I'm confident in these predictions about the future in part because I think that the right and left alike are fooling themselves about the degree of support, in movement conservatism today, for ideological anti-statism, Randian utopianism, or the notion that medical care should just be denied to sick citizens.

There is widespread cognitive dissonance on the right when it comes to social welfare and redistribution of wealth generally.

Conservatives are partly to blame for this confusion. Consider talk-radio entertainer Mark Levin, a favorite of many movement conservatives. If you accept the argument in his bestselling book, Liberty and Tyranny, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and that America would be better with FDR's legacy undone.

But if you listen to Levin's radio show, you won't hear him agitating for the repeal of those programs or vilifying everyone who supports them as rotten statists. He understands that his audience of relatively wealthy, relatively older, mostly white conservatives don't want to end those social-welfare programs. They want to continue benefitting from them.

There is widespread cognitive dissonance on the right when it comes to social welfare, a social safety net, and the redistribution of wealth generally. Self-described conservatives often articulate their first principles as if they oppose all welfare spending. But they don't actually think food stamps or welfare checks for impoverished families should be eliminated, which helps explain why redistributive social-welfare spending exists in red states as well as blue states, in red counties as well as blue counties, across Republican as well as Democratic majorities.

Conservatives talk tough. They're convinced the system has a lot of waste and fraud. The idea of freeloading hucksters on welfare outrages them to a degree far out of proportion to other government waste, sometimes for discreditable reasons. They're not all talk on welfare cuts, but their bark is worse than their bite.

This is most obvious when one examines the candidates behind whom the conservative movement rallies and what happens when they actually win elections. No one who reads Ayn Rand carefully could mistake the world she hoped to create for any program by any Republican president or congressional majority. The height of movement conservatism under Reagan did not even begin to undo the New Deal. President George W. Bush expanded social welfare in the healthcare system. Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney, the conservative alternative to McCain in 2008, can be mistaken for ideological anti-statists.

Romney either embodied or understood this cognitive dissonance better than most. He did his best to bring universal health insurance to Massachusetts, bragged about all the people he helped, and then, some years later, told donors that his opponent's supporters were just takers who vote blue for the social-welfare bribes. Remember how during the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries, Romney reinvented himself at every opportunity even as he insisted he'd been the same guy all along? That was the cognitive dissonance in conservatism personified.