Interesting Answers. Most of them unsupported or substantially wrong. Conservative is a reaction to the status quo. The status quo in america is classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is the founding mythology of our country. This mythology contains the classical liberal, european aristocratic egalitarian view of man that we associate with the Protestant Ethic. The protestant ethical sensibilities are what ‘conservatives’ are ‘conservative’ about.
The reason people become more conservative as they get older is that they have accumulated greater knowledge about the behavior of individuals in the real world. Young people have experience with the ethic of the family and give undue weight to the consensus bias. The market is the mature view of man, wherein we have dissimilar interests and goals and we can pursue those goals independently by cooperating on means within the market. The family is the childlike view of mankind. It is naturally communal and communistic. It is so because a family has similar interests, similar means, and similar abilities.
Single women and single mothers vote more heavily left than any other demographic group. This changes if they stay married, at which point they skew conservative. If it were not for women voters, and specifically single women voters, we would never have had a liberal president, and it’s unlikely we would ever have had a liberal government. FOr this reason, women are responsible for the left shift in america. And the increase in single women and single mothers is the result of the feminist attack on the nuclear family as an economic institution. Single women revert to their instinctual reproductive strategy: to bear children but to place responsibility for supporting them on the tribe. The family is the smallest tribe possible. When the family is not present, women still pursue their reproductive strategy, and vote to place responsibility on the state (the tribe) for services.
As we get older we understand the scarcity of good and services, and we understand the nature of human beings as more selfish and less communal. The market system and the family compensate for these selfish properties of human being and create community by controlling the selfish behavior of human beings.
That is why people become more conservative as they get older.
https://www.quora.com/What-causes-people-to-become-more-conservative-over-time