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Comment by stackbutterflow | Hacker News Reader

The definition of conservative is conserving the monarchy during the french revolution.

From the start it was and remain to this day an ideology for those currently in power to conserve their power.

Oh please, not a single person besides you thinks of "conserving the monarchy during the french revolution" when using the word "conservative" besides you.

If if was not clear my point is that it evolved with the current form of government of the time but never departed from the original goal of for those in power to conserve their power.

People in power who do not want to conserve their power are incredibly rare, regardless of their professed ideological orientation.

Not that rare at all, this describes most US presidents.

The democrat party doesn't seem to care about conserving its power.

While it is overly specific for modern use, it is actually much closer than what the prior poster suggested to the way the term has always been used as a political label and accurate as to its origin as one (more generally, it originally was protecting the power of the aristocracy and religious establishment against the encroachment of bourgeois liberalism; IIRC the liberal/conservative terminology was in use in regard to British politics even prior to the French Revolution, to which it was also applied; the French Revolution is where we get the Left/Right terminology that originally corresponded pretty directly to liberal/conservative though left and liberal have split a bit in more modern use, as the locus of elite power has moved, and liberalism has to a certain extent become associated with status-quo-ism related to that new locus of power), which has always been distinct from how "conservative" is used as anything other than a political label.

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