Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).
Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___
I guess if we accept European conservatism (as you describe it; I’m basically taking your word for all this) then it’d have to be designated as an exception. However, the things I wrote apply to most strains of conservatism, because it’s still baked into the very core of the ideology. European conservatives get out of this conflict by being extremely centrist rather than taking firm conservative positions.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_Germany#Modern_conservatism