Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry summarizes the goals of reform conservatism:
Reform conservatives believe that the GOP should put forward serious and credible policies that directly address the issue of family formation and breakdown. It will be good for the economy, good for people, 
and is a prerequisite to shrinking government over the long term since voters will not acquiesce to shrinking public handouts if they do not feel that they have private safety nets available, first among which is the family. Furthermore, as Jonathan V Last has pointed out, it’s good politics since family formation is a key driver of voting for the GOP.
The reform conservative blueprint, then, goes something like this: Address family formation seriously -> win elections -> make it easier to start families and have kids -> more families and more kids -> a better economy, a healthier society, less demand for big government, more GOP voters -> win more elections -> shrink government, grow the economy and civil society -> win more elections -> rinse, lather, repeat.
The alternative scenario would go something like this: Don’t address middle income voters’ day-to-day concerns seriously, don’t make family formation more affordable -> concede the field to Democrats -> increase economic and social insecurity -> increase demand for government -> lose elections -> government grows bigger -> social pathologies get worse -> keep conceding the field -> increase demand for government -> etc. 2012 was Act I of that nightmare scenario.
I need to fess up. I endorsed Ross’ and Reihan’s book, but took longer than they did to let go of my libertarian instincts in the face of yawning social inequality. It’s only been since the impact of the Great Recession sank in that I have truly come to terms with the fact that, say, flat taxes are irrelevant right now to our major problems, or that publicly subsidized private health insurance is an important response to a middle class facing an epic (if much predicted) employment and economic crisis.
I do believe, with Reihan and Ross, that supporting family formation is vital – hence my support for marriage equality (and my bafflement at Ross’ ambivalence). But my preference is for government to stop doing things that actively harm family life, rather than using money transfers to shore it up against some resilient social trends that may actually be helping marriage become more moral over time. Hence my passionate support for welfare reform in the 1990s. But there’s a core agreement: the times demand a different response than that imprinted on so many of us under Reagan-Thatcher; and encouraging self-government is the best way to keep big government at bay. If the GOP were to accept the principles of Romneycare/Obamacare, for example, they could then help reform the architecture to control costs better, empower individual choices more, and win people like me back.
Bouie makes the rather obvious but no less potent point that conservative reformers have almost no actual, you know, power:
The Republican Party is broken, and fixing it is the only way to bring long-term sanity to our politics. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of change. Last week, writers on the left and the right engaged in a debate over the conservative “reform” movement, and who counted as a “reformer.” It was a fascinating conversation with one major takeaway: Regardless of who “counts” as a reform, the obvious fact is that they have little influence over the current direction of the GOP. They lack the power necessary to challenge Republican leadership, break the party’s “fever,” and begin to reestablish it as a mainstream institution.
There is, as yet, no Tony Blair of the American right, grabbing his party by the scruff of the neck and forcing it to adapt to a new reality. And there is the persistence of the fundamentalist psyche which regards any sort of pragmatic accommodation to new political and economic realities as psychologically destabilizing. Yes, I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.” And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.
The greatest failure of the GOP is not realizing that Obama is a president they could have worked with on policy grounds, and whose relationship with them could have actually defused some of the very traits that suburban voters and most generations under 40 still find so disturbing in the GOP base.
Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.
And even the reformers are constrained. Have Ross or Reihan ever said that although they’d prefer a different healthcare reform, Obamacare is better than nothing? If they did, they’d be Frummed out. Or take Yuval Levin, recently tackled by Chait:
Levin may arrive at conclusions that gratify the tea party, but he does not merely rant against big government. He presents his analysis as the considered result of careful study. He harnessed himself, at least rhetorically, to a series of falsifiable claims. They are being falsified, but the restraints of his ideology give him no room to do anything but obfuscate.
I’d qualify that as the restraints that partisanship imposes on him. But they rode this tiger for so long it’s hard to feel pity as they try both to get off and not be eaten at the same time. Previous thoughts on the subject here.
The Dish 