Ok… if we’re looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.
Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.
These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others’. An example is France in the 18th century.
Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of “liberalism contains conservatism”. But that’s not the whole story.
Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that’s all we ask from an analytical framework, then that’s okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.
For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.
Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn’t settle for a reductionist view of history.
There’s a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.
In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there’s the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.
So that I can picture clearly what you’re saying, could you elaborate?