A conservative vision for America Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it. Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.” Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?” His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem? Maybe making the U.S. a place where life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is conservatives’ solution to inmigration by brown-skinned people. I don’t know. But whatever-we-call-them is a peculiar pathology. A right-wing obsession. I tweeted in reply: “Mike, I kinda like knowing hurricanes & tornadoes are coming my way & using GPS to find my way, that my hamburger won’t kill me & produce grown via New Deal aqueducts is trucked over Eisenhower interstates & my plane…