While debatable, I believe they want to conserve a systemic hierarchy of social privilege or sense of superiority. Regardless, human cultures (at least since the renaissance) appear to have an observable gradient of ideologies that span from progressive/egalitarian to regressive/discriminatory. In western cultures, we usually refer to the latter as conservative, despite the debatability of what, exactly, they are “trying to preserve”. As polarized as we are in modern U.S. politics, “conservative” is practically a team name.