As usual, F. A. Hayek was way out in front on this. In 1960, as an addendum to his book, The Constitution of Liberty, he penned an essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative” (full text at link) which explained why champions of individual liberty and property (including self-ownership and all that derives from it) cannot blindly embrace a philosophy of “standing athwart history, yelling Stop”.
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is need for a “brake on the vehicle of progress,” I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.
I, like Hayek, am not a conservative, but one thing I wish to conserve is the meaning of words, and just as I oppose furriners renaming and changing the spelling of their quaint backwaters to make them more “authentic” (for example, “Mumbai”, “Kyiv”, and however they’re spelling The Turkey this week). So, I regret the loss of so many words to the slaver blob, including “liberal”, which is how Hayek described himself.
I describe myself as a “flaming libertarian”. By that, I mean that I believe that individual liberty is supreme over the state and collective, and that the ultimate human right is to be left alone to do whatever you wish as long as it does not directly harm another.
What would be my idea of an ideal society? Well, ideals are not something we can achieve in this fallen world, but the U.S. between 1781 and 1912 would have been good enough, notwithstanding the constitutional coup in 1789 and the contretemps in the first half of the 1860s. The late L. Neil Smith once said he’d be happy to live in a society founded on the Bill of Rights, with each of the Top Ten amended to append the phrase, “and this time we really mean it.”