Caudillos vs the nation state

If liberalism involves commitment to abstract principles, then what does conservatism involve?
I like that the description of the colonies at this time does not sugarcoat anything, it tells it like it is. there was war, and it was violent, but it was pretty much the same everywhere else. It's shocking to think that that was the norm back then, constant wars in your country. It obviously would not have been war to the scale we would see (and might if trump doesn't get impeached soon) these days with nuclear weapons and large-scale weaponry, but it's still terrifying to think of your world as filled with nothing but war and destruction. At first I was worried that there would be accounts of how backwards Latin America was at this time for having so many wars, but I was glad (in a relieved way) that it was mostly just a sign of the times rather than a sign of those poor backwards countries.
In another class, a student made a minimizing point about people from the 15th century and my professor responded in saying that he was deeply uncomfortable with assuming that people from the past were less intelligent than we are today. I feel like that sentiment is also applicable here as well, especially with the comment in the reading that it's difficult to understand the past without diminishing the people to caricatures. I don't know why we're all conditioned or taught to think about the people of the past as less intelligent and why we fail to see them as actual human beings when really, they were like us, but without some of the resources that give us our modern comforts. And in another two hundred years, people studying this time will probably think that we made bad choices and that we were less intelligent than they are (will be???).

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