I. A Long Way From Philadelphia
I really wouldn't be surprised if you can't remember a thing about the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. I was there, and I'm paid to pay close attention to these things, and I have only the gauziest recollections. According to my notes, it opened with a Hispanic girl singing the national anthem. Then there was a video of a black Baptist minister preaching from the pulpit of his church, and there was a Mexican dancer with a big sombrero. Chaka Khan sang a rousing finale. I remember joking that with all the whites in the audience and all the minority performers onstage, the whole thing looked like a Utah Jazz basketball game.
This was a party trying to shake off the harsh aura of Gingrichism. The daddy party was trying to show it had a mommy side too. Laura Bush delivered her speech in front of a bank of school desks, with charming, immobile kids arrayed behind her, and announced that her husband would strengthen Head Start. Colin Powell praised George W. Bush for making education the centerpiece of his campaign. Bush came on and saluted Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry, Sharing and Caring Hands, serves meals to the homeless.
In his acceptance speech, Bush noted that his father's generation had been called upon to fight epic battles against great foes. That, he said, was the ''generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps and delivered us from evil.'' But we, he continued, are living in a time of blessing. So instead of fighting wars, we're called to perform ''small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial.'' The emphasis was on the word ''small.'' This was a convention about intimate connections, local associations, tender emotions and domestic concerns. ''Sometimes, we are called to do great things,'' Bush later said. ''But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love.''
The 2004 convention is taking place in New York, only 80 miles away from the last one, but in a different universe. All Americans have been forced to pass through the portal marked by Sept. 11. As you look out at the delegates to this year's G.O.P. gathering, remember that these folks have fallen down a chute, and they have no idea where it lets out. When they nominated George Bush in 2000, they had no idea that Mr. Small Acts of Compassion was going to be transformed into Mr. Epic War Against Evil. They had no idea they were nominating a guy who was going to embark on a generational challenge to transform the Middle East. They had no idea they were nominating a guy who would create a huge new cabinet department for homeland security, who would not try to cut even a single government agency, who would be the first president in a generation to create a new entitlement program, the prescription drug benefit, projected to cost $534 billion over the next 10 years. They had no idea that a Republican-led government would spend federal dollars with an alacrity that Clinton never dreamed of, would create large deficits, would significantly increase the federal role in education, would increase farm subsidies, would pass campaign-finance reform and would temporarily impose tariffs on steel.
The Republicans who gather in New York this week love George Bush. They admire the stalwart way he has fought the war on terror. They understand why, post-Sept. 11, he has governed the way he has. But they are a little shellshocked by the unexpected transformation that has come over their party, and they do not know how it is going to turn out.
Democrats may imagine that the G.O.P. is an amalgam of fat cats and conservative ideologues, but things feel different inside Republican circles. Inside there are, beneath the cheering and the resolve, waves of anxiety, uncertainty and disagreement. You hang around Republicans, and you begin to hear all sorts of discordant things. Jesse Helms recently remarked he wouldn't have voted for the tax cut if he'd known how bad the deficit would become. Three of the senior right-wing columnists -- George F. Will, Robert Novak and William F. Buckley Jr. -- have come out, in their different ways, against the war in Iraq. I had lunch recently with a senior Republican official who said his party had succumbed; it was ''defeatist'' about reducing the size of government. As Will himself has observed, under President Bush, American conservatism is undergoing an identity crisis.
There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.
Whether the Republicans win or lose in November, the party of 2008 is not going to look like the party of 2004, any more than the party of 2004 looks like the party of 2000. Parties change radically, even while remaining true to some essential nature. The Republican Party is in the midst of that kind of change; the transition is nowhere near complete.
II.The Death of Small-Government Conservatism
Two big forces are driving the change. The first, obviously, is the war on Islamic extremism. As the historian Bruce Catton once observed: ''A singular fact about modern war is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society's roots are nourished.''
