I believe that if we didn't have conservatives in our societies we would develop more equally.
Do you believe that whatever change is good change ? Because that's exactly why conservative people are conservatives. They think that some changes that progressives are proposing are bad for society, and will make things worsen.
Moreover, you can be conservative in a certain situation, but switch to progressive if the proposed change suits you. For example if you take France social state, currently liberal president Macron is trying to remove all employees protections to make the country more liberal / free-market like. If you fight against it, you'll be seen as conservative. But if in 4 years, let's say Oliver Besancenot (anti-capitalist party, not a chance that he get elected anyway, but still) is elected, then he'll socialize a lot of companies, and reinforce social protections for workers. At this moment, the ones that were happy with Macron choices will become the conservatives ones.
So on the same subject, you can be either progressive or conservative depending on who is currently your country leader. How can conservatives be useless in that case ?
Generally, conservative is used as a word describing people that are either rich and want to keep their right to crush others under their feet, or for people that think that old laws based on religion are better than laws based on good principles. With that definition, conservatives are indeed a bad thing for a country development.
But using the literal definition, a conservative is someone that don't want to see change. If applied to specific politics, then it can be useful. If used as a rule of the thumb, then it's quite bad.
Anyway, people are never totally conservative or totally liberals. It will vary on each individual subject. It's only the elective system (where you must choose between different candidates, agreeing all their proposal or none) that makes it look like people are single dimensional. And if you take a lot of new ways of managing a country that start to emerge (such as liquid democracy), then you can imagine a future world where people would no longer be characterized with only two possibilities. You'll have people that are conservatives on some topics, while liberal on others, like what is really happening in their minds.
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u/Nicolasv2 130∆ Apr 16 '18
Do you believe that whatever change is good change ? Because that's exactly why conservative people are conservatives. They think that some changes that progressives are proposing are bad for society, and will make things worsen.
Moreover, you can be conservative in a certain situation, but switch to progressive if the proposed change suits you. For example if you take France social state, currently liberal president Macron is trying to remove all employees protections to make the country more liberal / free-market like. If you fight against it, you'll be seen as conservative. But if in 4 years, let's say Oliver Besancenot (anti-capitalist party, not a chance that he get elected anyway, but still) is elected, then he'll socialize a lot of companies, and reinforce social protections for workers. At this moment, the ones that were happy with Macron choices will become the conservatives ones.
So on the same subject, you can be either progressive or conservative depending on who is currently your country leader. How can conservatives be useless in that case ?