Follow On

This is part of the thing about democracy, and the social contract - its a way of directing the energy for change, not by damming it, but through a system (elections, legislation, etc) that sort of smooths out the waves. It does slow it down some. It takes time to persuade people, and get the votes, and pass the legislation...and it's done out in the open, so people have time to adjust and adapt... So it doesn't (often) burst out in a flood.

This is also why the current situation is dmso dangerous. A coup attempt, a party that enables rather than condemns. They're trying to build a dam and force the flow to go in the direction they want, and don't seem to concerned with the rather predictable consequences of doing so.

'Conservative', at least according to the principles Russell Kirk laid out, recognized that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled.

It wasn't about stopping change, or trying to reverse it. It was about trying to reconcile it with custom, convention, and continuity.

That's why I've been saying that the modern Republican Party isn't conservative. 

Its not trying to reconcile change with our customs and conventions. It's trying to make changes that will allow them to dam the force Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Progression.

Ie. Radical Reactionaries rather than true conservativism.