One way to think of liberal, versus conservative, is in terms of the natural seasonal cycle of expansion and consolidation, in that liberalism tends to take a more expansive view on rights, power, cultures, etc, while conservative tends more toward the consolidation around what is established.
As Robert Frost said, "If you are not liberal when you are young, you have no heart and if you are not conservative when you are old, you have no head."
The irony here is the current establishment is based on half century old liberal ideas, that have, in their own way, become encrusted and thus the new form of establishment.
The deeper problem is our monist culture, where one side must be right, so the other side must be wrong, when in fact both sides are as necessary as youth and age.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgment.
Which goes to the foundations of Western culture, aka, monotheism.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as that was part of how they described multiculturalism. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years isolated in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments.
The Romans adopted and co-opted gnostic Christianity, for its monotheistic origins, as a way to validate the Empire and shed any reminders of the Republic. Consequently the default political model for the next 1500 years was monarchy. Divine right of kings. The Big Guy on top.
While gnostic Christianity had arose as a rebellion against the Greek Olympians, which had in its own time, rose from the tradition of year gods, the son born ih the spring, of the sky god and earth mother, but become "set in stone," with Zeus not giving up to Dionysius. Thus the origin of the Trinity.
That same tension between renewal and tradition, that is liberal and conservative.
When the West went back to more broad based systems, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics. Many versus The One.
A good book on the subject is, The Five Stages of Greek Religion, by Gilbert Murray;
