What Does "Conservative" Mean?

[ICantSpellDawg]

No, wrong, if they want to keep the status quo they're conservatives, not reactionaries.

Reactionaries would want whatever you had before the status quo.
Conservatives want to keep the status quo.
And progressives want to move on beyond the status quo.

That should be the terminology and I think that's what the opening post was aiming at, that many use the terms completely wrong or associate certain political aims with them when in reality the terms don't have anything to do with any aims because they are completely relative to the status quo.

It's also save to say that it's usually relative to the topic, you can be conservative in this regard and progressive in another, as a whole it would then be best to describe you as a human being or if you want, perhaps as the prevalent notion, like conservative when on 80% of the political topics you have a conservative stance, butt you can still be progressive or reactionary about this or that, although that should be self-explanatory.

Noble sentiment, but it still doesn't solve the problem of "what should we call an individual?". There is no single definition that would apply to an individual and any attempt is rather futile.

What are socialists? Progressives, even though they seek to restore old concepts and ways of governance? Even if they would modify tried and failed government to work, how is that really different from conservative who want the old modified to last as well?

[Husar]

That's not accurate though--you can't say progressives want to move beyond the status quo, the just want to change it in a way that it hasn't been changed before.

Well, if you change it it's not like the status quo anymore.

It's completely pointless to try to describe someone as any of the three by your definitions anyway--I challenge you to find anyone who fits that description for every political issue.

You must have missed the next part of my post.

Noble sentiment, but it still doesn't solve the problem of "what should we call an individual?". There is no single definition that would apply to an individual and any attempt is rather futile.

I tried to say that in my post, you have to come to a conclusion or, quite simply, put different tags on your drawers before putting people into them.

What are socialists? Progressives, even though they seek to restore old concepts and ways of governance? Even if they would modify tried and failed government to work, how is that really different from conservative who want the old modified to last as well?

socialists are usually socialists, whether they are progressive, conservative or reactionary depends entirely on the history and the status quo of the state they live in. They can very well be reactionary.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Labels are important because they help us to understand general ideological concepts, but they don't explain individual ideology. I've never met a true "Conservative", "Socialist" or a "Capitalist" unless they were morons who could only read information, never synthesize it.