RE: Nostalgia For Traditional Conservatism
I think I can agree with you on most of this post. For the first time! In fact, I always say that I identify as a classical liberal, because that is the way I like to proceed politically, that is, without using the State to impose my way of seeing things, however, as far as my beliefs are concerned, I identify much more with the conservatism to which you refer, the problem is that currently taking a position like that, is practically being classified as the extreme right and as a reactionary.
On the other hand, I do not agree with this:
While traditional conservatism, in many ways, aligns far more with the radical left, finding common ground with socialism on many points, it is wary of revolutionary and radical proposals.
Traditional conservatism can not be in consonance with the radical left, they are two ways of conceiving the world completely different, the left "Marxist" does not even believe in morality, and thinks that everything that defends conservatism is its privileged position.
Let me clarify what I meant by that. So, classical conservatives were critical of capitalism (which they saw as a system of wage-slavery, with wealth concentrated at the top). Their critique resembled leftist critiques in many ways. The difference was the solution they proposed. The conservatives proposed widespread distribution of ownership (make private property the foundation of society and ensure nearly everyone has some)... Russell Kirk touches on this in "The Conservative Mind"...socialists, on the other hand, proposed replacing private property with public property. So, conservatism was a decentralist approach to markets, no centrally-planned economy but also no centrally-planned industry for the most part—opposed to both big business and big government. (Cf. Chesterton, Belloc, Kohr, Schumacher, Kirk, Weaver, Wendell Berry) This is, for the most part, the position that I've come to take recently, in opposition to the far-left position. So, my views at the moment are a mixture of center-right and center-left. (Very different from where I was coming from when you first stumbled across my Steemit posts.)
Anyways, that is what I meant, there is very real agreement between conservatives and socialists in their opposition to capitalism (which they both happen to define the same way).
As for Marxism, I think you have a very limited and skewed perspective on it. Marx did believe in morality. His theory of ethics was very similar to Larry Arnhart's. (Arnhart is a conservative writer, so obviously their views don't really align, but the general meta-ethical framework is basically identical.) Most marxists (democratic socialists, council communists, libertarian marxists) put ethics and morality at the forefront. That's why feminist ethics, queer liberation ethics, and such got labeled "cultural marxism." Leftists really do believe that inequality is morally repugnant. They're all about ethics and morality. They just have different views about what is right and what is wrong.