The second and more pervasive change is the death of socialism. Everybody can see how the collapse of the socialist dream has transformed left-wing parties like the British Labor Party. But, as David Frum observes, the death of socialism has transformed the Republican Party just as much as it has transformed the parties of the left.
For most of the 20th century, the conservative movement and the Republican Party were built to combat the inexorable spread of big government. Faced with that great threat, Republicans became Jeffersonian. If the left was going to embrace larger welfare states, the Republicans were going to become enthusiastic decentralizers, suspicious of concentrated power, the foes of big government. Anti-government sentiment was the glue that held the different factions of the American right together. And in that great cause the G.O.P. -- from Coolidge to Goldwater to Reagan -- was successful. Conservatives and libertarians defeated socialism, intellectually and then practically.
Socialism has stopped its march. Now almost every leading politician accepts that government should not interfere with the basic mechanisms of the market system. On the other hand, almost every leading official acknowledges that we should have as much of a welfare state as we can afford. Now the debate over the role of the state takes place within much narrower parameters.
The federal government has consumed roughly the same proportion of national wealth for three decades. The Clinton administration tried to increase significantly the size of government with its health care plan and was thrown back. Newt Gingrich tried to reduce significantly the size of government, and he, too, was thrown back. We will still argue about budgets, about new government programs and new tax cuts, but the size-of-government debate will not be the organizing conflict of the 21st century, the way it was for the 20th. Just as socialism will no longer be the guiding goal for the left, reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives, as the Republican Party is only now beginning to understand.
If you want to put a death date on the tombstone of small-government Republicanism, it would be Nov. 14, 1995. That was the day the new G.O.P. majority shut down the government. Gingrich, Dick Armey and others came to power with a list of hundreds of government programs and agencies they wanted to eliminate, including the Departments of Commerce, Energy and Education. They led what Grover Norquist called the Leave Us Alone coalition, the alliance of all those different Americans who wanted government to get out of their lives. Gingrich vowed to show the world ''how to end programs, not just create them.'' Republicans welcomed a showdown over the size of government because they were convinced that the public would be on their side. Faxes came over the machines vowing, ''No Compromise.'' Senator Phil Gramm celebrated the shutdown. ''Have you really noticed a difference?'' he reportedly asked.
The public did notice, as it turned out, and they didn't like it. Within a few years the Republicans were backtracking so furiously they were proposing to spend more money on the Department of Education than the Clinton administration thought to ask for.
III. Muddling Toward a Governing Philosophy
So now we have two sorts of Republicans. The first group is made up of people who still mouth the words about reducing the size of government but don't even pretend to live according to their creed. These Republicans, mostly in Congress, go home to their states and districts and rail against Washington and big government. Then when they get back to Capitol Hill they behave like members of any majority party. They try to use their control over the federal purse to buy votes. They embrace appropriations and champion pork with an enthusiasm that makes your eyes pop.
For them, the old anti-statist governing philosophy exists in the airy-fairy realm of ideals. When it actually comes time to make some decisions about priorities and spending, they have no governing philosophy and hence no discipline. The money just splurges out. ''The current version of the Republican Party is engaged in an outrageous spending binge, and they're being steadied and encouraged by Democrats,'' John McCain observed recently.
The money is appropriated in increments large and small -- a $180 billion corporate tax bill one week, a steady stream of pork projects all the rest. In 1994, there were 4,126 ''earmarks'' -- special spending provisions -- attached to the 13 annual appropriations bills. In 2004, there were around 14,000. Real federal spending on the Departments of Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services has roughly doubled since the Republicans took control of the House in 1994. This is a governing majority without shape, coherence or discipline.
The second group of Republicans is at least trying to come up with a governing philosophy that applies to the times. It understands the paradox that if you don't have a positive vision of government, you won't be able to limit the growth of government. If you can't offer people a vision of what government should do, you won't be able to persuade them about the things it shouldn't do. If the Republican Party is going to evolve into a principled majority party, members of this group are going to have to build a governing philosophy based on this insight.
