Some of the most vitriolic arguments boil down to a disagreement about definitions. Here it is particularly fraught.
The OP asks about Conservative philosophy. That’s an easier topic than conservationism in practice. Let me offer some definitions.
Liberals are empirically oriented reformists. Socialists are more concerned about justice and less about empirical observation, which puts them to the left. Communism is defined by a particular set of policies, most notably authoritarianism and state ownership of big companies at the very least.
Conservatives grant the need for change, but prefer to be careful and slow about it. Reactionaries are defined by their opposition to Liberalism: they react by accusing Liberals of being Socialists (sometimes Communists) and accusing Conservatives of being RINOs.
Reactionaries self-identify as conservatives. Conservatives self-identify as moderates.
Liberals self-identify as liberals or sometimes progressives. Socialists self-identify as socialists or sometimes progressives. Communists self-identify as communists.
Got all that? There’s a distinction between Conservativism as a coherent philosophy, and conservatism as a sociological phenomenon. Since I’m an empirically oriented liberal, I usually use a sociological perspective: conservatives are what conservatives do. And what they do is engage in Reactionary politics.
Is there a way of creating a coherent philosophy of Reactionary politics? Sure. And it’s mostly bunk, because Reactionaries are liars or bad faith actors at best. They are the very last people you would ask if you want to understand conservatism or the hard right. After all, they casually tossed away decades of allegedly core beliefs over a matter of months in 2016. How is that possible? The question answers itself: the sort of people who toss out core beliefs overnight are people who didn’t have those core beliefs to begin with. It Was All a Lie.
Capitalization in this post was intentional: capital letters indicated philosophy while small letters implied sociological observation of self-identified respondents.