Conservatism and political adherence of the “subaltern classes” in everyday life

Abstract

Used in different ways by both liberals and those who claim to be “left-wing”, the word conservatism has served to create much more confusion than clarification. For example, its connection with the historical terrain that brought it to the fore during the period of the great bourgeois revolution in France is emptied, or, alternatively, it operates with reductionisms that seek to restrict the reference only to the existence of the capitalist mode of production. In this sense, it is ignored that everyday life, and not specifically the capitalist mode of production, is the terrain in which conservatism is expressed. It is also necessary to consider, and this is the direction of the proposed article, that conservatism, as a social practice, is not restricted to the dominant classes, without which it would be impossible to explain, for example, Jair Messias Bolsonaro's victory for president of the Republic , in Brazil. In this sense, the text builds its argument based on a hypothesis: conservative ideas span history, are rooted in the daily life of societies structured into social classes, and assume a specific configuration in each historical period.