Primary distinction between conservative ideology/mindset/brain and … hell, even a lot of liberals, as well as other thought modes:

Preservation of social hierarchies is the prime directive.

Basically all of conservative thought derives from this, and its often so completely innate that it is not even consciously realized, or formulated.

The fish doesn’t realize it’s been swimming in water its whole life until it is removed from it sort of thing.

A conservative is likely to not like their particular boss, or perhaps even realize that bosses in general, or in some kind of limited category (likely a category that is foreign to their lived experience), are encouraged to be shitty, selected as bosses because they are shitty.

But its not capitalism, its crony capitalism, its a lack of law enforcement stopping crime.

Its not all bosses, its Wall Street execs, its Jewish Bankers, its that one no good old money family.

They will conclude that this unequal social power structure is inevitable, unavoidable, necessary for society to exist without collapsing into chaos, and thus the idea of power abusing bosses in general is good.

The dullard conservative hopes to become the boss simply for the material benefits and the ability to abuse others as they have been abused.

The ‘enlightened’ conservative learns some surface level pop or psuedo history or sociology or politics to justify their own position as ‘temporarily embarassed millionaire’ as well as their boss’s position, because ‘society would fall apart otherwise’.

IE, the bootlicker mentality.

Seriously, go find an actual conservative and don’t use any scary trigger words like socialism or capital or means of production or Marxism…

… and attempt to explain to them how… well democracy is good, right? Bosses often make arbitrary, stupid, incompetent decisions, right? Wouldn’t it be better if all the employees got together and voted every quarter on a company strategy, instead of just having it dictated to them? And then the current work hierarchy stays in place, but is directed toward executing the goals everyone agreed on?

What you’ll find is that actual conservatives, in this kind of conversation, will usually basically outright reject the concept of democracy within a workplace, because that would upset the existing, clearly defined power structures.

They’ll even tell you they don’t trust their own competence or the competence of other employees to make such decisions, despite usually having previously agreed that their boss is incompetent.

Conservatives often do not actually believe in democracy…they’re just kind of good at going through the motions of pretending they do, which they ironically only do to fit in with the perceived current status quo.

That’s why we’ve seen so many of them basically go full mask off fascist in the Trump era. Now they no longer have to pretend that democracy is all that important, as Trump managed to basically break it, while openly mocking it, which to conservatives is a huge relief: See? Might makes right, we can stop pretending otherwise now and just accept reality as it always has been.

It isn’t logical, it isn’t coherent, it doesn’t parse if you lay it out in symbolic logic.

But that doesn’t matter. The conservative, deep down, wants and believes in a rigid social hierarchy.

They really, really like the idea of everything fitting neatly into categorized boxes which do not change, never need to be updated, and which do not have exceptions.

That’s why they knee jerk hate LGBTQ.

That’s why they still cannot admit climate change is actually happening.

That’s why they basically cannot create art, why their ‘comedy’ punches down and is based on cliches and sterotypes, why everything they learned in high school 30 years ago is totally correct and does not need alteration or further expansion or context, that’s why the Bible is the unchanging, infallible word of God, etc.