If you think all conservatives are selfish dolts, read Andrew Sullivan's strong column about "Conservatism and Extreme Inequality"

Andrew Sullivan:

And so it remains true that Reaganism, enormously successful in its moment, can be seen as irrelevant to the new challenges its success spawned. Yes, growth soared for a while, but it soared far, far more for those at the top than those in the middle and the bottom. I saw no problem with that as such. I remember even mocking Al Gore's in retrospect prophetic denunciation of the "top one percent" in 2000. But over time, the extremity of this inequality began to trouble me, because of its impact on the legitimacy of capitalism and liberal democracy. And when I first saw Barack Obama speak, his argument made me prick up my ears. I wasn't buying it yet, but he was onto something. The good thing about having a blog is that I can go back and read my first impression from more than five years ago now: 

I went to see Obama last night. He had a fundraiser at H20, a yuppie disco/restaurant in  Southwest DC. I was curious about how he is in person. I'm still absorbing the many impressions I got. But one thing stays in my head. This guy is a liberal. Make no mistake about that. He may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I've heard in my lifetime. As a conservative, I think he could be absolutely lethal to what's left of the tradition of individualism, self-reliance, and small government that I find myself quixotically attached to. 

Not as lethal as the Bush administration was, but you get the point. And you'll notice the early twitches of my political/intellectual migration. It was clear by then that three decades after Reagan's great reduction in taxes, the middle class was struggling hard, moving upward largely on credit, while the top were in a new stratosphere. I didn't buy any crude redistribution solution from the left, but I also saw how the right was coming up empty with proposals, apart from rationalizations. Hence my support for Clinton in 1992, and for Bush's allegedly humbler, but ultimately catastrophic betrayal of conservatism from 2001 on. More to the point, as income growth stalled, and middle and working class Americans saw their richer peers leave them further and further behind, there were greater incentives for government to rush in to placate the middle, to ease the pain, to give them something to retain the illusion that the American dream was still alive.

The full article