What is conservatism?

Andrew Sullivan (link here) writes in the Atlantic: "People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this - on the right and the left - is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival.... Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right.
In the mid-twentieth century conservatism revived itself by a profound critique of liberal hubris and rationalism, of liberals' belief that they really could transform the world through better government, of the new left's critique that the personal is political, and of the stifling of human nature, individualism and freedom that socialism and communism had wrought."

I have been trying to get my conservative friends to tell me why they believe in certain things, like state’s rights or term limits, with little success. But here is what one recently wrote about conservatism in general:
"Conservative –– he who believes in The Constitution as written, SLOW change (I like 60 in the Senate) and all change (laws & regulations) reviewed in context with our time tested values (family, hard work, honesty, lawfulness, integrity, equal opportunity for all, meritocracy, and yes, even a belief in a Higher Power). I could go on and on, such as promoting/requiring assimilation of all legal immigrants (multi-ethnic good, multi-cultural bad) and no illegal immigrants..."

The New York Review of Books has an entertaining article (link here) about the Tea Party convention in Nashville. It seems that a great number of people at the convention did not believe in many of the Tea Party concerns. They were concerned about budget deficits and government spending.

And here is an excerpt from republican Bruce Bartlett’s blog on the deficit (link here):
"At the end of 2009 the gross debt was $11.9 trillion, $4.3 trillion more than the debt held by the public. Although many people get excited about this figure, it is in fact economically meaningless. The Treasury securities held in government accounts really amount to nothing more than budget authority permitting the Treasury to in effect use general revenues to pay Social Security benefits once current Social Security tax revenues are insufficient to pay current benefits, something that will happen in the year 2015, according to Social Security's actuaries.
Another confusion is that the Federal Reserve is treated as part of the "public" when debt held by the public is calculated. This is awkward because the Fed is part of the government and holds vast quantities of Treasury securities, with which it conducts monetary policy. (When the Fed buys them it increases the money supply; when it sells them it reduces the money supply.) At the end of fiscal year 2009, the Fed owned about $900 billion in Treasury securities. (The Treasury pays interest to the Fed on these holdings, but the Fed then gives almost all of it back to the Treasury.)
As big as these numbers are, they really only touch the surface of the federal government's indebtedness. The full scope of that appears annually in something called the Financial Report of the United States Government. The latest report was issued Feb. 26. According to it, in addition to the national debt, the federal government owes $5.3 trillion to veterans and federal employees. But the really big debts are those owed by Social Security and Medicare: Over the next 75 years, the federal government has promised benefits for these two programs in excess of anticipated payroll tax revenues equal to $7.7 trillion and $38 trillion, respectively.
The Treasury Department estimates Social Security's deficit at 1% of GDP over the next 75 years and Medicare's deficit at 4.8%. With federal revenues estimated to be about 19% of GDP in the long run under current law, taxes would have to rise by about one-third to pay all the promises that have been made for just these two programs.
The Office of Management and Budget estimates that in the absence of massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, or an equally massive tax increase, the national debt will rise to 77% of GDP in 2020, 100% of GDP in 2030 and more than twice GDP by 2050."

This is a serious problem. And I applaud anyone who takes it seriously. But how are we going to deal with it? And what does this have to do with other items that fly under the banner of conservatism today? I see no logical connection. I believe in "The Constitution as written, SLOW change and all change (laws & regulations) reviewed in context with our time tested values (family, hard work, honesty, lawfulness, integrity, equal opportunity for all, meritocracy." Sixty in the Senate I am not sure about. While personally I don’t believe in a Higher Power, I have nothing against those who do. Many who do perform a lot of work on behalf of the poor and have values with which I agree. And I understand that their beliefs are important to them and should not be silenced. But I don’t think views on metaphysics have any place in our government. I also have nothing against deporting people who are illegally here or requiring people who are here legally as immigrants to learn to speak English and helping them to assimilate. So my conservative friends, help me out. What ideas hold conservatism together today? Is Andrew Sullivan correct in asserting that current conservatism has betrayed it’s original values?