Reformish conservatives: meet the handful of conservative writers who are suggesting, respectfully, that the GOP change its policies.

• Author: Cooper, Ryan

There are two striking facts about the apparent glasnost that has broken out among Republicans since their shocking (to them) November election losses. The first is how timid the rethinking has been so far. There is much talk, in the Republican National Committee's recent "autopsy" report and elsewhere, of the need to change the party's "messaging," but little about the need to change the policies behind the messaging. The second striking fact is how long it's taken just to get this far. The GOP failed to win a majority of votes in five of the last six presidential elections. Only now is the party beginning to wonder out loud if maybe its doctrinaire conservative approach to politics isn't working.

The Democratic Party's equivalent period of soul searching played out quite differently. As early as the late 1970s, a major rethinking of traditional liberal ideas and policies about crime, welfare, entitlement programs, and much more was under way at magazines like the Washington Monthly and the New Republic--this at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. In 1984, only four years after Ronald Reagan's first presidential win, reformist Democrats had their own popular primary candidate, Gary Hart. In 1985, the centrist-reform Democratic Leadership Council was founded. By 1988, two charter members of the DLC, Al Gore and Richard Gephardt, were running for president. By 1992, a former DLC chairman, Bill Clinton, won the office.

Compare this to Republicans. It's two decades after Bill Clinton's first presidential victory, and there is still no Republican equivalent of the DLC. During last year's GOP primary, the only candidate who ran as a moderate reformer, don Huntsman, garnered almost no party support, quit in disgust, and started advocating for a third party.

The one commonality between the two reform periods is that, as with Democrats in the 1970s, the rethinking on the right today, such as it is, is being led by a loose network of reformist writers and policy intellectuals--though the task on the conservative side is more treacherous than it generally was for liberals. In 2005, former Reagan Treasury official and Jack Kemp acolyte Bruce Bartlett questioned the fiscal rectitude of the Republicans for, among other things, adding an expensive new entitlement, Medicare Part D, without budget cuts or tax increases to offset the massive new costs. For his temerity, his employer, the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free market think tank, fired him. Five years later, conservative journalist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum criticized Republicans for failing to negotiate with Democrats on Obama-care; he too lost his job, at the American Enterprise Institute.

Most of the conservative journalists and writers who make up the reformist camp today--people like Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam of the National Review, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, and Yuval Levin of National Affairs--have been more tentative and selective in their critiques of Republican policy than Bartlett and Frum. The average conservative reformist output consists of about three articles bashing liberal statism for every one questioning Republican dogma. To retain an audience among Republicans, one must be "considerate of the contours of conservative opinion," Ponnuru told me.

By being careful in what they say, a number of these writers have built audiences among party elites, and increasingly so since November, according to interviews with Republican House and Senate staffers. "They're addressing ideas in policy spaces where there may be gaps," says Neil Bradley, an aide to Eric Cantor. "Ramesh is widely regarded as a smart and insightful thinker," agrees a Senate Republican aide. The reformists are read in Marco Rubio's office; Paul Ryan's office is a fan of Levin.

It is easy, however, to exaggerate their influence. "There is a cultural gulf," says John Feehery, a former staffer for Tom De-Lay and Dennis Hastert, between the reformist writer-intellectuals, with their New York/Washington sensibilities, and Republican officeholders, with their base of voters in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia. The reformists "are speaking the language of policy," notes Feehery, while the base "is speaking the language of hating Obama."

Frankly, the Republican reformists face an extremely steep climb. In the '80s, the Democratic reform project was helped enormously by the fact that their ideas were eagerly embraced by Democratic politicians of the day from red states and swing districts who were looking for fresh ideas that would appeal to the moderate voters they needed to win. Today's Republicans, by contrast, are mainly concerned with avoiding a primary challenge from the right in 2014 and often seem barely interested in ideas at all, flesh or otherwise. Compared to ages past, "there is a lot less entrepreneurship in the House GOP," says Ponnuru. Too many congressional Republicans "just wait for instructions." But if in 2016 a Republican presidential contender can break free from the death grip of conservative Know-Nothingism and still succeed electorally, the...