The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.
Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.
Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.
And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".
In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.
You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.
(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)
The US seems to be combining the worst of both ideologies. I can't imagine what happens next.
Yeah, that actually is an inability to process reality. Stuff changes, and things have never been stable or orderly.
Basically, conservatives got increasingly angry (because things inevitably do change), so they decided to give up on conservatism and flip the table instead. One intellectual upstream of Trumpism is the writings of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), who laid out how mere conservatism wasn't enough because "Cthulhu swims left" still, and coined his philosophy "reactionary". This also ties into one of the commonly-described dynamics of fascism - invoking an idea of some imagined idyllic past, as a reason that the current society needs to be attacked and destroyed.
I had never voted for a major party candidate in a national election until Biden 2020 and Harris 2024. I consider those solidly actually-conservative votes, and partially attribute them to my getting older and more actually-conservative.
We're going to find out if that is true or not.
Look at Germany: 16 years of austerity policy have left our infrastructure so thoroughly compromised it literally falls apart - we were damn lucky that that bridge collapse in Dresden end of last year didn't kill anyone!
And even in the US you see it with every presidential change: Democrat governments cut services and expenditures because the last Republican cut taxes for the wealthy, the frustration leads to people vote for Republicans who introduce yet another round of billionaire tax cuts and blow up the government debt by untold billions of dollars, rinse and repeat.
I grew up [second hand] listening to a lot of this, and as I came of age I could never understood why there was so much cynical condemnation of the system but yet the cognitive dissonance to keep voting for more of the system. But I guess farming this dissonant frustration was just the whole point. Another way of looking at it is that Trumpism is this populist monster escaping, devouring the Party traditionalists, and leaving Republicans with nothing but Trump.
In some sense I think that is large part of what's fueling the fascist energy is the fact that Trump is not a [traditional] Republican, a conservative, a moral person, a competent businessman, etc. So throwing your support behind him is already buying into a Big Lie where up is down, there are no values or morals, just purely allegiance to what Dear Leader has declared is true. That none of Trump's policy positions make sense is a feature for keeping that support in line - independent thinkers who would point out the contradictions are ostracized and othered. Essentially the worst social dynamics of "woke" most everyone was wary of, but we had/have forgotten how much worse they can be when power is wielded autocratically rather than bureaucratically.