I agree that individuals tend to have idiosyncratic reasons for doing what they do. In the conservative's case, though, those reasons are rationalizations or distractions because the conservative ideology is anachronistic in the modern era. Thus, in a long series I wrote on conservatism, I hypothesize that we can safely ignore every one of the conservative's stated reasons for her social and economic policies, and focus like a laser on the systematic effects of those policies, to determine what conservatives unconsciously believe, this being authoritarian social Darwinism.