I don’t think you understand. Let’s say you prefer red wine over white wine. But you go to dinner, and maybe you feel like having fish and so you decide to have white wine. Have you contradicted yourself? Maybe tomorrow, you are in the mood for steak, and so you pick a full bodied red to go with it. This is also not a contradiction from the previous day’s order.

This is how the conservative mind views political positions. They might have a loose sense of rules, but what is true on Tuesday is irrelevant on Wednesday. That’s not contradiction, because what you wanted before may or may not be what you want later. For a conservative, hypocrisy isn’t even a possibility, because nothing is set in stone.