Conservatism historically meant attaching to the status quo and resisting science and change

Evidence

By the end of the nineteenth century it was widely believed in both Europe and the United States that political views and political institutions could be ranged on a continuum from the radical left to the conservative right. The conservative right has believed in self-enrichment by personal exertion and in the rightness of the social and economic inequalities that follow from such individual competition; it has been opposed to such interferences with rugged individualism as social welfare legislation, state regulation of economic activity, and to the association of working men into labor unions. More generally conservatism has championed the status quo, religion, and tradition over science and humanitarianism. The radical left has chiefly stood for economic and social equality, for full suffrage, civil liberties, labor unions, welfare legislation, change, and science. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 460

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mid-century operationalization of the left-right political continuum that anchored the Berkeley studies.
• XREF: connects to: 1950s liberal intellectuals dismissed conservatism as intellectually incoherent — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 309; Free-market liberalism and traditionalist conservatism were irreconcilable uneasy allies — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 375; Depression-era American conservatism was weak as an intellectual force — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1445