The problem with this conservative political philosophy is that it will acknowledge there were injustices in the past, but not anymore. But it can never answer the question, if the system is fair now, when did it become fair? Was it after slavery was repealed, after Jim Crow, after the trusts were busted, after the Glass-Steagall act, after women got the vote, after the civil rights act, the ACA? At each of those intervals in history, that same political philosophy was saying "the system is already fair". You think any right minded person can look at the system we have today and say it's fair?? Give me a break!!
But that's not what conservatism is.
Conservatism stems from the realization of two principles: First, the intelligence and problem solving ability of all the people who have ever lived is greater than all of the people currently alive.
Second, while traditional ways of doing things are often fraught with problems of their own, often some really horrible ones, the "solutions" to these problems can often be worse than the problems themselves due to the law of unintended consequences.
Really that's the gist of it, anyone who believes those two things is a conservative whether they realize it or not.
A conservative does not so much radically cling to a status quo because status quo is sancrosanct, rather a conversative believes that each decision has to be examined in light of the status quo, a kind of political skepticism for lack of a better way to put it.
Rather, a conservative is looking for a robust, overwhelming argument that changes are justified and well reasoned and demonstrably better than the current status.
This is very difficult to achieve because all the consequences of an action have to be reasoned out to produce gain, and Sturgeon's Law dictates that most proposed changes will not pass such a test.
If there's ever an impasse, the wiser thing to do is maintain, because we at least know that our society/species has survived that long.
And just because an idea's time hasn't come in the present doesn't mean it can't come in the future.
There are many examples where if conservative thinking had won out, negative consequences would have been prevented. The thing is, we may not necessarily LIKE all of the downsides of traditional ways of doing things, but those methods are robust. People survive and even prosper despite the inefficiencies or injustices.
What's more, just from an engineering and optimization perspective, the inputs and outputs of a government could never be exhaustively detailed and analyzed, at least not objectively. By veering toward conservation, we can at least gain a better if flawed understanding of what does and doesn't work, versus indulging in the moment to run ahead with a change for the sake of making a change we really don't understand the impacts of yet.
Ignoring the priciple of conservatism is like continually feeding random inputs to a black box device, more or less. You might get lucky sometimes but it's a wasteful approach overall. It's better to proceed methodically, carefully and intelligently because you are playing with forces of such magnitude.
Even if the status quo has some faults, it is often better to know what the faults are than trade them for unknown faults. To think any given proposed change will somehow solve the faults without introducing new ones that are even worse without a very robust and thorough assessment to back that up (an assessment that realistically often can't be performed) is foolhardy.
When you tend toward conservation, what you get is admittedly a limited government that can't really solve all the problems it needs to, but it will tend to solve the problems it can more robustly.
Such a government will tend towards Pareto optimal status, so at least there's some assurance that we have something approximating the best possible government. Note that the best possible government may well be quite terrible and rife with many problems.
Interestingly, a liberal is actually not the opposite of any of this as some seem to think, most Americans are conservative and liberal simultaenously but the words are so muddled any more they don't even realize it.