I've explicated how I think "conservativism" should be understood, in an earlier series of articles.

If you're saying that democratic critics of Lenin would be conservative relative to Lenin, that's of course a relativist concept. The idea would be that conservatives value social stability, and the more stable the better.

My view of conservatism, rather, takes into account the sweep of history. My account is big-picture, not fine-grained or relative just to local circumstances. Both Lenin and the democrats would be liberal rather than conservative in the big picture, relative to the premodern norms which prevailed practically everywhere for much of civilized history.

I don't think conservatives value stability in the abstract. They value that feature because of the type of society that's proven to be especially stable, namely the type that lets nature take the wheel, in which case we revert to the traditional kind of society, to patriarchy, slavery, authoritarian monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, social castes, dominance hierarchies, and tribal warfare. I think conservatives would be disingenuous if they were to say that they value social stability more than those features of the type of society that's historically been most stable, the primitive one that comes easily to us thanks to what we have in common with other primates like chimps.

If you value stability itself rather than the social conservative's favourite type of society, what's your argument against Orwell's 1984? The most stable society would be a dystopia in which the desire for change is bred out of the masses, so oppression becomes the accepted norm. That's pretty much what medievalism was, which is why modernity was so revolutionary.