To his credit, George Bush falls into this latter category. By the time he began his campaign for president in 1999, Bush understood that the simple government-is-the-problem philosophy of the older Republicans was obsolete. During that campaign, Bush criticized what he called the ''destructive mind-set: the idea that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved. An approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than 'Leave us alone.' '' Instead, Bush argued, ''government must be carefully limited but strong and active.''
In another speech, Bush noted, ''Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.'' He continued: ''Our founders rejected cynicism and cultivated a noble love of country. That love is undermined by sprawling, arrogant, aimless government. It is restored by focused and effective and energetic government.''
Compassionate conservatism was his attempt to come up with a new governing philosophy, a set of beliefs to guide Republicans as they tried to figure out what to do with power. Unfortunately, compassionate conservatism turned out to be a pretty thin tissue, and it was incinerated by the events of Sept. 11.
Since then, the Bush administration, while focusing on the war on terror, has been muddling toward a more appropriate governing philosophy. As Daniel Casse observed recently in Commentary magazine, ''It is impossible to ignore the ways in which the sometimes surprising and unorthodox politics [Bush] has been advancing, albeit unevenly, have created a new type of conservative agenda.''
On domestic policy, Casse writes, the Bush administration has agreed to greater federal spending in exchange for the seeds of market reform -- a big prescription drug benefit in exchange for the hint of a new approach to Medicare that emphasizes choice and accountability. This is not traditional big government, nor is it small government. It is strong government, Casse writes, which provides services while giving individuals choice about how they want them delivered.
This sort of conservatism measures its success not by how big or small government is but by the habits it encourages in its citizens. Does it encourage dependence or self-reliance? Does it sap individual initiative or give it new forums to exert itself? As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The National Journal: ''Conservatives have been obsessed with reducing the supply of government when instead they should reduce the demand for it; and the way to do that is by repudiating the Washington-knows-best legacy of the New Deal. Republicans will empower people, and the people will empower Republicans.''
Bush himself seems to agree. On July 21 he noted that while ''government should never try to control or dominate the lives of our citizens,'' nonetheless, ''government can and should help citizens gain the tools to make their own choices.''
This is not yet a governing philosophy. It is not yet a new identity for American conservatism. It is not yet an updated conservative agenda. But it is a glimmer of these things. It is the first glimpse of the sort of Republican Party we could see when the convention rolls around again in 2008.
Nobody knows who the nominee will be that year. It could be Bill Frist, Chuck Hagel, Rudy Giuliani, Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado or somebody else -- maybe even Arnold Schwarzenegger. But if the party is going to offer a positive, authoritative vision for the post-9/11 world, which is a world of conflict and anxiety, then it is going to have to develop a strong-government philosophy consistent with Republican principles. It will have to embrace a progressive conservative agenda more ambitious and fully developed than anything the Bush administration has so far articulated.
A candidate who does that would not need to launch an insurgency campaign against the Republican establishment, the way Goldwater did in 1964 or the way Reagan did in 1976. The fact is the Republican Party no longer has a coherent establishment left to inveigh against. Instead, a progressive conservative candidate would have to play a more constructive role. He would have to lay out a vision that would rebuild the bonds among free-market conservatives, who dream of liberty; social conservatives, who dream of decency; middle-class suburbanites, who dream of opportunity; and foreign-policy hawks, who dream of security and democracy. He would have to revive and update the governing philosophy that did bind these groups, and did offer such hope, in the early days of the G.O.P. Long before it was the party of Tom DeLay, the G.O.P. was a strong government/progressive conservative party. It was the party of Lincoln, and thus of Hamilton. Today, in other words, the Republican Party doesn't need another revolution. It just needs a revival. It needs to learn from the ideas that shaped the party when it was born.
IV. What Would Hamilton Do?
Today we have one political tradition, now housed in the Democratic Party, which believes in using government in the name of equality and social justice. We have another tradition, recently housed in the Republican Party, which believes, or says it believes, in restricting the size of government in the name of freedom and personal responsibility. But through much of American history there has always been a third tradition, now dormant, which believes in limited but energetic government in the name of social mobility and national union.
