Rereading a book of Roger Scruton’s — called simply Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition — I came across this definition which is both sturdy but also shows its own date:
Modern conservatism began as a defence of tradition against the calls for popular sovereignty; it became an appeal on behalf of religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress, before joining forces with the classical liberals in the fight against socialism. In its most recent attempt to define itself it has become the champion of Western civilisation against its enemies, and against two of those enemies in particular: political correctness (notably its constraints on freedom of expression and its emphasis in everything on Western guilt) and religious extremism, especially the militant Islamism promoted by the Wahhabi–Salafi sects. In all these transformations something has remained the same, namely the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created, and the determination to hold on to those good things in the face of politically engineered change.
Political correctness was before “Woke 1.0” perhaps a kind of proto-woke. But the emphasis on Western guilt occasionally gives way to a vanguardist attitude, which recruits the patriotic sentiment, but casts America or the French Republic or whichever nation in the role of progressive champion. That was the attitude in the early Obama years, and the kind of background worldview of Hamilton. My guess is that a post-Trump left will dwell, for some time, on the principle of negation.