This is exactly correct. I sometimes chuckle when conservatives call Obama "far far left," or make arguments that we've tried leftist economic policies and they've failed. Clinton and Obama were centrists, and they employed mostly centrist policies. Congress since the early 80s has made centrist or conservative laws and policies. The result of those policies has been an ever widening income and wealth gap.
The problem with those gaps is not fully understood by most people, and the wealthy who bring them about certainly do not understand the logical conclusion of doing so, though history is more or less univocal on this point. The result of such a gap is that people lose any sense that they're involved in a common enterprise with their fellow citizens. People will start to opt out when that is the case, and turn to their own means of making a living. When they get desperate enough, those means include preying on others directly. It's a recipe for taking a society down.
One notion that seems to infest conservative thinking these days is that citizens have no responsibility for anyone other than themselves, no obligation to anyone but themselves. This works itself out in a number of ways, including the idea that taxation is theft and that social programs should be abolished. This kind of attitude runs directly counter to the reason to have an economy and a society in the first place. Complicating matters is that conservatives have a legitimate point when they claim that things can go too far the other way--taxes can be too high, social programs too robust. Competition plays a legitimate, beneficial, and necessary role in any economy. But the problem is that they've taken this principle and turned it into an ideology that any mutual help is to be shunned. And when societies get to that point, I'm afraid history is also univocal--the end is nigh.
