I have an open mind about it and have seen it many times, but I struggle with the leaps of logic required to understand the one proposition of conservatism. On its face it is obviously unfair, and it's hard for me to see it as the obvious consequence of conservatism which is "heavily trust the past and move forward with caution".

Can you help me connect the two or at least help me understand the underlying proposition?

I don't agree with GP, but if you consider "what have worked in the past" to be those who have the upper hand when setting the rules, then conservatism is cementing the status quo and preventing everyone else from changing it. In a way, preserving "what works" turns into "preserving what works for us".

This is rather one-sided interpretation, but it definitely has its precedences in history and even in our times.

It's two different meanings for the word "conservatism". You're quoting the more traditional meaning (for example "environmental conservatism" or "fiscal conservatism") whereas Wilhoit is using it to name an (in his view) ancient and universal political philosophy that he believes subsumes all others.

(FWIW I think he's got the wrong word. He says "For millenia, conservatism had no name..." and then cites divine right of kings.)

Well, to be fair to Wilhoit, the divine right of kings was only asserted after the threat of other models of (conservative) government were asserted, to try to justify something that had previously never seemed to need justification.

Trust the past implies trusting those you know and grew up with and thus those most like you, as in your in-group. It also means you may overlook their mistakes and crimes because you may trust they're doing the right thing.

Moving forward with caution doesn't mean you absolutely don't trust others but they are the out-group, if we assume there are two groups here. Those others won't get the same benefit of the doubt as your in-group and thus any mistake they make will be magnified (in relative terms).

It helps to have more of the full quote to work with:

> For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

> As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

That is to say: the past is built around this one proposition. Moving forward "with caution" translates to "how can we move forward (solve some current problem) without jeopardizing this essential proposition?"

To be fair, it's not like we hide who the system's set up to serve. It's right there in the name. Capital - ism.

Managers and executives aren't capital. In fact their relationship with capital tends towards adversarial.

Middle management certainly aren't, that's true, but CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their income. It's true that preferential treatment for the C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent problem to capture more value personally for those with connections. A CEO can make choices that aren't necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch someone important's back or get them a personal favor of a similar sort elsewhere—see also: board members.

So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart.

I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence).

In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.

I look at this and ask - from this analysis, what distinguishes conservatism from feudalism?

You clearly do not know what feudalism actually is if you are asking that question.

Feudalism is about a structure of hierarchical allegiences. You swear fealty to your count who swears it to his duke, etc.

The conflation is basically a shibboleth for Marxists in the same way that creationists pluralize evidence as evidences, and holocaust deniers ask if a conclusively documented and damning event happened.