No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc.

Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.

American conservatives in 2025 are liberal because liberalism is the current most recent stable status quo. American colonial conservatives in 1776 were monarchist because monarchism was the most recent stable status quo at that time.

Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies.

Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance.

Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.

Here's another fun example that flips the American "conservative"-"liberal" axis on its head: just a few decades ago, conservatives were opposed to the liberalization of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. In other words, in that time and place, conservatives were communists and liberals were the right wing of the Overton window.