Seems to me that when you boil it down, that one of the main differences between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint has to do with how they view the social strata. A caste system in America? Say it isn’t so!
The typical liberal view seems to be that there are the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor, the evil and the good (not all are willing to cop to this last one, and it does not work really well with the whole relativism BS, but…) But the way that your bleeding heart liberal sees of fixing this situation, is that the poor and downtrodden must be given a hand (not a hand up) in struggling from paycheck to paycheck. Not to better one’s situation, but merely to live more comfortably within it.
Contrast this with the conservative feeling that the poor and downtrodden just need the right opportunity, and the right amount of grit and determination, and they too can better their situation, live the American dream. To put it bluntly, get up off the couch and make something of yourself, go find your dream, don’t expect it to come find you.
It is sad that the American dream, which used to be the opportunity to make something of ones self, to create one’s own destiny, to be able to make gobs of money if that was what one decided was his dream, has somewhere along the way changed into just making gobs of money. It used to be that we all had the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” but now too many people seem to think that the right is to “happiness” itself. No work. No effort. I am owed it just because I exist.
I think that the conservative perspective is gaining (at least I hope the recent election points in this direction) popularity with the common man in large part to the fact that the Democratic party is becoming more and more run by the rich elite of the party who think that their task is to make the lives of the lower class easier, but they truly think that their is no way that the lower class could ever become one of them, because, well, that just never could happen because they are so much better than those scum, ah, less fortunate persons.