In a comment, Professor Lawler argued:

Would is a modal auxiliary verb, like will, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must, and sometimes need and dare. They have their own very irregular syntax and meanings. Calling some of them "past tense" is historically accurate, but the usage died away except for idioms long ago, and modals don't otherwise inflect for tense, and rarely have any tenselike meanings, so I'm one of the linguists who don't call some, but not other, uses of would "past tense".

Although the comment does not explicitly say so, it, in virtue of being posted on this page, pragmatically implicates, that the sentence that the question is about cannot be classified as to tense. In the comments that followed, tchrist defended a stronger claim, that we should not use tense to describe modal verbs, such as would, at all.

(This is posted here as a 'community wiki' answer to make it easier for the future visitors to the page to see the full array of possible views of the matter.)

In a comment, Professor Lawler argued:

Would is a modal auxiliary verb, like will, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must, and sometimes need and dare. They have their own very irregular syntax and meanings. Calling some of them "past tense" is historically accurate, but the usage died away except for idioms long ago, and modals don't otherwise inflect for tense, and rarely have any tenselike meanings, so I'm one of the linguists who don't call some, but not other, uses of would "past tense".

Although the comment does not explicitly say so, it, in virtue of being posted on this page, pragmatically implicates, that the sentence that the question is about cannot be classified as to tense. In the comments that followed, tchrist defended an apparently stronger claim, that we should not use tense to describe modal verbs, such as would, at all.

(This is posted here as a 'community wiki' answer to make it easier for the future visitors to the page to see the full array of possible views of the matter.)