The leisure class is the conservative class.

The exigencies of the general economic situation of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of this class.

They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community.
Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them.

The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.
This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the cultural development.

When an explanation of this class conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present conditions.