Ultraconservative Islam vs. western conservatives

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This isn't really aimed at secular Muslims, but this is more about the Islamic countries in the middle east, with their exported terrorism and backwards form of government. For the definition of western countries, I'm including the US, even though people will argue that US is too "far right" for a western country. But isn't there a difference between the ultra-conservative ideas of Islam and the conservatives of the west, including in the US? I'm conservative in the US and I strongly oppose the ultra-conservatism of the Islamic countries.

Doesn't the conservatism in US have more in common with other western conservatism than Islamic conservatives? Do some people compare the US to the middle east?

There is more to the difference between conservative Islamic countries and conservative Americans, but yes, they are much more conservative than *most* conservative Americans are. The neo-fascists though are more conservative than the conservative muslims.

Yes, there is a clear difference between Islamic conservatism and US conservatism. What is referred to as Islamic conservatism involves explicit theological beliefs justifying these theocracies and their brutalities. US conservatism is.... less well defined these days. For a significant period it was tied more towards ideas like originalism, small government, and some level of Christian favoritism.

The issue that makes this all very strange is that Donald Trump really isn't a small government person, or a good Christian for that matter, and that was a major plank in the old notion of conservatism. This has left some people scrambling to understand this more, and there are two sorts of ways to try to understand this change:

1) Conservatism as a mood. So, even though Trump is NOT a conservative by the prior Republican standards, he did capture the right mood. Notions of a conservative approach the world have been brought up in writings by linguists and psychologists.

So, Jonathan Haidt believes that US conservatives rely on additional moral foundations that liberals and libertarians tend not to, moral foundations like authority, in-group loyalty, and purity (idea discussed more here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/exploring-our-moral-foundations-haidt-loyalty/).

George Lakoff, on the other hand, believes it really boils down to metaphors, and that US conservatives are attracted to the metaphor of the "strict father", where the world is best understood through the lens of harshness, toughness, and individual virtue(more information on this idea here: https://georgelakoff.com/2011/02/19/what-conservatives-really-want/).

The last and most controversial of these psychological theories is one by psychologist Bob Altemeyer that conservatism is highly populated by authoritarians, and that there is a prevalent authoritarian personality that has some fairly significant defects that is the cause of certain major social problems and is hard to negotiate around. Of course that last idea was very heavily criticized when it came out, because of how negative it was perceived as being.(Additional information on that idea can be found here: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ )

Under psychological theories of what it means to be a conservative, a unity between US conservatism and Islamic conservatism is highly plausible, and it would be striking if they were driven by different psychological processes.

2) Trumpian conservatism as an injection/revelation of white nationalist politics as part of the intellectual animus of the GOP. This idea actually has some real support among conservative intellectuals like [url="Jonah Goldberg"]http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439150/white-identity-politics-wrong-and-immoral[/url], [url="David French"]http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement[/url], and [url="Avik Roy"]http://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12256510/republican-party-trump-avik-roy[/url].

There are questions and concerns that one might bring out of it, as explicit white nationalists are a small group, but there was more racism invoked than anybody would ever accuse of the past elections. Of course, middle-easterners, not being white, would not be white nationalists and so this would make the two instances fairly different.

I hope this wasn't too long, but I really hope it helped make sense of your question and how everything in it can come together, and even gave you a few things to chew on.

Also, when I say "conservative" in regard to Islamic vs. Western, I am talking about the way it is in mainstream. I reiterate that I am a conservative American and I deeply oppose the intolerance of Islamic ultra-conservative societies.

And I believe they are both fundamentally different on certain levels.

By its nature, "conservative" is a relative term. The US is a much more progressive society than Saudi Arabia (for example) and so its conservatives are also more progressive, on average.

Have to be careful about what these terms mean, what most people understand as conservatism in the West is now dead, especially after Trump. The economic liberal strain of conservatism (which I have always considered an aberration): the free traders, the pro-immigration people etc are all quickly being purged.

I think you're overstating the importance of Trump a tad there. The Conservative Party certainly still seems to support free trade, thank goodness.

Mind you, at least if conservatives disavowed economic liberalism then liberals would have no reason to continue to support them...