Not "Has"the left" ever been wrong", but have social conservatives, ever, once, been right, in any country, about any issue, ever?
Not "Has"the left" ever been wrong", but have social conservatives, ever, once, been right, in any country, about any issue, ever?
The Luddites thought that machines and factories were destroying their traditional way of life and creating hardships for the workers. Wikipedia says they're radicals but they seem conservative to me.
In Domenico Losurdo’s “Liberalism: A Counterhistory,” the author mentions how advocates for the feudal system spoke forcefully against the brutality of chattel slavery, which exploded in scale after liberal revolutions.
It looks like there are probably a lot of examples where it's obvious that the nobility and bourgeois are expanding their power and the socially conservative peasants or workers push back. I have a hunch that this sort of thing becomes rarer as the alienation of labor increases but I don't have the historical backing to back that up.
The Luddites were a bit of a predecessor to a working class movement. They recognized that output was going up but pay was not. Apprentices weren't actually being taught the trade, they were being put to work on the machines. They were positioned at a point in time where they could remember clearly how things used to work and see clearly how they were changing, but were ultimately too small and specific a group to do much about it.
I thought of another example. The German Peasant Revolt involved peasants revolting because the nobility and bourgeoisie were trying to reduce the peasants to serfs (being a peasant is better than being a serf). It It also involved a lot of other factors and was a political and religious clusterfuck (much like every other historical event in the Holy Roman Empire) so it's possible to interpret it differently. This is also what Martin Luther was talking about when he wrote "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants", despite the peasants being (in some ways) inspired by the protestant reformation.