Political conservatism is simply that, a political stance that prioritizes conserving what we have. Change is resisted, and accepted at only gradual increments.
These days, what is called conservatism is actually much more like Reactionism or Regressivism. Reactionaries/Regressives want to roll back progress in the hope of bringing back a mythical golden age of their civilization. Conservatives often side with regressives because they are more opposed to progress and what they are unfamiliar with, than they are of regress into what they see as somewhat familiar. So conservatism very easily slips into and is overtaken by regressive political movements.
As others have pointed out, political conservatism is theoretically agnostic when it comes to economic or social ideologies. Conservatives at the end of the Soviet Union would be fighting for to conserve that union, while reformers were working towards changes that would eventually cause it to collapse and build something new. Conservatives in America during the 1800s Civil War era could be found among the Democrat party fighting to keep the chattel slave economy, but in the 1900s could be found in the Republican party fighting to keep segregation in public institutions.
Ideological Conservatism is not actually about conserving the status quo. It is an actual ideology with values and commitments and a consistent worldview. It often overlaps with political conservatism. If someone is an ideological conservative, then they are most likely either a political conservative or a reactionary.
Ideological conservatism is mostly based on the philosophy of the 15th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who defended the absolute necessity of monarchy over human society in the wake of the English Revolution/English Civil Wars, in which the Parliment went to war and executed the King of England. In the worldview of the ideological conservative, the world of human society is either naturally heirarchical, or must be strictly made to be heirarchical, or else it will perish. Some humans must be brought low and a few must be raised up. These few elites must rule the lessers, as is their right. Otherwise, society falls to chaos, anarchy, destruction... what the conservative calls "leviathan". Anything that seems to be "flattening" society, tumbling heirarchies, is seen as dangerous and destructive to the experiment of human civilization. Anything that is an institutionalized heirarchy is defended in the name of ideological conservatism, until it is finally gone.
