CONSERVATIVE IDEALS

If you read my posts, you may get the idea that I am against conservatism, but I do appreciate certain conservative ideals.  Here I will discuss three of these:

TAKING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Chief among these is taking personal responsibility, an ideal that is as difficult for conservatives as it is for liberals.  Think of Donald Trump who always seems to have a scapegoat.  Consider that ALL 12 step programs emphasize taking responsibility.  If you can't handle alcohol, it is your responsibility to stop.  Also you can't blame someone else for your drinking, you didn't have to do it.

DO NOT CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGING
Another good one is that you shouldn't change for the sake of changing.  You must think of the consequences.  I have a good example of this from my life.  I was all for the high-rise low-cost apartment complexes.  Give people a nice new home, and they will live up to it was the thought.  What I hadn't taken into account is that if you put a lot of failed people together, you don't get success, you get massive failure.  It sounds pretty obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't to me at the time.

I had abandoned my engineering training to analyze a situation and ask, "What can go wrong?"  The change might sound good on the surface but what are the unintended consequences.  Of course you can't always figure them out.  Note this is not to say that all change is bad as some do.

TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY
Then there is the tyranny of the majority.  This can be hard to figure out and some conservatives will apply it over generously.

An example here is background checks for all gun purchases that polls indicated were approved by more than 80% of the public.  But there were those who thought that this was tyranny of the majority for example in that who should have  to go through a background check to give a gun to your child?

Another example active now is giving children legal status who were brought to this country by illegal immigrant parents (DACA).  Again more than 80% of the public approves of this and even more than 50% feel they should be given a path to citizenship.  I have a hard time viewing this as the tyranny of the majority, but there are a lot of Republicans that seem to think so and that these people should be deported even though they were educated in the U.S. and speak American without an accent.  Many of these do not remember their native countries that are a foreign land to them.  There is the thinking that these people are taking American jobs away from citizens.