The concept of limited government is nonsensical. What you want is active government, one which is actively working for the good of it's citizens, and which is as directly subject to the will of it's citizens as is possible.

Mistrust of government makes sense only in a context where you've given up on democracy. You look at the sclerosis in political life and instead of saying "I need to make government more responsive to the needs of the public", you say "let's try contain the damage by making government weak enough that the public can use other mechanisms to organize itself, which we hope will be more responsive".

In the modern era, this alternative is the free market. Which, of course, is now almost completely sealed off from public needs and opinions because conservatism stopped being about anything but limiting the government to the point of dysfunction, and capturing whatever of it that was left to the control of cartels with sufficient capital.

The soul of conservatism ought to be about using political and economic power to ensure sustainable growth, by which I mean growth that doesn't inject sudden shocks into the ecosystem due to over extraction of resources or release of harmful byproducts with no regard for their effects. Of preventing overreach, whether by the market or a non-accountable government, that causes widespread ecological and environmental harm,which hurts social cohesion, freedom and stability.

The soul of Ango-American conservatism has encouraged and protected a technological ecosystem and economy that has shot massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no regard for consequence, and then captured the regulatory state or weakened it to allow for continued harm.

Incremental change my ass. When you enable the destruction of human civilization, you have no fucking right to call yourself a conservative. You allow for massive change, weaken our strongest tools to curb it, or mitigate it's effects, and then want to preach about <I>incremental change</I>?