Is there anything good about being "conservative?"

This is badly incomplete. Conservatives defend the status quo because that’s how you defend the privilege of the elites. And they don’t just defend the status quo - they are invariably reactionary, seeking to turn back the clock to a prior state where those elites were even more powerful and entrenched. That’s why they do things like repeal Glass-Steagall - because the gilded age of the 1920s was even better for them than the guided age of the 1990s.

That is true. Swedish conservatives do not defend the status quo.

But isn’t that a reactionary, if they want to turn the time back?

Actually, that is the question, when does someone go from a conversative to a reactionary?

A reactionary is a conservative, although I suppose not all conservatives are reactionary (though its seeming more and more like the two are synonymous).

But I think that is something we on the left have trouble with. Neither the media, nor people in general do a good job differentiating between those on that are conservative and those that are reactionary, except in extreme case. It jumps people together, and creates a group that is pulled more to the right that it needs to be.

Thankful, the Alt right is helping, since conversates don’t want to be associated with them, and they tend to be reactionary, as well as Nazis.

By the way, I am a true Reactionary, because I want our tax rate, education costs and public spending levels to go back to the 50 and 60. 90% tax on the highest bracket! And bring back pensions. And unions!

Although, without the racism and misogyny.

All conservatives are reactionary. It’s inherent in the motivations for the ideology. Point to a conservative who doesn’t think things were better in the ‘old days’, so long as she/he gets to pick which old days.

I think that is false and that sort of argument will fail us as a nation.

Along the most traditional single axis political spectrum, which is somewhat simplistic, reactionaries are usually considered the extreme rightmost edge of the conservative side, just as radicals would be the extreme left of the liberal side. There’s no clear delineation where this transition takes place.

I would consider most of the paleo-conservatives that followed Pat Buchanan, as an example of reactionary ideology, and a lot of those folks have ended up in Trump’s camp.

Easy enough to prove false. Just name some prominent / public conservatives who aren’t reactionary.

Bill Clinton

If Bill Clinton is a conservative, then everyone is a conservative and the word means nothing at all.

He is pretty much in favor of smaller government and the free market. I think that makes him a conservative, rather than a moderate.

Clinton beat Dole by adopting the Republican platform. “Conservative” has gotten pretty damn crazy since then, but the Bill Clinton that got elected President was conservative in all but name. I mean, jeez, his welfare reform bill was solidly conservative except that he didn’t sell it with dog whistles to the right.

Thatcher. Cameron. Gove. Boles. Javid. Davidson.

In the US The Blue Dog democrats self-identify as “conservative democrats”

“Everyone is a conservative” is a pretty fair summary of US politics in the 90s as seen from the rest of the world. (Although by that point the house GOP at least was well on its way to wingnuttery)

Thatcher was the prototypical reactionary. She want the old days so bad she could taste them. Look at her platform and accomplishments: Anti-immigration (when it came to minorities), anti-taxation, anti-union, anti-public housing, anti-public education. She was trying to recreate the England of 1900. The rest of your list are all pale imitations of Thatcher, but not for want of desire to be her.

Before Clinton beat Dole, he beat Bush, by campaigning against the Reagan Revolution: For higher taxes on the wealthy, for abortion rights, for higher wages, for better economic conditions for workers and better benefits. Once elected, he signed the FMLA (which had been vetoed by Bush), reversed Reagan-era abortion restrictions, pushed the Family Leave Act through Congress, and raised taxes on the wealthy to address Reagan’s deficits. He even tried to usher in universal health care, but Congress stopped him. He signed HIPA in 1996.

Despite the Gingrich revolution of 1994, Bill Clinton expanded children’s health care with SCHIP, and successfully defended Medicare against cuts despite Gingrich’s tactic of shutting down the government.

The government actually grew in every year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. His budget surpluses were largely the result of 1) his tax increases, and 2) the improved economy.

Not much of a conservative.

This whole argument is semantic. It’s kind of why I prefer to use party identification rather than ideology. Democrats advocate a specific set of policies. Those policies are what is important. Ideology is important only insofar as it results in policy. Republican policy preferences are low taxes, de-regulation, and the removal of any obstruction to the conduct of (particularly corporate) business activities. That’s really it. I don’t think those policies are particularly “reactionary” or “conservative.” They serve an interest, and Republicans are willing to propose and pass quite radical legislation in service of that agenda. The problem that Republicans have is that those policies are not terribly popular; thus they need to form a coalition in order to effect policy democratically (and/or engage in various kinds of vote suppression.) Libertarians are natural allies of this policy agenda, but aren’t a huge constituency. Social conservatives are a large constituency, but are unnatural allies, but were alienated from the Democratic party during the racial and protest politics of the 1950s and '60s and more lately during the gay-rights politics of the 90s and 00s. Abortion was invented as a further wedge issue to bind social conservatives to the Republican agenda. So now Republican policy is an unholy amalgam of often-contradictory issues and Republican elites rely on propaganda to maintain their coalition. Propaganda dealers become pathologically cynical, and propaganda victims become unthinking hate-bots. Thus, modern Republicanism. “Conservative” is kind of a short-hand for that, but–as with “liberal”–is too fraught in some contexts to be all that useful, as when someone asks “Is there anything good about being conservative?”

To many people, conservative means preferring slow over rapid social change, effecting social change through democratic methods rather than edict, privileging the societal role of venerable cultural institutions, cautious fiscal policy focused on reducing deficits, a measured controlled-border stance on immigration, and a legislative strategy based on moral principles rather than pragmatic concerns. I don’t agree with all of those, but they’re perfectly reasonable and defensible positions. There’s plenty “good” there, and to the extent that those impulses act as a check on the more wild extremes of progressivism, they’re vital to a functioning democracy. The problem is that those conservatives aren’t in power, and really never have been. What we have to deal with is Republicans.

(edit: chagrined at my egregious grammar error, I changed “too” to “to” where warranted)

Yes, it’s a purely subjective term, and at this point (certainly in this thread), it’s merely used as a pejorative in order to be able to attack people instead of ideas. It’s similar to the way “Liberal” was used by the right wing in the past.

Real things are more complex than a simple right/left split, certainly more complex than a BINARY left/right split.

Intersectional Political Theory! Interest groups serve specific interests, and then form coalitions that invent ideologies to justify their particular Venn diagram of interests.

Aside from a general admonition against over-confidence in our ability to predict the consequences of new policies, I fail to see anything good in most of those stances. Why is slow social change a good thing? If protecting groups that are not part of mainstream culture is a primary concern of policy about social change, why should those protections wait for majority acceptance of the out group? The third point I could see as a potential good if it included things like Universities and Public Broadcasting, instead of primarily meaning religious institutions aligned within the appropriate religious group (i.e. Christian ones in America). Reducing deficits in itself isn’t a good idea, it is simply conflating the economics of a household with those of a country, and basically exists as a justification of other terrible policies like “starve the beast”. Strict immigration controls serve mainly as a way to preserve the place of whites in society, and “moral principles” sounds like a great thing to base legislation on, but is incredibly slippery and not solely the province of conservatives.

So, my conclusion is that what’s good about being conservative is being the restraining arm that keeps saying, “Consider the base rate! Is this a big enough sample size for that conclusion? What haven’t we considered? How do we know this policy does more good than harm? Etc.”