Conservatism does not take any single political ideal, value or alleged 'natural right' to be supreme and to override all the others, although it accords a certain primacy to security, whose preservation it regards as the main task of government.
It does not concern itself with liberty in general or liberty in the abstract. But it does uphold traditional, customary, established liberties. It is opposed to the according of absolute power to government and therefore endorses the preservation of a large area for the private activities of individuals and of the non-governmental associations or institutions in which they are involved. It is unimpressed with the credentials as lovers of liberty of those professed liberals who wish to prevent buying a drink from anyone prepared to sell you one, smoking in public places or the reading by children of Little Black Sambo.
Conservatism does not identify equality with justice and, in view of the massive and massively varied differences between people, does not admit any initial presumption in favour of equality of condition. Justice, for the conservative, is, in the first instance, procedural, the impartial application of the law. Substantively, justice is a matter of guaranteeing the enjoyment of customary and established rights. It may often be reasonable and proper to extend the enjoyment of certain rights from some people to others, but that is not to say that such extensions are requirements of justice.
Democracy, as embodying a particular form of equality, is thus not seen as a good in itself. But representative parliamentary institutions, continuously developed in parallel with the political maturity of the population, is, in advanced Western societies, an historically established mode of proceeding and, therefore, worthy of preservation. That does not make it a universal political panacea, as the melancholy history of almost universal lip-service to it makes clear.
(Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," chap. 9 in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993], 244-68, at 260)
