The Times' David Leonhardt defines, compresses and resolves, brilliantly I think, a century of American conflict:
Nearly every time this country has expanded its social safety net or tried to guarantee civil rights, passionate opposition has followed.
The opposition stems from the tension between two competing traditions in the American economy. One is the laissez-faire tradition that celebrates individuality and risk-taking. The other is the progressive tradition that says people have a right to a minimum standard of living — time off from work, education and the like....
It’s easy to look at the current debate and see an unavoidable trade-off between this country’s two economic traditions — risk-taking and security. But I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it is ultimately as misplaced as those worries about Social Security and Medicare equaling Bolshevism.
Guaranteeing people a decent retirement and decent health care does more than smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. Those guarantees give people the freedom to take risks. If you know that professional failure won’t leave you penniless and won’t prevent your child from receiving needed medical care, you can leave the comfort of a large corporation and take a chance on your own idea. You can take a shot at becoming the next great American entrepreneur.
Those once known as Eisenhower or Rockefeller Republicans understood this, what I'd call an accepting mutuality -- this authentic "common ground," a term contemporary Republicans, such as John Boehner, only toss around to stake out their ideological territoriality and to avoid, for the base's sake and their own hides, even the appearance of compromising reasonableness.
Yet there's something else, and it's why I so commonly employ the word "pseudoconservative," rather than just "conservative," to describe today's miscellaneous Boehners and Palins and McConnells. The something else: Eisenhower-Rockefeller Republicans adhered to the honorable Burkean side of philosophical conservatism; they accepted and even embraced gradual, sociopolitical change, assuming most everyone was, to use the vernacular, on the same page of acceptance and embrace.
Not so today, not among today's crowd.
For example one would be hard pressed to think of more widely accepted changes last century than in the ways in which we collectively chose to care for seniors' financial security and health. By now, Social Security and Medicare are no less than American Institutions -- as traditional, loved, accepted, embraced and venerable as church or school.
The only genuinely conservative position is to conserve them; only a pseudoconservative would advocate upheaval and radical rejection.
Which is what our pseudoconservatives do. The once-revered concepts of community and consensus mean nothing, other than whatever they want them to mean -- for the next election, for that additional Senate seat, for that upcoming shot at the White House.
No respect, no self-respect, no tradition, no anything else of value is left. Just power.