I understand the apparent linguistic associations of "conservative" with "conserve"
But, I am not sure that in the political domain that the association is or was ever significantly meaningful.
If you or anyone else has a link or reference to an explanation of the "frugal roots" of political conservatism that would be very interesting. It would certainly historically bound the period in which the shift in meaning took place.
If one employs "conserve" as the underlying verb association with "conservative" you might expect the following:
conservatives would conserve money---i.e. be frugal, but they aren't, unless conserving means building enormous collections of wealth. And the modest home of the oracle of Omaha not withstanding, the wealthy spend...often quite extravagantly and decadently.
You might also expect that conservatives would want to protect the environment from exploitation or pollution, which political conservatives actually don't want to do...,
you might expect that conservatives would want to conserve endangered and threatened species, but political conservatives don't really have much interest there.
Curiously "liberal" has similar rather confounding meanings when you move it from inside to outside the political realm.
Liberal comes from the same root as liberty and you might think that 'liberals' in general promote freedom. But in terms of liberal and neo-liberal economics, left-wing type liberals DO NOT want unfettered freedom for the robber barons. It's the conservatives, and the democrats who love conservatives, who push for neo-liberal economics and freedom from the restrictions of "profit robbing" regulations that liberals put forward to 'conserve' the interests of society as a whole.
Sometimes the words seem very confusing.
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