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This article is from the Conservatism FAQ, by Jim Kalb kalb@aya.yale.edu with numerous contributions by others.

Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show?

Experience suggests otherwise. Slavery disappeared in Western and
Central Europe long ago without need for self-conscious attempts at
social reconstruction. It lasted much longer in the new and less
conservative societies Europeans founded in America.

While conservatism as such doesn't guarantee there will be no
oppression, neither do attempts at autonomous rational thought. It
has been under radical and not conservative regimes that brutal
forced labor and other gross forms of oppression have made a comeback
in recent times. That is no paradox. Radicalism is far more
compatible than conservatism with tyrannical institutions because by
emphasizing theory and downplaying stable consensus it destroys
reciprocity and mutual accommodation between rulers and ruled.

Conservatism arose not from a desire to freeze everything exactly as
it is, but from recognition of the necessity of continuity, the
difficulty of forcing society into a preconceived pattern, and the
importance of things, such as mutual personal obligation and
standards of right and wrong not reducible to power and desire, for
which ideologies of the Left have trouble finding a place. Those
recognitions make conservatives more reliable opponents of tyranny
than progressives.

Conservatism recognizes that moral habits evolve with experience and
changing circumstances, and social arrangements that come to be too
much at odds with the moral feelings of a people change or disappear.
It's not self-contained; recognition of existing practice as a
standard does not mean denial that there is any other standard. It
recognizes that there can be improvements as well as corruptions, and
that there are rational and transcendent standards as well as those
that exist as part of the institutions of particular peoples.