Socrates99
Bottoms up!
Yeah, the last actual "compassionate conservative" I remember in the States was Jack Kemp. That was quite a while ago, it's almost nonexistent today. Recently, when they controlled the House they needed a lot of pushing just to fund the CHIP program. Things Trump and other conservatives say about Muslims are things GW Bush warned may happen and we should guard against. When the tax cut passed Paul Ryan claimed The way to balance this was "entitlement reform" and voters would have to be pretty foolish to not know what that means. The ACA "hurt" red states because Republican governors turned down The optional Medicaid expansion. Compassionate conservatism died with the advent of the Tea Party and The Freedom Caucus.I don't think that this necessarily represents any particular dissonance in conservative thinking. When they benefit from these programs, it is so they can maintain the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, so that their rightful place in the social order is maintained. Despite the viciousness of free market street-preachers, most conservative have maintained a sympathy for the deserving unfortunate; this is what they call "compassionate conservatism". What confuses this is their readiness to attribute misfortune to people who do not look and sound like them to moral degradation, their tendency to reserve deserving-ness to people with whom they can readily identify. Ultimately, it comes down to their unwillingness or inability to conceptualise poverty as a structural problem, which permits them to regard short-term financial distress as misfortune, but forces them to regard long-term or permanent poverty as essentially voluntary.
If you listen to conservative politicians, they rarely declare that they are going to abolish widely-used programs outright. Some do, but they are usually both insane, and occupy extremely safe constituencies. What they say they are going to do is to restrict access to those programs, with the accompanying promise that service for the deserving unfortunate will, in fact, improve without the dead weight of the undeserving indolent. I wouldn't say that they are secretly socialists so far as they and those like them are concerned, because they retain a certain terror of becoming dependent on the state and thus socially reduced, but dishing out dollars to the deserving is entirely within the acceptable and proper function of the state, as imagined by the majority of conservatives.
The actual voters may have compassion but they continue to vote for politicians with none. That just comes back to my point that the voters often have a single issue, maybe a couple, that draws them in and gets them to vote against programs they personally benefit from.