As an ex-conservative who only shook it off because of Trump:
It is not the case that conservatives believe you cannot solve things. Perhaps some varieties such as Calvinists do, but more commonly, they believe it is insane to believe people will not respond to punishment. Think about it: if you thought killing someone would result in being painfully executed, why would you commit murder? If you think stealing will get you sent to jail, why steal? They expect that people are sufficiently rational to not take actions unless they anticipate a net benefit from them, and therefore by raising the consequences (or the likelihood of being caught) you can decrease bad behavior. You stop rape by making people afraid of the consequences of committing it, or by reducing the temptation to commit it.
But what about the research that says it doesn’t work? That research must be wrong because it violates their lived experience. They cannot imagine a world where pain does not deter. Perhaps the results are skewed by bad design. More sinisterly, perhaps they are a scheme to ensure that justice is not done: that criminals roam free, killing, stealing, and raping. This is the “encomial dyoxin” scenario from the book Technopoly by Neil Postman. If you see a study that says you can lose weight by eating chocolate eclairs (because the eclairs contain encomial dyoxin) you should distrust the study because it violates common sense. This is the source of conservative paranoia.
This is part of a larger economic schema of justice, in which justice is equivalent exchange. Giving people houses for free devalues the work of the construction crew, which will lead to workers being paid less for their money, which will only increase poverty. Letting a murderer escape execution devalues the lives of his victims.
Justice is therefore largely unrelated to democracy. If people vote to let criminals off the hook or to increase pay without an equivalent increase in labor, they are voting against justice and demanding something wicked. To the extent that conservatives value democracy, they do so from a libertarian standpoint that people do not want to be controlled by unnecessary laws and will vote against having their economic behaviors restricted or their property confiscated. But laws that ensure equivalent exchange are never unnecessary and are intrinsically just.
Conservatives are not, for the most part, “okay with poverty and disease”. They believe that leftist promises to reduce poverty and disease by redistribution are pie in the sky as well as unjust. You reduce poverty and disease by hard work, or by technological advancement. Any attempt to divert wealth away from those who have earned it will only reduce productivity as people stop working prematurely. You cannot feed the poor if food is not being grown; you cannot clothe the poor if clothing is not being made; you cannot house the poor if housing is not being built. This is what people were afraid of when they said shutdowns for Covid would harm the economy: not a drop in some abstract numbers, but a drop in production of necessary goods that keep people alive.
To some extent, all of this makes logical sense. The failure of rationality for conservatives generally comes at the point where people fail to be the perfect rational actors the market is built around. Rather than adjust their models to account for it, conservatives expect people to learn to adjust their behavior to fit the incentives given. Sometimes this is impossible due to human biophysics or innate behavioral constraints like orientation. Sometimes it comes from structural factors (I would work harder but can’t find a job!).
Summary: Conservatives believe justice is equivalent exchange, which is true regardless of voting behavior and thus above democracy. They do not believe there is sufficient economic surplus to feed the poor unless everyone contributes. They believe human nature outside of the need for sustenance is malleable and that people can be deterred by pain. They believe that people deserve to be allowed to do as they please under most circumstances and thus most regulations are contrary to freedom*, but this does not include directly harming others or taking their property. Under normal circumstances they believe in democracy because they expect people will vote against government controls and in favor of individual economic liberty.
When this does not happen or leads to problems, rather than adjust their beliefs, they blame conspiracy.
*Most conservatives hold to a traditional Christian standard of morality which does not accept bodily autonomy as a given. At the very least, life is above it and economic liberty is more important. This does not apply to secular libertarians or most business conservatives, nor (in a different way) to most parts of the alt-right.
A few types of conservatism, such as monarchism, strict Calvinism, or overt fascism stand outside this description entirely but are also not common to modern America.
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