Where you're wrong is treating conserving as a binary, as though a conservative either wants to conserve everything or nothing and they all agree on the point of time where they want to conserve things.
That's a lazy liberal stereotype of a conservative. There's an equivalent stereotype that is very commonly cited by the other side: "a progressive wants to throw away everything and start from scratch without considering whether some things are worth keeping".
You recognize that statement as a false stereotype. If you don't recognize what you're saying as equally false then you haven't spent enough time around enough conservatives. You seem to have lived among them long enough to disdain them but never actually sought to understand them.
> conservative either wants to conserve everything or nothing
If they want to conserve some stuff but not others, they would be progressives. Because that's what progressives do. In fact, 99% of stuff is conserved with progressives because there's a lot of stuff. Like... a lot. Progressives target that 1% they feel needs change. The rest of human society? Stays.
It turns out people tend to disagree less than they think they do—kind of like we share 99% of our DNA with a chimp, a conservative agrees with a progressive on 99% of issues, both about the things that need to change and the things that need to stay.
We just don't talk about those because they're not controversial. When a conservative agrees something needs to be changed they're just stating the obvious. When they disagree, it's obviously because they're opposed to any change ever.
In actuality, a conservative is just someone who disagrees with the current batch of progressives in a particular place about a few specific things that the current progressives want to change in that moment of time. In nearly every case throughout history conservatives are on board with tens of thousands of other changes, there are just a few that spark more resistance for various reasons.
That's a lazy liberal stereotype of a conservative. There's an equivalent stereotype that is very commonly cited by the other side: "a progressive wants to throw away everything and start from scratch without considering whether some things are worth keeping".
You recognize that statement as a false stereotype. If you don't recognize what you're saying as equally false then you haven't spent enough time around enough conservatives. You seem to have lived among them long enough to disdain them but never actually sought to understand them.