There is, in fact, an enormous difference between conservatism as classical social philosophy and conservatism as modern political practice. Major problem for conservatism stands in the question – what do we basically want to “conserve” and where we want to be with our conservation? Do we want to conserve what we are having in the modern world or modern socialism with enormous income redistributions or we rather want to conserve a particular type of society in historical retrospective of the times when conservatism as a social philosophy was born? Those, of course, are two completely different types of society. If conservatism wants to conserve modern socialism, it will loose a power battle all the time, because it embarks on the socialist field. In fact, it has already lost this battle absolutely as a political stream, not may be yet as a social philosophy. Of course, conservatism originally emerged as an ideology of protection of the monarchy and therefore, directly or indirectly, also of the state domination in society and of income redistribution in favor of the Crown. From this point of view, it is sufficiently close to pro-etatist ideologies and it still embraces atavisms of such political vision today. On the other hand, advocacy of British monarchy of 17th-18th century is very far from advocacy of German state under national-socialism or of Russian state under communism. Besides, conservatism has gained its full-fledged configuration and momentum already in 18th-19th centuries under the domination of classical liberal ideas and from this angle it is much close to the latter. Conservatism of today faces a tough choice – either it turns socialist (what it has already done as political current) or it joins in with classical liberalism or with libertarianism (to which it is leaning as social philosophy and to which both its theoreticians and practitioners are mostly inclined) as there is no any third choice available – either you conserve modern socialism or you try to return to a real capitalism of laissez-faire and of classical liberalism.  

For the time being there are several fundamental reasons for a difference between conservatism and libertarianism as between political currents:

1. Conservatism is closely linked with modern days political realities or with the political process and have to take into account voters’ satisfaction. It cannot escape a strong political pressure towards enormous property (income) redistributions inherent to representative democracy and is simply trying to channel these resources in closer correspondence with superficial and seemingly conservative principles and values. Conservative parties will simply loose all their political positions, all votes and all elections if they would opt for diminishing property (income) redistributions. Libertarianism so far is politically weak and can allow itself to lean closer to philosophical or even idealistic vision

2. Weak position of libertarian parties is not allowing libertarian adherents to build a successful political career, re-routing ambitious supporters towards more “profitable” political parties

3. Misunderstanding of a simple fact that realization of all real true conservative values is impossible through their coercive enforcement. This basically relates to all social values, but to conservative ones in particular. We have to remember that all conservative values have emerged when the State, State revenues and State interference in economy and society were close to zero and domination of private property was absolute. And this is basically what we have to “conserve”. No conservative values can survive enormous social parasitism associated with modern property (income) redistributions; all-embracing lawful corruption; extraordinary state property, state revenues and state domination characteristic for any modern society; permanently diminishing importance of the hard work and constantly rising importance of personal connections; etc.

Hardly, there is any fundamental or even any single difference between libertarianism and conservatism as between social philosophies, i.e. difference based on their vision of the nature of societal and property relations. The difference is purely artificial – based on seduction of conservatism by the necessity to survive as a political current.

Modern conservative and liberal parties are having nothing to do with conservatism and liberalism as with traditional or classical social philosophies – there is very little, almost negligible difference between them and between socialist parties  (which is absolutely straightforward since they cannot propose anything else except for the very same coercive socialist income redistributions). Both political conservatism and political liberalism simply sold themselves in exchange for material benefits of these parties’ leaders. All the so called “conservative” and so called “liberal” policies are built on the vast coercion coming from perverse levels of property (income) redistributions in our society, which are leading to a permanent acceleration of the state domination and to a massive downgrading of personal freedom.

In the modern world there are no any conservative or any liberal parties left – the only thing left are socialist parties of different coloring.