
And when all those trees are cut down, the deer population moves away. So now hunters have fewer chances to harvest during the hunting season. I know a lot of people back home have given up on hunting. I haven't harvested a deer in over five years, and we used to fill multiple licenses per season.
Anti-regulation is supposed to make rural life easier. But in effect it really only makes life easier for out-of-town businesses who want to destroy a rural area and leave it decimated for the population who lives there.
These should be conservative talking points. This should resonate with rural populations. "Lack of environmental concern from big business is making your already-difficult life even harder." But that message is considered "liberal" and I just don't understand it.
So you have an election cycle. Each election is a function Polity → Polity, the people who performed the election look at the election issues and they vote and they look at the results and they are changed by that process. A cycle of these will chain a bunch of these together; the time delay between them is a sort of diffusion process in the middle of them. That diffusion is kind of the only way to escape the basic theorem. So there’s a broad set of theorems about these x → x functions called fixed point theorems; under very general conditions repeating one indefinitely causes it to converge to some value which is equal to its input, x = f(x).
So the mathematical theorem says that whatever your election process is, your nation will fall into a state where those elections do not change the polity much, except to eliminate any diffusion.
It seems then that the fixed point of the “divide the country into seats and run first-past-the-post elections on each seat” looks like this:
1. There are two spineless political parties. By spineless, I mean that they are not actually associated with real deep-held convictions; over long time-scales you will see seismic shifts, such as a “party of Lincoln, freed the slaves” becoming a “definitely favored by white supremacists” shift or so.
2. Each party maintains approximately 50% of the popular vote, and probably 50% of the control of the government. Note that this happens both with gerrymandering (the House) and without (the Senate).
3. Typical people do not belong to one party or the other. People think they are relatively independent and they disagree with “their” parties in many many ways. What makes that party “theirs” is not their identification with that cause, but their abject terror at the policies of the opposite party.
Presumably these three trends continue to polarize the nation until an inevitable civil war. One can also predict that, since the casus belli of the civil war was chosen by spineless political parties, after the situation is resolved one way or the other there will be some sort of movement from the losers to forget that casus belli and recast their motives into new lights as the political climate changes—so in a post-slavery America the US Civil War is understood as not being about “slavery” but about “states’ rights to self-determination,” which is not really about white-washing history (the Republicans after all won the US Civil War and would not mind reminding people of it if that were politically expedient) so much as re-stoking the same demonization of the Other that keeps the system going (“those Democrats are part of a dangerous Northerner lineage that dates back to the Civil War and wants to take away all of your rights in the name of improving your life, whereas we in the South prize individual liberties and would never do such barbaric things”).
The sibling comment by freehunter makes a good point too. But the bottling plant went in because someone was able to sell or develop their land, and because of the demand in the urban areas. You can bet if environmental regulations had blocked it, there would have been lots of local grumbling against the EPA--and of course no mention of how the threat to their wells had been identified and avoided.
Just in terms of energy consumption, people in cities save vast amounts of CO_2 by:
- having shorter commutes
- driving smaller cars, or even...
- ...using public transport
- using less real estate (lower heating/cooling costs)
- living in large, shared houses with better space-to-surface ratios
They also protect the environment in the classical, i. e. by not building houses with manicured but dead lawns in it.
I might even speculate there is some residual association with the hippie movement of the 1960s.
Also, the mockery that Al Gore got from Republicans for his environmental activism more or less cemented anything associated with environmentalism and "climate change" as a "leftist fraud" in the minds of many Americans.
I lived in the Sierra Nevadas where we have to do absurd things like destroy unauthorized dams that have existed for 150 years[1]. We have to adhere to solar installation regulations, despite getting hundreds of inches of snow that require 400# per square foot of roof strength tolerance, and are covered by snow six months out of the year. We have to live in constant fear of a massive forest fire blowing through our community thanks to our government's approach to fire containment.
I admit that Big Oil has seized on this skepticism to push their own environmentally harmful agenda, but not wanting the government to sink its tentacles into rural life is more than just the hypocrisy that you are implying countryfolk have. There are real consequences to past legistaltion they are reacting to.
[1] https://mynevadacounty.com/2444/Lake-Van-Norden-Spillway
The US Conservatives are currently attacking the clean water act, the clean air act, and the endangered species act only because they interfere with profit and greed.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed.