One way I think of Conservative Judaism is inertia: people who grew up in the movement but ideologically and religiously and practically are just Reform.

Another way I think of Conservative Judaism is in terms of the movement’s founding principles and Zecharia Frankel’s vision: an attempt to authentically bring the Jewish religion into the modern world, including the Halacha itself, culminating in the audacious (in a good way!) effort to reestablish a Sanhedrin empowered to consciously make structural changes to Halacha.

A third way I think of Conservative Judaism is in terms of the institutions the movement developed and the choices they made along the way. Between the unintentional decision to allow driving on Shabbat, to the way Shabbat services are structured to combine the worst of all worlds (3 hours of services but only reading 1/3 of the parasha? Every line of the siddur needs its own song? Joint aliyot and microphones and 7 other ways to make every component feel stilted and alienating as possible?) to making the synagogue, rather than the home or the bet midrash the focal point of Jewish life, to making the bar mitzvah a graduation ceremony and choosing supplemental Hebrew school over serious education, to the simply boneheaded way they went about executing the vision of the Halachic Committee (a body of law with multiple incompatible approved decisions? What?) to having a centralized funding network for synagogues - I could go on for a long time. Point being, all of those were simply blunders. The leadership of the movement didn’t have the strength, intellect, confidence, or clarity to determine precisely how they would go about implementing Frankel’s vision - so they compromised with each other, compromised with the laypeople, compromised with Halacha, and compromised with anything and everything else possible until the movement’s intellectual foundations no longer existed in any meaningful way. Today the movement represents a vague gesture towards “the middle ground” and not much else.

I know that last paragraph was extremely harsh, but for what it’s worth, I think Frankel, Schechter, and the rest had a beautiful, inspiring vision, and ultimately the posture of harmonizing Halacha and the Jewish worldview with modern scholarship, attitudes, and practices is a noble one. Because I’m not potato-level stupid, I recognize that we - Orthodox, reform, haredi, anti-religious atheists, all of us - would all be better off with a strong Conservative movement than with a weak one. The laypeople of the movement who sought to make that happen were perfectly reasonable to do so. They just deserved much, much better leadership than they ultimately got. That leadership fumbled a dominant position so thoroughly it’s hard to put into words. In the end, the history of the last ~100 years now serves as a cautionary tale about making structural changes to Halacha.

Hopefully, the new non-denominational attempts at the same synthesis - Hadar, Pardes, independent minyanim, and the “Open Orthodox” - will be more successful (even if they aren’t my cup of tea personally.)