They say today’s America is a center-right nation. If you want proof, look to our liberals.

It goes without saying that the American Left falls to the right of its counterparts elsewhere in the world, on issues ranging from foreign intervention to environmental protection to regulation of the free market. But liberals in the U.S., and especially the Democratic Party, go beyond merely espousing rightward-tilting positions. Their true colors show when we look at how they justify the stands they take, regardless of what those stands might be.

Think revolution and reaction. Today's Democrats have largely abandoned the revolutionary mindset that has dominated leftist thinking for centuries and gained a firm ground in U.S. politics in the 1960s. Of course, like any opposition-turned-governing party, the Democrats have a stake in overturning the status quo in many ways. But as of late, their vision of an ideal world has held a distinctly regressive quality—that is, they often present themselves as meaning to restore something bygone rather than creating an order without precedent. Whereas Marx (whom the international Left still reads) lamented that history nightmarishly haunts the present, the Dems are rummaging through the past to justify tomorrow’s policy.

This has especially been the rule in the context of the recession. No one of any consequence is talking about scrapping and replacing the market system with something newfangled and rationally designed, as you might see in a country where socialist movements continue to thrive. Even the most liberal Democrats point to yesterday’s methods—namely, the New Deal—when considering models for economic reform. When rolling out the big guns and calling for wealth redistribution, Democratic commentators qualify their arguments by wistfully reminding us of a time long ago when the richest of America’s rich tolerated a 90% marginal tax rate. They speak of a country that has succumbed to greed and egotism and “lost itself” on Wall Street; they mourn the passing of altruism and community-mindedness when they confront opposition to their healthcare plans. In short, they throw liberal staples like individual choice to the wind and instead complain of the havoc unrestrained liberty has wreaked upon our traditional values.

It would seem the Democrats have been reading their Benjamin Disraeli. In the Victorian era, Disraeli saved a seemingly doomed Conservative Party by reaching out to the British working class via a number of social, labor, and economic reforms, including a dramatic expansion of the voting franchise—a sort of “New Deal” for the late 1800s. His “Tory Socialism” was designed to bring workers and the aristocracy together in an alliance against the rising middle class and the business elite, who favored the Whig Party and who were coming to dominate British politics. Disraeli detested unrestrained capitalism; in addition to driving the success of his political opponents, he also believed it was nihilistic and disruptive to the aristocratic social order that had sustained the country for centuries. He believed that capitalists were arrivistes whose unbridled pursuit of wealth would exploit the lower classes and degrade the whole of society, whereas the old nobility had been cultivated since the Middle Ages to treat the commons with paternalistic compassion.

This idea that limitless economic liberty poses a threat to the moral order is a very old and very conservative one indeed. In Disraeli’s day, before Marx really caught on, to be skeptical of the markets was to align oneself with the remnants of feudalism. To favor the rational clarity of capitalism, on the other hand, was the mark of an enlightened liberal thinker. Today's Left looks very much like yesterday’s Right: it is suspicious of a predatory free market and sees the federal bureaucracy, rather than the aristocracy, as the arbiters of ordinary folk, purpose-built to defend society from capitalism’s many demons. With Marx banished from American politics, it would seem that the Democrats have re-discovered the old aristocracy’s nostalgic critique of the market system.

Not all Democrats are so ideological in their thinking, however. Their conservatism is expressed in practice and procedure, and thus stems from the very roots of conservative doctrine.

Take President Obama. In his healthcare address to Congress, Obama stated quite frankly that to institute a single-payer or totally socialized national health program would be too radical a change from the status quo to be good for the country. He reasoned that incrementally manipulating the current system and using established institutions to correct is flaws would be a sounder approach, and hence we have the current Democratic healthcare proposal. This rationale sounds a lot like Edmund Burke.

Burke, another British politician who predated his disciple Disraeli by almost a century, is considered the father of modern conservatism. He professed not so much specific ideological principles so much as an approach to politics that deals with the changing demands of society while avoiding the costly disruption and unintended consequences that come with radical projects and overthrow (he left it to his successors to fill in the ideological ‘blanks’). Obama’s words are precisely in line with Burke’s view: the system as it exists today has value that arises from the fact that it is established, known, and familiar. To dash it to pieces is to assume the risk of creating a monster in its place, a risk no prudent statesman should take.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is often maligned on the Right for bringing the state deep into the heart of the U.S. economy, but in truth he could actually be credited with having saved liberal capitalism from self-destruction. Likewise, in the best-case scenario, President Obama’s reforms will succeed, and our private healthcare system will essentially survive. Now, as in the Depression, the Democrats may in fact be doing more to save the free market system than a hypothetical GOP government ever would. Their statist concessions (bailouts, stimulus, social programs, tax hikes) reek of leftism, but in a crisis they may actually be necessary to keep the general public from demanding more radical changes to the system.

The Right, meanwhile, seems to be tearing away from its roots. As the Republican Party sheds moderates like bad dandruff, it is rapidly eroding the cornerstones of its Burkean heritage: its prudence and its flexibility. The ‘Tea Party’ mentality is defensible in principle, but in practice such stubbornness could eventually mean martyring capitalism as we know it—and a true conservative statesman avoids such suicidal radicalism at any cost. But the Party of Palin is content enough to be the new party of revolt, and so the mantle of conservatism seems to be changing hands under our very eyes.