I believe that because I've spent time studying the history of conservatism in modern times. Most people aren't conservative because they read Edmund Burke. People are conservative because there's been a large, concerted effort to make people conservative. I know that's a bold claim, but I think the historical evidence justifies that view.
One book that was highly influential in forming this view was the book "The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes" by Johnathan Rose. In this, he documents, well the intellectual life of the British working class, and contrasts them somewhat to the intellectual life of the British elite. The British working class were highly educated. People would pay children to read texts to them as they worked. They would read Marxist texts. They wrote and published their own newspapers. The elite classes were basically Philistines, by contrast, people make the mistake that since historically, educated->elite makes people think that elite must imply educated. But that's very much not true.
The point, though, is that this class of pretty well educated people basically universally formed collectivist ideas. They weren't Marxist, in fact were even opposed to Marxism, but valued their self worth and independence, and hated waged labor. The key idea is, when working people actually engage intellectually and politically, the force is basically always ""far"" left. And that's really the trend throughout history, and it persists today: the majority wants things much differently than they are.
But, the age of monarchism and aristocracy was ending. And the elites knew about these collectivist tides, they were occurring all over and the Soviets took over Russia. So they came up with a plan to save democracy: they would "win the battles for the minds of men", by creating concerted propaganda efforts to convince people of the right things. You can read the foundational text, "Propaganda", by Edward Bernays:
Of course, this was a key text in developing Nazi propaganda, and was a baseline text read by many American industrialists. This is the sort of thing the people with power and privilege read, and this is how they thought to organize.
So how did this take effect? It seems outlandish. But, there's actually a solid historical record explaining how this "invisible governance through propaganda" works. Remember, during the 1930's, labor won a bunch of power in the United States. I mean, that did lead to the greatest era of the middle class world wide, but it cut into profits and the wealthiest earned less. So, they wanted to fight it. Starting in the late 1940's and on, American elites began disseminating their views down through the ranks. The history of this is well-detailed in "Selling Free Enterprise" by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf takes over.
This book details basically the early parts of the rise of neoliberal/neoconservative economics and politics, and is very helpful in trying to understand the origins of modern conservatism. Wealthy elites targeted anything and anywhere they could to disseminate propaganda that was: anti-union, pro-individualist (as that's anti-collectivist), anti-civil rights apologia for business owners. Some vectors include: "donating" textbooks to schools that represented history in the way the wealthy elites preferred, writing religious tracts that explain how Capitalism begets good Christians and Protestant work ethic stuff and disseminating it through churches. Of course it was always framed as anti-communist stuff, but their intent is clear from some of the correspondences she reflects on: to crush any and all organized labor, to create larger profits for themselves. Stuff like that is why I don't attend church very much in America, even though I have no problem with religious beliefs. It's because churches more than any other institution have been hijacked and adapted to be megaphones for a sort of pro-capitalist, anti-collectivist world view. Honestly I can't do her book service here. She goes through a bunch of historical documents: letters, texts, films, a large archive of evidence of how drastic, widespread and deep corporate propaganda efforts go in America. It's not small, it's deep, and extremely troubling when you shed light on the actual historical work.
And this propaganda manifested itself nowhere more than in the Republican party. I don't think most people who believe they are conservative know why they believe what they do. I can guarantee you though, it has much more to do with where they were born and what people they were surrounded by, and what institutions they were placed into, than some actual intellectual understanding of abstract conservatism. I mean, if you actually poll people who vote Republican, they stretch pretty broadly around all degrees of economic beliefs, there are a good amount (literally, like a third) who are essentially Democrats in how they think government should run. There's no such split in Democrats. In fact, Democrats largely agree on basically all issues, Republicans are much more scattershot.
In any case, basically what happened in America is what the Russians did in the 2016 election, but instead of some scary Russian behind it, it was wealthy Americans, who did it much better and successfully, and have been doing it for decades. And the Republican party is their primary haven. And I've cited three historical works which go in depth discussing the specifics of how that arose. I highly recommend anyone who's actually interested in this to go and read the texts I mentioned, because it will make it clear just how artificial American political beliefs are.
