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D-squared trashes "conservatives", but sneaks in a rather understated punchline:

the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been "the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness". Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is "what I have, I keep". Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that "what I have, I keep" is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem.

And then there's this:

one of the biggest problems with the psychological politics of left and right is the need that people feel to think of themselves as not just having made what looks like on balance the best decision given the things they regard as important, but as morally good people themselves. People in general seem to be horribly uncomfortable with the idea that, by the standards they use to judge political situations, they themselves don't come out as moral heroes. At base, this is a fairly childish and decidedly illiberal attitude; childish because it demands a sort of moral perfection which everyone intellectually knows can't exist outside fairy stories (unless you count the way that parents appear to their children) and illiberal because it suggests that you're only prepared to have normal social interactions with people who pass your own personal moral examination (a rather prominent political philosopher has told me to my face on a couple of occasions that he regards me as morally beyond the pale because of the job I do; I've nonetheless been made to feel very welcome at his house).

D-squared, ever read Shelby Steele?