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This is an interesting take on conservatism. I suppose it must be a fairly common take among people who consider themselves progressive, and helps makes sense of some things I've observed recently.

I consider myself generally conservative but would sum up my outlook more along the lines of "change isn't necessarily/automatically good" than "the past was right". Chesterton's Fence etc.

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Nobody thinks that change is inherently good. Change is a product of time, not a moral dimension.

I don't consider myself a progressive per se, but I think their framing would be something like this: change, if not good in itself, frequently begets opportunities to make things better.

Similarly I would doubt that anyone actually thinks that the past was good simply because it came before the present. The desire to return to "the way things were" is born of a critique of specific aspects of "the way things are", combined with a sense that tradition is likely to embody hard-earned wisdom that may not be immediately apparent or perfectly defensible by abstract argument.

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