"CONSERVATIVE" WILL DO NICELY:

"Conservatism" (David Warren, 11/16/03, Sunday Spectator)
Consider, if you will, what might be meant today by the term, "social conservative". It is applied to people who have strangely backward views about society; who are against things like killing unborn children, or publicly celebrating homosexuality. And they are categorized with persons in other cultures who advocate, e.g., stoning rape victims for adultery.

This can only mean, that a person who does not agree to the revolutionary overthrow of the social order is a "social conservative", beyond the pale. The term has, in other words, been twisted so far around, that it has come out right-way-up again, but on a wheel off its axle. For what was previously "normal" is now labelled "abnormal", and vice versa.

This fills me with hope. It suggests the possibility that with further twisting, other ideas may come out right again, albeit in a crazy, off-the-spindle sort of way.

In the meantime, I'm looking for another word to communicate the idea of "conservative", other than the word "conservative" which must inevitably communicate something else. I am playing with the word "traditionalist", which might, at the minimum, have the advantage of not being understood at all.

The idea itself is that all sound action within a society will come out of a development of that society's own traditions, rather than from a negation or inversion of them. For it is a secret of society and nature, that few things are improved by turning them upside-down. It is one of those things that just works, like gravity; always worth another try.
Or, as Michael Oakeshott put it:

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be . . . an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past.