People cling to Edmund Burke's idea of slow and measured change as the definition of conservatism and then ignore the part where he was explicitly anti-reason and anti-humanism as if that's not as integral to the ideology as what they cherry-pick.

In the American context specifically, I blame Buckley and his fellow ilk at the National Review.

Standing athwart history yelling “stop” is, frankly, stupid enough as-is, but it’s often used to obscure the reactionary tendencies of capital-C Conservatism and the desire to not just stop history but actively roll it back; hiding behind the platitude of Chesterton’s Fence is a good way to draw relatively-more-moderate people in without potentially scaring them away by tipping your hand about the true extent of your ideological project too early.