I've been thinking about a pretty abstract subject lately: The educational value of failure vs. that of success. So I started to wonder if maybe one of the reasons conservatives hate the poor so much, and treat rich people as gods, is that they don't see the societal value of allowing people to fail safely - maybe they don't understand that success is built on learning from countless failures, both as individuals and as societies, and that allowing common economic failure to be a life sentence (or even a death sentence) prevents that educational process from happening.
We find that conservatives just cannot fathom the underlying structure of success that is built on a process of learning: They want to believe that God came down from heaven and anointed the rich with predestined success, or that the rich are magical Nietzschean creatures whose Will is just so strong they beat reality into submission on sheer force of desire. This realization led me to more fundamental conclusions about what conservatism is: Simply and basically, an inability or unwillingness to learn. All the rest of their ideology is just derivative of trying to rationalize deliberate stupidity.
I suppose in many cases it boils down to crass narcissism: Just being so totally convinced of your own absolute, fundamental superiority that the very concept of being educated by experience seems alien. After all, if you are already perfect and surrounded by imperfect Others, then life must surely be a process of figuring how to change them to better conform to your perfection. The notion that you don't know something important at any given moment is beyond comprehension: You are born knowing everything you need to know for the rest of your life, and Success is defined by how well you are able to force other people to work around your ignorance and selfishness. This is Ayn Rand's ideal, and the mold from which basically all Republican politics is cut.
It is literally the emotions of an infant elevated to the status of political philosophy. This doesn't mean conservatives never learn, because in truth a human being has no choice in the matter - reality will not be denied - so often it's just a matter of self-deception (and deceiving others) that they engage in to maintain their sense of superiority. Despite their apparent exemption from consequences, it's a deception that is enormously costly to them, although even more costly to others: They are under constant siege by the entire universe as it careens onward and they do everything in their power to maintain the cargo cult of their own perfect, unchanging, perpetually fetal Self.
There are some, it should be said, whose unwillingness to learn is less a product of narcissism than of fear: They have a fundamentally negative, nihilistic view of existence where their only psychological anchor point is to try to keep everything exactly the same as they perceived it in childhood. Actual facts mean no more to this type of conservative than to the Randians - absolutely everything they think and do is built around protecting their own fragile little world of beliefs they know to be false but protect all the more violently because of it. The results are predictably hypocritical and Orwellian: The cargo cult pseudo-"patriotism" of murderous fascists who can't get enough of American flags and tricorner hats, "Christians" who worship their God by trying to crucify the whole world, so-called "private enterprise" advocates who promote oppressive monopolies and corporate welfare, "constitutionalists" who think the Bill of Rights consists of one half of one Amendment, etc.
So if you want to defeat conservatives - and what's far more important, refuse to be them - the answer is simple: Learn. Challenge your own thoughts and ideas. Explore. View the world not through the covered, unknowing eyes of the fetus they worship, but through the open and all-seeing eyes of the curious child. Stop and look around at things you think you know and just, for the moment, pretend you don't - often enough you will find things that surprise you. Take time to be less concerned with applying your knowledge and more time to just soak in the lessons that are all around you, without being soured by the negative ones.
Move around toxic and bitter memes rather than trying to digest them, because no one ever learned a damn thing from them other than to stop thinking. Balance your agency in the world with your ability to perceive it - don't be a blind force. You will not only find surprises around every corner, but will find that other people will appreciate your insight. That is, of course, if they're not conservatives, but there's nothing you can do about that other than refuse to let them include you in their suicide.