Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (one of our era’s few highly successful labor organizations) and now a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richman Center, made five points about conservatives in an email to me:

“They appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.”

“They understand people’s more innate belief in hard work and individual responsibility and see government as too often lacking that understanding.”

“They are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices.”