This third tradition was founded by Alexander Hamilton, embraced by Henry Clay and the Whig Party, taken up by Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party and brought into the 20th century by Theodore Roosevelt. It withered during the great 20th-century debate over the size of government (its philosophy was confusedly crossways to this debate), but it is this tradition the Republicans must embrace if they are to become the majority party for the next few decades.
This progressive conservative tradition is built on an admiration for a certain sort of individual: the young, ambitious striver, who works hard, makes something of himself, creates opportunities for others and then goes on to advance America's unique mission in the world. Alexander Hamilton was the first embodiment and definer of this creed. Hamilton came from nothing and spent his political career trying to create a world in which as many people as possible could replicate his amazing success.
Hamilton looked around after independence and saw a country destined to become the greatest empire of the earth (as he put it) but burdened with institutions that retarded social mobility and stifled development. The American economy was still mainly an agricultural economy, which trapped talented young people on the farm, where they could not cultivate the full range of their talents. Then there were the aristocratic families like Thomas Jefferson's, which exercised stranglehold control over the country's economic life.
Hamilton sought to smash all that, to liberate and stir Americans to exploit the full range of their capacities. As he wrote in his ''Report on Manufactures,'' ''To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted. . . . Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.'' Hamilton believed that people had inside them vast wells of untapped resources, and that it was the job of government to open up opportunities, to arouse, stimulate and cultivate an energetic populace so citizens could compete with one another.
First Hamilton had to break up the vested interests that encrusted American life. He did this, in part, by nationalizing the Revolutionary War debt. This, he said, would fuse the many insular local economies into one dynamic national economy. It would also lead to thriving credit markets. It would shift power away from the local landowners to commercial traders, who would move capital around looking for investment opportunities. Hamilton also created the Bank of the United States, to finance investments. He organized what we would now call federal scientific research.
He believed, in other words, in using government to enhance market dynamism by fostering more equitable competition. He believed government could usefully promote social revolutions, in his case the move from an agricultural to a commercial economy. In short, he rejected the formula, assumed too often today, that you can be for government or for the market, but not for both.
For his part, Hamilton saw entrepreneurial freedom, limited but energetic federal power and national greatness as qualities that were inextricably linked. It was always the cause of America, or rather, the cause America represents -- universal freedom -- that was uppermost in his mind. Hamiltonianism was about spurring individual initiative, but it was also about gathering the fruits of that energy in the cause of national greatness.
After Hamilton's death, the Hamiltonian spirit was carried on by the Whig Party. Self-conscious Hamiltonians like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster sought to apply Hamiltonian principles to their own day. Abraham Lincoln came of age in the Whig Party, inherited Hamiltonian understandings of economics and the nation and infused the Republican Party, founded in the 1850's, with those ideas and causes. Lincoln's program was based on a conception of man as laborer and climber. As the historian Gabor S. Boritt has written, ''Lincoln probably talked more about economics, to use the term in a broad sense, than any other issue, slavery included.'' Lincoln's first fully published speech was about banking. His first political pamphlet was about how to encourage national banks. His first address at a national forum was on how to stimulate economic growth. Even during the Civil War, Lincoln predicted, ''Finance will rule the country for the next 50 years.''
That was not a dour warning. In true Hamiltonian fashion, Lincoln embraced banking and finance capitalism because he saw bank credit as a new source of energy for American society. Around him, most of his countrymen opposed the spread of banks as the symbols and gestation centers for this new economic system, commercial-industrial capitalism, which threatened to upend old pastoral ways of living. But Lincoln spent much of his time as a state legislator supporting an Illinois bank, a local version of Hamilton's national bank.
Like Hamilton, Lincoln rose from obscurity to greatness; like Hamilton, he dreaded the thudding repetition of farm life; and like Hamilton he was obsessed with self-transformation and social mobility. Lincoln embraced the idea that each of us has a mission to work hard and get ahead. ''I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition,'' he declared in 1861.
His second great cause as a young politician was canal-building. Like Hamilton, he was an ardent champion of ''internal improvements'' and lobbied vigorously for a canal to be built to improve the navigability of the Sangamon River, because he thought it would replace the torpid, pastoral economy of his region with a humming, churning new economy, which would lure immigrants and create economic opportunity.
Like Hamilton, Lincoln was indifferent to his own wealth. Rather, he wanted economic development because it meant more fluidity, more competition, more opportunity. For him, the market was admirable because it cultivated a certain sort of upward-climbing individual.
This free-labor ideology was a contract. Individuals would be held responsible for their own behavior. But government would do what it could to open up opportunities, so that people would have second and third and fourth chances to succeed. During Lincoln's presidency, this government philosophy produced a raft of legislation: the creation of a single currency, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land Grant College Act, the railroad legislation and so on. All of these initiatives were designed to stimulate, energize and unify the nation. The Homestead Act placed land in the hands of families. The Land Grant College Act promoted the spread of practical knowledge. These Republicans were not trying to care for the downtrodden or shelter them. They were trying to open fields of enterprise.
They acted even though they were skeptical about federal power. They knew about cultures of dependency and how they could grow; they worried that public or private charity, even for basic supplies like food, would corrode habits of self-reliance. They were just as suspicious of government bureaucracy as today's Republicans are. But still they acted.
They acted because no social transformation is without its dark side. Industrialism was wreaking havoc on some communities, even as it improved others. It was dislocating thousands. The early Republicans sought to open up new lands and new opportunities so those on the losing end of the Industrial Revolution would have new places to succeed.
The next great figure in this tradition was Theodore Roosevelt. He, too, believed in the marriage of individual economic opportunity with political and cultural union. He believed in the character-building force of competition, its ability to produce individuals who possessed the vigorous virtues he lauded in his 1905 inaugural address: ''energy, self-reliance and individual initiative.''
Roosevelt, too, believed that government must sometimes play an active role to give everybody a fair shot in the race of life. ''The true function of the state, as it interferes with social life,'' he wrote, ''should be to make the chances of competition more even, not to abolish them.'' In his day, corporate corruption was as big a threat to free competition as socialist revolution, and Roosevelt detested both. As he observed,''Every new social relation begets a new type of wrongdoing -- of sin, to use an old-fashioned word -- and many years always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into a crime which can be effectively punished by law.''
Roosevelt was an ardent champion of reform, believing that a corrupt and ineffective government would breed cynicism and despondency. He believed in aggressive policies to preserve national cohesion; to strengthen the bonds nourished by our culture and national environment. He believed in America's unique mission in world history. As he argued in his famous Strenuous Life speech at a Hamilton Club in 1899, ''We cannot sit huddled within our borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.'' He increased the number of American battleships from 9 to 25 and more than doubled the number of sailors, so the U.S. could project power around the world. He was an ardent nationalist.
Of course Hamilton, Lincoln and Roosevelt were complicated individuals whose careers contained diverse and sometimes conflicting strands. But they do belong in one tradition, a tradition newly appropriate for life today.
V. A New Conservative Platform
If we turn to the future, it's easy to see some of the tasks that strong-government conservatism will champion.
The War on Islamic extremism. The first great agenda item has been thrust upon us. This has been miscast as a war on terror, but terror is just the means our enemies use. In reality, we're fighting a war against a specific brand of Islamic extremism, a loose federation of ideologues who seek to dominate the Middle East and return it to the days of the caliphate.
We are in the beginning of this war, where we were against Bolshevism around 1905 or Fascism in the early 1930's, with enemies that will continue to gain strength, thanks to the demographic bulge in the Middle East producing tens of millions of young men, politically and economically stagnant societies ensuring these young men have nothing positive to do and an indoctrination system designed to turn them into soldiers for the cause. This fight will organize our politics for a generation, as the Cold War did.
