Maybe that's a question: what do you all see as the issues that absolutely define American Conservatism?
Few folks are wholly conservative or liberal. Most orient one way or another, but as you point out values like empathy and compassion are not ideological.
Conservatives are oriented toward individual liberty and the encouragement of economic initiative in the context of free markets, meaning they favor equality of opportunity, not necessarily of result. Liberals are informed of Rawlesian notions of the role of government, and favor taxation of the community to fund a safety net.
This broad distinction between conservative and liberal is complicated by the presence, on both the right and the left, of idiosyncratic obsessions that clash with the libertarian instincts of conservatives and the Rawlesian instincts of liberals. On the right it is social conservatism, urging a role for intrusive government in the support of Biblical morality, and on the left it is identity politics, which is amoral cynicism that undercuts the credibility of its communitarian impulse.
