Conservatives – to say nothing of the Republican Party – are taking a drubbing lately as the Democrats move further and further left. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton aren’t just running against Republicans on welfare issues, but against the welfare reform measures signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996.

It’s time to take back that issue. Conservatives have as much a claim to being compassionate as liberals and progressives do.

What’s more, we have decades’ worth of evidence that Democratic solutions to poverty haven’t worked.

“Each year, the combined state and federal governments of the United States spend roughly $1 trillion fighting poverty,” wrote Evan Peter Smith of the Opportunity Project. “And nothing happens. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Even as government welfare spending exceeds our entire national defense budget, the welfare argument spun by the Left has remained as consistent as the poverty rate. And that perennial argument goes something like this: Liberals want to give the poor a safety net, and conservatives want to take that net away so the wealthy can pay less in taxes.”

That’s not true, of course. But it’s a persistent myth.

“The tragedy, however, is not that conservatives may be losing a rhetorical war against the Left to win over the votes of America’s poor,” Smith wrote. “No, the real tragedy is that the people who are actually on welfare are suffering because of it.”

Smith cited authors Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers, who recently published a book titled “The Human Cost of Welfare.”

The first step, those authors say, is to verbally acknowledge there’s a proper role for welfare, and in many cases, that role is being fulfilled.

“The safety net for some people works the way it’s supposed to,” Harvey says. “You lose a job, you go on food stamps for a couple of months, and then you go off. And that’s a system that works.”

But the system is flawed, and often it works against the best interests of those it is supposed to help. It traps some people in a cycle of poverty, he said.

“For these people, many are afraid of reaching what we call the ‘benefits cliff,’” Harvey says. “That is the point when they earn too much money, so they’re going to lose their benefits, perhaps unpredictably, and perhaps suddenly. The rules are there, but they are very complicated and hard to figure out.”

Smith urges conservatives to change the nature of the conversation.

“The new conservative welfare conversation would no longer be about malicious ‘welfare queens’ or con artists scamming the system, because these people are outliers in a broad system that also includes struggling single mothers, laid-off industrial workers and the working poor,” he wrote. “Rather, the conversation would be about encouraging upward mobility for those who are trapped in a system that gives them enough resources to put food on the table but little else.”

Conservatives are compassionate, too. The real debate is over how best to help those who need it.