I actually was just rereading Adam Smith today and he has a section on this that is just fucking perfect:

When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state. It is the very state which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out to ourselves as the final object of all our desires. We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What pity, we think that any thing should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! … Every calamity that befalls them, every injury that is done to them, excites in the breast of the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment than he would have felt, had the same things happen to other men.

From “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”.

I wish more ‘conservatives’ would actually read Smith.