The question is being asked a lot lately, especially within the American conservative movement. The self-reflection began after the 2006 electoral beat-down, and continued in 2008 when they realized they’d screwed the pooch so badly Americans preferred to elect a black nationalist fascist socialist secretly Muslim president rather than give the GOP another chance. The conservatives retreated, and conferred, and a consensus finally began to emerge earlier this year: they decided that they lost the 2008 presidential election because—wait for it—they were not conservative enough. Sure, okay, if they say so, but the question then becomes what exactly do conservatives believe?

Without exception, GOP elites will tell you that fiscal conservatism is central to their ideology, but that’s easily exposed as a myth by anyone with an internet connection and two fingers to key in a Google search. Ronald Reagan ran a multi-billion dollar deficit in all eight years of his presidency. George Bush Sr. ran a similarly massive deficit four out of four years. Bush Jr. inherited a budget surplus from President Clinton so large it took him a full year to spend the nation into the red, which is why his record is only seven crushing deficit years out of eight. But in the surplus year he still managed to spend about 118 billion more than the government took in, so it wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying to follow form. Once is a fluke, twice is a trend, three times is a deliberate strategy. Republicans are not fiscally conservative, and haven’t been for a long time, if ever.

But none of this is a secret to anyone who bothers to read a website or newspaper. Nor is it a secret that Republicans believe government serves only one purpose—to be a money funnel for business. Combined with their tax cuts for the rich, Republican presidents haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of running a balanced budget. But it doesn’t matter, because when a Republican takes control of the presidency, he does so knowing he’s going to spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave. And he knows his tax cuts will deplete federal coffers. When you consider everything, you almost begin to suspect their plan is to break the treasury so that the public programs they hate will be crippled. A public program suffering from budget shortfalls can be labeled a program that doesn’t work, much the way Social Security has been labeled.

One thing all conservatives believe is that the rich create wealth for the citizenry through the process of investment and employment. They warn that the American economy may suffer if the wealthy are overtaxed. But the United States functioned just fine with a tax rate from 1945 to 1961 on the uppermost percentile of earners of 91%. And this coincided with a time when the nation became incredibly prosperous as a whole, which means, though the rich may have hated the tax rate, they clearly were not overtaxed in the economic sense. By 1965 the tax rate on top percentile earners was 65%, during which time the rich still whined, even though America was still undoubtedly the most comfortable nation in the world. Entrepreneurs invested and made money while workers had profitable jobs. The rich were getting richer and the working classes were constructing stable, fulfilling lives for themselves.

But then rich conservatives began their attack on the poor and middle classes. Enough was enough. It was not okay to be merely very rich—they wanted to be so rich Caligula would blush. So they cooked up what would become known as “trickle-down economics.” It was a philosophy designed to match a pre-existing belief system, and as such, it was filled with gaping holes. But that didn’t matter. American lawmakers spurred by lobbyist money embraced the ideas and, as the tax rate declined on high percentile earners to 39.6%, the U.S. as a whole mirrored that decline. Fast forward to 2008 and the wealthy had increased their per annum profits by a factor of eight while wages for the middle class and poor had made no inflation-adjusted gains. The $20 an hour blue collar jobs that built the middle class during the post WWII era had all but vanished, representing a mere 18% of hourly jobs. But of course adjusted for inflation, those jobs were not equivalent to what they were during the middle of the century. Adjusted for inflation the $20 blue collar job was gone, along with the means for workers to climb into the middle class. Meanwhile the nation’s infrastructure had fallen apart, schools had crumbled, public health had fallen behind that of the rest of the industrialized world, and entire industries had been gutted and left to rot along with the cities that contained them. Families had to send mothers to work full-time just to keep their finances in the black. For everyone save the rich, trickle down economics had been not just a failure, but a broad social catastrophe.

Certain conservatives decry the changes that have taken place in the GOP since the Reagan years. They claim the party has lost its soul. But in reality, things haven’t changed. There is a noisier fringe, and their public displays embarrass intelligent conservatives, but the core beliefs of conservatism have been steadfastly focused since at least the time of Nixon. It is pro-lower taxes on the rich, and pro-shifting of the entire tax burden onto workers and off of the leisure class of investors and inheritors. It is pro-market deregulation, though the players in the market have proven more than once they don’t have the moral fiber to operate unsupervised. It is pro-privatization of public resources, including schools and retirement benefits. It is pro-union suppression, as well as pro-corporate protection through the overhaul of tort law. It is pro-wars of choice wrapped in patriotic rhetoric, and pro-violent opening of markets in recalcitrant nations. It is pro-any law, regulation, or act that preserves the status quo from which it draws its power. In short, American conservatism is what it has always been.

But I am somewhat empathetic toward moderate conservatives who believe their movement went off the rails, and that admission brings me to another characteristic of conservatism worth examining. In these days of health care debate the following point is worth noting. Joe Conason wrote an article for Salon recently in which he mentions the case of Cindy McCain, who wants more research money thrown toward the problem of migraines—because she suffers from them. And he points out how Nancy Reagan wanted more federal money used for Alzheimer’s research because her husband had the disease. And yet another GOPer, former senator Pete Domenici, made an issue of mental health, but only after—you guessed it—his daughter developed schizophrenia. Do progressives make crusades of health issues that directly affect them? Certainly, but they are allowed to, because healthcare for all is a core progressive belief, whether one’s own daughter or son is sick or not.

But the emotional appeals made by McCain, Reagan, and Domenici were, for members of a party that has been against national healthcare for thirty years, unseemly and hypocritical. Conason goes on to point out that every member of Congress and their families—Republicans included—actually already have public healthcare. It’s called the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program and we pay for 72% of it. Under such circumstances, it is brazenly two-faced for Republicans to oppose public healthcare for the nation. If any of them want to renounce their socialist healthcare as proof of belief in their party’s free market ideals, I’m listening. And I have a feeling I’ll be listening—to silence—for a long time, because yet another unfortunate characteristic of conservatism is its craven opportunism.

Liberalism is not perfect by any means, but for all its flaws, it is about wanting all people to have a fair shot at what the lucky few have, while conservatism is about preventing that from happening. That prevention is always mingled with a sprinkling of lies, and a tinge of racist or anti-immigrant rhetoric, and a dose of denial, as conservatives pretend they did not have a helping hand like the GI Bill or the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program themselves. But thanks to the inexorable march of time, liberalism triumphs, and conservatism fails. The fact that today women vote, and there is a minimum wage, and protected equal rights, and Social Security, is all proof of that. For in the end, conservatism’s definitive characteristic is that it is a movement standing on the wrong side of history.