Conservatism’s strength, its stress on the value of individual responsibility, is also its central weakness.

The right’s claim that liberalism creates a deterrent to personal initiative and generates an ethos of dependency has resonated powerfully among white swing voters crucial to the ascendance of the Republican Party over the last four decades.

As the aftereffects of the financial collapse of 2008 continue to batter the nation with high unemployment and low growth, however, the conservative message has run into headwinds.

How does the laid-off 55-year-old factory employee “who worked hard and played by the rules,” looking for a job in a market where there are 4.2 applicants for every opening, find comfort when he turns on the TV to see Newt Gingrich declare that “you’ve got to become more employable” or Mitt Romney arguing that

the American people, edified by American principles, will rise to the occasion again, securing our safety, our prosperity and our peace. One of these principles is a merit-based society. In a merit-based society, people achieve success and rewards through hard work, education, risk taking and even a little luck.

The conservative response to crisis offered by Gingrich and Romney fails to address the anxiety and anger of those millions of Americans who suddenly find themselves with no job, no health insurance and no money to pay the mortgage.

This question will set the terms of the debate for the 2012 election.

With just over three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, the narrative of the right is under challenge from a competing narrative originating on the left, a narrative that describes an American economy sharply skewed towards the affluent, with rising inequality, a dwindling middle class and the persistence of long-term unemployment.

Describing the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement on the electorate, Frank Luntz, a conservative consultant who specializes in framing political messages, told the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando on Nov. 30, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz contended that shifting voter attitudes require Republican officials to carefully monitor and change their language. The public is now favorable to raising taxes on the rich, he said, but “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.”

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said in an interview that “2012 is going to be about two fundamentally different theories of the economy.” In a Nov. 21 memo to Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, Garin wrote:

The success of the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections was based to a large extent on the ability of the Republicans, aided by the activism of the Tea Party movement, to focus voters’ attention on an anti-government narrative that blamed the country’s economic problems on excessive federal spending, the size of the national debt, and increased government involvement in the private economy. Recent polling, however, indicates that the Republican/Tea Party narrative about the economy has been superseded by a different narrative – one that emphasizes the need to address the growing gap between those at the very top of the economic ladder and the rest of the country.

Garin cited the findings of a Nov. 3-5 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that asked respondents to rank their support for 1.) a set of policies generally favored by Republicans which would cut spending, eliminate regulations and reject all tax increases, or 2.) a set of policies generally favored by Democrats calling for the elimination of tax breaks for the rich and tougher regulation of major banks and corporations.

The Democratic alternative received far more backing, with 60 percent in strong agreement and 16 percent voicing mild agreement, compared to 33 percent strong support for the Republican strategy, with 20 percent giving moderate support.

An ABC/Washington Post poll provided further evidence of public attitudes on the move. More than three fifths of respondents, 61 percent, said the wealth gap between the rich and the rest of the country has grown larger. The same percentage said the federal government should “pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans,” compared to 35 percent who opposed such policies. Shifting public attitudes do not, however, represent a decisive movement to the left. Instead, the Post survey shows that right now the public is divided, with no clear advantage to either party.

The job ratings of Republicans in Congress have tanked at 74 percent negative to 19 percent favorable, dropping more steeply than Obama’s, which are 51 negative-44 positive. But the Post survey also found that congressional Republicans run neck and neck with the president when respondents are asked “who would you trust to do a better job” on handling the economy (42-42) and creating jobs (40-40). On an issue on which the public traditionally favors Democrats by wide margins, “protecting the middle class,” Obama held only a 45-41 advantage over congressional Republicans.

These mixed results point to an election in which the competition to define the substantial disagreements between the two parties will be crucial to the outcome. Will deficits and debt continue to dominate as they did in 2010, to the advantage of Republicans, or will inequality and government intervention to promote job creation be central, favoring Democrats?

Conservatives, recognizing that they may be forced by the high levels of public concern to engage on the issue of rising inequality, have already begun to develop strategies designed to shift blame back onto liberals.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who worked in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations, argued in a blog post published by Commentary that a Congressional Budget Office study shows that worsening inequality results in part from the fact that government transfer payments

have become less progressive. Why? In large measure because rising entitlement payments are going to wealthier seniors at the expense of lower-earning young people. For example, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments; in 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.

In a Nov. 15 speech at the Heritage Foundation, Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, called for addressing inequality by means testing Medicare coverage and Social Security benefits:

Rather than raising taxes and making it more difficult for Americans to become wealthy, let’s lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive. The President likes to use Warren Buffett and his secretary as an example of why we should raise taxes on the rich. Well, Warren Buffett gets the same health and retirement benefits from the government as his secretary, but our proposals to modestly income-adjust Social Security and Medicare benefits have been met with sheer demagoguery by leading members of the president’s party.

The issue of inequality is inherently dangerous for Republicans who are viewed by many as the party of the upper class.

An Oct. 19-24 CBS/New York Times poll asked respondents whether the policies of the Obama administration and the policies of Republicans in Congress favor the rich, the middle class, the poor or treat everyone equally. Just 12 percent said Obama favors the rich, while 69 percent said Republicans in Congress favor the rich.

In this debate, Obama and the Democrats have another factor in their favor – the unrelenting internal pressure on Republicans to remain loyal to conservative orthodoxy, even when such orthodoxy is a liability in the general election. Republicans are now falling directly into that trap.

Romney, desperate to discredit Gingrich’s surging bid, is setting the trap by attempting to create a new conservative litmus test that Gingrich cannot pass. Romney wants to make support for the radical Ryan budget — passed earlier this year by the House but rejected by the Senate — a must for every Republican candidate.

The non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that the Ryan plan “would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals” and “eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, converting these health programs largely to vouchers that low-income households, seniors, and people with disabilities could use to help buy insurance in the private health insurance market.”

In a May appearance on Meet the Press, Gingrich described the Ryan proposal as “right wing social engineering.” Now, Romney is running an online ad, “With Friends Like Newt, Who Needs The Left.” The ad quotes prominent conservatives criticizing Gingrich, ending with Pat Buchanan describing the former Speaker as “out of the left wing of the Republican Party” and Ryan asking, “With allies like that, who needs the left?”

Democrats are delighted to see Romney put the Ryan budget once again into the headlines. “When you go through what’s in the Ryan budget to voters in focus groups, they are horrified by it,” Democratic pollster Garin said. “The inequities of the Ryan budget are not just striking, they are shocking to people. To make Medicare much less affordable while continuing to add on new tax breaks for people at the very top is mind-blowing.”

It would be difficult to imagine the Republican establishment allowing the presidential nomination contest — in a climate of stark economic adversity for millions of unemployed Americans — to be defined by a fight between Romney and Gingrich over the Ryan budget. But already that vaunted establishment has arguably damaged the party’s prospects by failing to persuade a credible, compelling and charismatic competitor to enter the nomination fight, leaving the field to candidates widely viewed by party loyalists as vulnerable.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.”