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You can fill a whole library with books answering different aspects of this question.
Conservatives are Yin and liberals are Yang. Two opposing forces that are actually complementary and interconnected. They rely upon each other to exist, in much the same way rival football teams may hate each other but at the same time rely on each other's existence to keep the sport from fading away (hard to play a game with only one team). In the same way, the United States and the Soviet Union, while ostensibly enemies, capitalized on each other's existence to force all of the other countries in the world to gravitate into their spheres of influence. As a result, both of them grew vastly more powerful than any of the other countries that had existed in human history.
One feature of conservatism almost regardless of culture or time period is that it implicitly accepts the hierarchy of relationships underwritten in social animal ethology, which is a complex way of saying that conservatives believe in alpha-beta relationships with guys like George W. Bush and Donald Trump being the alphas and all the poor/middle income blue collar conservative guys who vote for them being the betas. Pretty much the same as between fraternities and their leaders or between football jocks and their team captain. The leader and the captain get more benefits but the betas have the dubious honor of being better than the nerds outside of the football team/fraternity, who are usually liberals, homosexuals, academics, and other bookish types.
A persistent feature of liberalism is that it explicitly trivializes/challenges this hierarchy.
Pretty good boiling down to roots you did there. The OP posed a question, which while always good at generating a discussion answers frequently devolve into slogans/talking points and name calling.
I have strong disagreements with both liberal and conservative positions, at least as they are presented here in the U.S. And don't get me started on the "2 parties". It doesn't help that both sides have (with a few exceptions, mostly on the left) gone farther and farther out into their respective fields during my adult life. It would be easier if I could just swallow the dogma of one side or the other, but my head would explode.