Even if those Democrats were residing in the western territories moved there from the South where it was their traditional value. It may have been new to those territories, but it was not new to them, that’s what counts. If a conservative moves somewhere where his traditional values are not honored, he may still try to promote those values. In doing so, he is acting like a conservative.
Right, two things, firstly that you are wanting to look at people supporting slavery in the western territories as exclusively migrants from the south. That is you are forcing history into a little box and only considering reality as the little box you have built. What about the people who don’t fit into your self declared box? What about Democrats from the north who were a minority in a Republican dominated culture of freedom? What about people who were of the western territories accepting different philosophies in accordance with their own morals and interest? No they were all migrants from the south wanting to ‘conserve’ their values. (God help us).
So people in the 1960’s fighting against the Vietnam war were really conservatives because they came out of a university system where their traditional culture at the university was anti - war. Do you see how this is really self serving rubbish?
Lets agree with your self declared little box that all people in the western territories were migrants from the south bringing 'their traditional culture with them. We come to the second point.
What you have then (given your definitions) is a fight between two conservative groups. One wanting to preserve their values of slavery and one wanting to preserve their values of freedom. Yet you only want to call one of them conservative because you have the bias against the term conservative. You are back to having to admit your labels make no distinction. You have the Republican conservatives fighting slavery with respect to their traditional culture and the Democrat conservatives fighting for slavery in accordance with their traditional values.
It makes little sense to try and define people by change and resistance to change.One obvious objection is that if change is successful suddenly the support of these previous progressive values quickly become support for conservatism because they are the new values.
Hitler wanted to completely throw out German Christian culture and introduce his third Reich. Similar to other self declared socialists of Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao etc who wanted to throw out their traditional countries values and bring in their new socialist utopian values.
They were all progressives then?
Yet in those countries where the socialist madness lasted for a a few decades suddenly they become conservatives because they were successful in moving their Progressive culture to the centre of society. where it became the new values.
Your definitions make no sense and the twisting of logic and history is only so that you can justify in your head that the philosophy actually heroically fighting against slavery was really the philosophy defending it.
I’m sorry Leaf, that is literally insane.