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Where most Americans in the last century have seen an expansion of freedoms,
these conservatives see curtailments of what they consider "freedom."

What makes them "conservatives" is not that they want to conserve the achievements of those who fought to deepen American democracy.

It's the reverse: They want to go back to before these progressive freedoms were established.

What they want to conserve is, in most cases, the situation prior to the expansion of traditional American ideas of freedom:
before the great expansion of voting rights, before unions and worker protections and pensions,
before civil rights legislation,
before public health and environmental protections,
before Social Security and Medicare,
before scientific discoveries contradicted fundamentalist religious dogma.

That is why they harp so much on narrow so-called originalist readings of the Constitution
-on its letter, not its spirit
-on "activist judges" rather than an inherently activist population.