Let’s give Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt: He didn’t really mean it when he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Or, let’s just say he cares about them no less than he cares about the rest of us. Only 41 percent of respondents in a recent poll said that Romney “cares about people like me,” so if the wisdom of crowds is any guide, the very poor are hardly unique as objects of his indifference.

Let’s look instead at Romney’s follow-up: That there’s a “safety net” for the very poor, and “if there are holes in it, I’ll fix them.” This isn’t just a walk-back of the “not concerned” comment. It represents a very real element of an emerging conservative argument, one that deserves to be taken seriously. In this antiquated vision of the economy, everything is fine for most people, but there is a slice of the “very poor” who might need some help. Poverty, in this vision, is the exception; prosperity and opportunity without government aid is the norm. (Jonathan Cohn noted yesterday that Romney and his party aren’t serious about repairing the safety net, but for our purposes, let’s take him at his word.)

In some ways, Romney’s poverty-exceptionalism is an old postwar liberal vision. John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society, wrote about “islands” of poverty in the midst of plenty. Michael Harrington’s breakthrough in The Other America, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year, was to show that poverty was whiter and more widespread than Galbraith had assumed, touching perhaps 40 million people, which was still just one fifth of the country. (Today we’d call it “the 20%”.) William Julius Wilson, in his 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, called for a focus not so much on the breadth of poverty, but on its depth and intractability in one of Galbraith’s “islands,” the black inner-city. Much liberal philanthropy and social services are still driven by a vision not of the economy as a whole, but of poverty as a distinct and identifiable exception within an otherwise functioning system.

Often, it was conservatives and Republicans who challenged the poverty-exceptionalism of liberals. Ronald Reagan, for example, was a supporter of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefited not the very poor, but those who had low incomes even though they worked. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, both Republicans and Democrats gradually built out programs like Medicaid to extend beyond the poverty line, a long trend that culminated in the mandatory expansion of Medicaid by an estimated 16 million people in the Affordable Care Act, as well as the subsidies for people earning up to four times the poverty line. To the extent that the 1996 welfare reform “worked,” it was in part because of these expansions: They ensured that people wouldn’t automatically lose all their other supports if they moved from the ranks of welfare recipients to the working poor. The idea that the safety net could be a trap, unless some of its benefits were extended to the working poor and even beyond, was not purely a conservative idea, but it was a point of significant bipartisan agreement.

Romney, and a new group of conservative thinkers, have aggressively rejected this consensus. Romney attacks our current “entitlement society” as “a fundamental corruption of American society” because it provides benefits to a large swath of society. The “entitlement society,” Romney has said, “makes us all poor,” because it encourages so many of us to rely on the government for services. William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute has made a similar argument in his book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. The extension of benefits and supports to the working poor and beyond, Voegeli argues, knows no natural boundaries and will eventually consume all our resources. This new-ish argument is an extension of the claim made by deficit hawks such as David Walker of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that an “entitlement crisis” is the cause of long-term budget deficits. But Romney, like Voegeli, takes it much, much further: “The battle we face today is more than a fight over our budget. It is a battle for America’s soul.” Government programs for the non-poor, in other words, are not just expensive, but actually detrimental to the vast majority of their beneficiaries.