I am not sure if my cynicism is more a cause of my conservatism or a defense mechanism I've developed to withstand the sentimentalism employed by liberalism to shame its opponents, but it runs deep.
As a Christian, I think this is a spiritual problem. The universalism and concern for the poor and marginalized that characterize left liberalism are features it inherited from Christianity. The conservative Christian would say that liberalism exaggerates and distorts these features, having taken them out of context, but he cannot deny they are a part of his religion, too. Thus, he must both maintain enough objectivity to critique liberalism's claim to be the only morally upright response to the poor and marginalized, yet not actually let his heart be hardened against them.
It is not easy to do--particularly when you generally agree with liberals that the thing they're campaigning against is bad, and you don't have your own easy alternative solutions on hand. So, for instance, I agree that the modern market is creating great disparities in wealth and power and that this a problem for society. I largely agree that racial and sexual minorities often have it rough (though I don't entirely agree with them about the causes of this). And I don't really buy the official conservative rationalizations or solutions for these problems. Getting the government out of the way so that personal liberty and market economics can work their magic won't solve much of anything. The result is that my politics are largely negative--engaged in bursting the moral pretensions of the left, but without offering much of substance to replace it.
I would like to think that, fundamentally, this view of the world is not so much cynical as it is tragic. There are certain evils that cannot be eradicated from the human heart or human society because what is good and what is wicked in man are so tightly involved in each other that we cannot stamp out what is wicked without also crushing what is best in man. The wheat and the tares cannot be sorted out until the end.
So, I view the lot of the poor and the marginalized as, in some ways, built into the structure of reality, and I oppose efforts to alleviate their suffering that deny reality because these can only end by constructing an order that is fundamentally inhuman and insane. This means, sometimes, we have to say, "no". We do have duties to the poor and marginalized. Our hearts should be open to them, but their claims (or the claims of those who advocate on their behalf) cannot be unlimited. They have to evaluated critically and weighed against the claims of other goods.
In theory, that is not the same as indifference. In practice, it is hard to keep it distinct. This is particularly so in the face of the unending onslaught of guilt trips emanating from the moralistic zealots who speak on their behalf. Saying "no" in the face of a guilt trip takes some spine and maybe even a certain kind of callousness--or whatever it is that parents develop to avoid being manipulated by their children.
In parents, this callousness is (usually) countered and kept in check by a deeper natural sympathy--in fact, the callousness is usually in service to the deeper love. Most of us don't have that kind of natural sympathy for the poor and marginalized--so saying "no" without slipping into indifference (or worse) is a moral challenge.
