That was not the argument you made; you made the argument that the mere act of advocating policy based on results was conservative.
You inferred that. I never said it. Basing your position on the results is pragmatism. To give an actual definition:
""pragmatism: an approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application."
Pragmatism exists in contrast to idealism, which seeks conformity to a particular ideal, regardless of which ideal that happens to be. Idealism wants to implement practices that matches its idea of what is good, even if sometimes it leads people into worse conditions by many metrics, it's still accepted in pursuit of the ideal. A fully pragmatic approach has no ideology, and is willing to accept whatever works, though I don't know if anyone could possibly be fully free from ideology, I'm certainly not.
There words progress and conservative have been used in politics for centuries, but were not the dominant forces they are now. It was not long after the the philosophy of pragmatism was fully formulated in the US that the Progressive Era came about, and that's not coincidence. Progressivism and conservatism are two halves of pragmatic politics. Conservatism sees the things that have been done leading to the results of the present and seeks to conserve those things which have allowed present prosperity. Progressivism seeks alternatives to current practices which may lead to preferable results, those society progresses slightly better each iteration. Every policy defended by conservatives was new at some point, implemented in progressive or even revolutionary ways. What's conservative now used to be progressive. Every progressive policy now that proves successful enough to justify long-term adoption will no longer be progressive in the future, as the established status quo will then be conservative to defend. Conservatism and progressivism are philosophically identical, they are both political pragmatism, with only the distinction in perspective looking forward or backward in time.
I did not say Silvanus is conservative based solely on basing positions on results. I said that Silvanus bases his positions on results in contrast to an idealist who does not. It is the last part of the paragraph that makes Silvanus conservative, that he will defend existing practices based on results. "People are doing these things currently, and it leads to these good results, so we should continue doing them" is the essence of conservatism. If a person were so deliberately blind that they would not acknowledge the good results of any existing practices, and focused only on the bad results, you could in theory have a person who considers results and is not conservative, but that person would be a moron.
But originally you were talking about 'conservative' as a descriptor for a /person/-- and that its appropriate and suitable to call the person conservative if the person in question has a single conservative thought process. Meaning that as a descriptor for a person, you could call anyone conservative, from Lenin to Reagan.
Here's what I want you to get from this: Reagan had very different positions from you, but you share a general philosophy. You do not share the philosophy with Lenin. If Lenin wanted to keep something around, it was not because he thought about its effects and determined whether it was beneficial or harmful. If Lenin wanted to keep something, it was because that thing matched his ideology. Lenin would not preserve something that conflicted with revolutionary communism, no matter how practical it would be to keep. That's kind of the whole idea of revolutionary communism, if we make only practical changes to our existing system, we will never reach communism, it requires a revolution.
It is proper to describe someone as conservative if they have any conservative thought processes, but you make a mistake thinking that everyone has some conservative thought processes. Many, many people do not care if an action leads to good results, they determine whether they like it based on ideology. Conserving something because it fits your ideology is not a conservative thought process. Even a staunch traditionalist trying to keep everything in the status quo may have no conservative reasoning leading them there, if their position is "I don't care if the status quo sucks and makes things suck, we're gonna keep doing things the same because that's how we've always done them". I don't think that person is rational, but people like that definitely exist, and are very philosophically different than those who value the status quo for its positive outcomes.
