Conservatives are often called the “brakes on the runaway Progressive train.” They slow down the process of degeneracy caused by Cultural Marxism, but don’t do much to repair it, or reverse the process.
Usually, “conservatives” regard whatever the norms of their youth were as “traditional.” When “dating” (premarital sex in monogamous relationships) became popular in the 1920s, it was considered degenerate compared to the “traditional” practice of Courtship. But, by the 1950s, “dating” (serial monogamy, although with marriage the assumed destination) was the norm. Today, people who grew up with “dating” in the 1950s and 1960s now consider that to be “traditional” or “conservative,” while Courtship is alien and forgotten. In the 1960s, cohabitation before marriage (“shacking up”) was considered degenerate. By the 1990s, when I was young, this had become the norm, although by the 1990s “serial monogamy” did not have the assumption of concluding in marriage, but was more often conceived as a stable state in itself. Hookup culture was spreading but had not become dominant. Today, a monogamous cohabiting young couple is considered to be fairly “traditional,” and on a likely path to formalizing what has effectively already become a marriage. It is getting a little hard today to even imagine a couple that would take the leap to marriage without cohabiting first. Cohabiting is not very compatible with hookups, long-term Friends With Benefits arrangements or polyamory, which is considered degenerate today but is on the now-well-worn path toward normalization.
Thus, the whole process has been one long slide of continuous degeneracy from the original model of Courtship, which proved to be stable and productive for centuries. Today, we can look back on this and say that it does not make much sense to try to recreate the norms of our youth (for me, serial monogamy or “dating” leading to cohabitation), as that was just a transient period in a long path of decay, which has no inherent advantages or evidence of long-term sustainability.
So, we are left with studying patterns that have not existed for about a century. There is nothing within living memory worth “conserving.” We have to build anew, from fresh materials.
Cornerstone 