At the heart of the debate between conservatives and liberals is the question of evil. Both conservatives and liberals may look around and recognize that much of the world is not as it ideally should be but they will disagree as to why this is the case. For a conservative, the source of evil lies in human beings themselves. The liberal will see the source of evil within society.
The conservative view can best be seen in the thought of Augustine of Hippo, who saw even infants as sinners ruled by self-love. This flaw only becomes even more manifest in older children when they come to suspect that they are not what they should be but, rather than improve themselves, they come to actively hate the good. For example, the child hates learning Greek in school, which requires effort and discipline. His teachers are not content to leave him in his comforting idleness but desire the child's good. Therefore, the child hates them along with anyone else who might attempt to direct him onto a good path. Seeking refuge from the good with its demands, the child eventually comes to actively embrace evil. For example, stealing pears and throwing them away because he knows it is wrong.
Self-love is so dangerous because it never goes away even when a person honestly tries to be better. The adult who decides to finally focus on his studies and earn a degree will find himself pursuing even greater depravities like becoming an honored teacher of philosophy. With his mastery of being able to talk about ethics, he will finally become truly impervious to anyone questioning his complete lack of virtue.
In the world of Augustinian psychology, there are essentially two kinds of people, the tragically flawed and the satanically evil. There are the people who try to do what they intellectually know is the right thing even though, in the long run, they are doomed to fail. The other kind of person clings to their claim of righteousness by pretending that their self-love is actually a virtue. Such people are satanic in the sense that they do evil not out of some venial weakness of character but because they actually believe that evil is the true good.
The solution for the conservative, even if it is a highly imperfect one, is to keep the individual, with his self-love, in check through social organizations. This includes the brute force of the law but more importantly the family and organized religion, which inculcate a person with a moral code and a conscience. This makes it possible for a person to not constantly pursue their self-love even when no one is around and there is no fear of punishment.
This notion of self-love as an inescapable fact of human psychology can also be seen in thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. There is the hope that, under the right system, self-love can be harnessed for the public benefit. That being said, the starting assumption is that there is no way to remove self-love and create truly selfless people. Even the man who sacrifices his finger to save China will never escape the fact that losing that one finger will cause him greater suffering than the deaths of millions of strangers.
If Augustine was the paradigmatic conservative, Rousseau can be seen as the paradigmatic liberal. Rousseau rejected Original Sin. People are born fundamentally good because nature is inherently good. It is society that corrupts them. People left to their own devices would be noble savages without a thought of preferring themselves to others. It was only with the invention of private property that people learned to be greedy. Education made people arrogant by causing them to assume that the greater their book learning, the wiser they were when, in truth, greater book learning simply meant less connection to the truths of nature.
This question about the origin of evil becomes important when we consider the prospect revolution as a solution to the problem of evil. If you are an Augustinian, you are likely to recognize that human beings, with their self-love, will eventually corrupt any set of institutions they are allowed to control. As such, rather than reign in self-love, the institution will come to serve that self-love. Therefore, from time to time certain reforms must be made in order to allow those institutions to resume their job of keeping human self-love in check. What you are not going to consider is tearing institutions down in the hope that better ones will grow in their place. It would be the height of madness to assume that the same people who lack virtue even when they are kept in check will suddenly conquer their self-love once there is nothing left to stop them.
This is the critical context for understanding Edmund Burke. It may be one thing for British colonists in America to rebel against the Crown in the name of traditional English liberties with the local colony governments remaining largely the same. This is not the same thing as the French deciding to tear down centuries of monarchial tradition because of something some of them read in Rousseau.
The Rousseauians, like Maxmillian Robespierre, who carried out the French Revolution and eventually the Reign of Terror did not ask themselves who will guard against the revolutionaries. On the contrary, the revolutionary, by the mere fact of being a revolutionary, was assumed to be free from the taint of social corruption. If you believe that society corrupts then struggling against society should protect a person from corruption and make them virtuous. Hence, Robespierre thought of himself as incorruptible.
From the conservative perspective, the problem with any revolutionary movement comes out of this confidence that self-love can be circumvented. We are self-loving beings who seek to pretend, especially to ourselves, that we are not in order that we should be able to pursue our self-love without being held in check by society or even our own conscience. This renders revolutionaries morally perverse. You are going to take people who are already predisposed to self-love and being deceitful about it. You are then going to allow them to overthrow the very system that keeps their self-love in check, all while telling these revolutionaries that they are above self-love. Is it any wonder that the end results are monsters, who commit mass murder?
To be clear, Augustinian politics is no guard against corruption. This should come as no surprise as people remain tainted by self-love no matter if they become kings or even popes. On the contrary, the loftier the position the more likely they are to be seduced by their self-love, believing that their self-love is somehow really the selfless caring for humanity. That being said, Augustinian politics, because it does not believe in the perfectibility of human beings, is protected from sinking into the totalitarianism that is the logical endpoint of Rousseauian politics.
To bring this around to our modern political discourse, if you are an Augustinian, you may honestly believe that racism, as a type of tribalism that ultimately comes from self-love, is an evil that needs to be fought. One might even support laws banning discrimination. What you are not going to do is make any pretense that racism can be eradicated. You are certainly not going to engage in anything so reckless as tearing down social systems in a bid to eliminate "structural racism." You cannot change the reality that people have their thumbs on the moral scales in favor of people they perceive as being more like them. What you can do is to strengthen those social systems that will speak to people's sense of decency and keep self-love in check.
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