The first task is to build a new set of strong federal and multinational institutions to defeat this foe. Obviously the intelligence community needs to be reorganized. The military needs to be bulked up, and public diplomacy needs to be rethought. Somebody has to develop a counterideological message that is more than just: ''We're Americans. We're really decent people. We're nice to Muslims.''
We need to strengthen nation-states. The great menace of the 20th century was overbearing and tyrannical governments. The great menace of the 21st century will be failed governments, because those are the places where our enemies will be able to harbor and thrive, where violence can nurture and grow, where life is nasty, brutish and short.
We are going to have to construct a multilateral nation-building apparatus so that each time a nation-building moment comes along, we don't have to patch one together ad hoc. In the 1990's we thought free markets were the first things new nations needed to thrive and grow. Now we know that law and order is the first thing they need. We are going to have to construct new institutions to help nations develop rule of law within their boundaries, for if that is not accomplished, all the economic development in the world will not help.
Entitlement reform. At home, the most obvious and daunting problem is runaway entitlement spending. Right now, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security consume 8 percent of U.S. G.D.P. By 2040 these programs will consume 17 percent. In other words, these programs will swallow a sixth of the national wealth, requiring massive tax hikes to support them. That's simply unsupportable if we are to maintain a vibrant, growing economy.
Just as bad, entitlements will devour the federal budget. It will become impossible to create new programs to deal with new problems. The government will become a giant, immobile entitlement machine. The U.S. will follow Europe down the route of welfare-state stagnation, with growing burdens, aging populations, limited growth and horrendous choices.
The solution is clear: push back the retirement age, reduce benefits for upper-income people, redesign the welfare state so that individuals have control over their own benefits packages. That means designing programs that allow people to have their own health insurance, which they can carry from job to job; to control their own unemployment insurance and tailor their retraining efforts to suit their own talents; to invest part of their own pension money and benefit from higher returns, so they have greater incentives to save on their own. It means reforming the health care system so competition works as it does in every other sphere -- to improve value, spur innovation and reduce costs. Our current welfare state produces either no competition or warped and ineffective competition.
Social mobility. America remains a remarkably mobile society, but at the bottom ends of the education and income scales, we're seeing an ever-larger group of people unable to rise and succeed. Over the past two decades there has been a sharp rise in the number of people who define themselves to pollsters as ''have-nots.'' Though poverty has declined since 1988, the number of blacks who call themselves ''have-nots'' has risen to 48 percent from 24 percent. The number of whites who use that phrase to describe themselves has risen to 28 percent from 17 percent. These perceptions have been rising steadily over the Bush, Clinton and Bush presidencies.
When people call themselves ''have-nots,'' they are not only commenting on their current economic status. They are also commenting on their prospects. They are saying that they do not see any plausible way they are going to make it and thrive in this society. This is poisonous. It is doubly poisonous because African-Americans feel this way in such high numbers. In other words, not only is there a perceived lack of opportunity, but this perception also rubs raw at the central wound that runs through our entire history: racial inequality.
Worst of all, this is not just perception. People without skills really do have limited prospects in the world. There really is a huge achievement gap. By high-school graduation, the average Hispanic or African-American student is roughly four years behind the typical white or Asian student, and this gap has been getting worse over the past 15 years, despite $100 billion in Title I money spent to reduce it. The results are obvious and horrific. According to one study, 44 percent of urban African-American men without a high-school degree are idle all year round. Lacking jobs, they lack prospects. This is an affront to our identity as the land of opportunity, a menace to the Lincolnian vision of a hypermobile society and ruinous to our social fabric.
Conservatives know that any solution begins with culture. Successful families raise successful people. They raise children who lead stimulated, rich and reinforced lives, who are not plopped in front of the TV, who are not starved of discipline and affection. They raise people instilled with bourgeois values -- industry, responsibility, loyalty and decency. They are more likely to understand that they are responsible for their own choices, not victims of social forces. Most of all, they are more likely to have the sort of soft skills -- the ability to control your emotions, to greet a new person and make a good impression, to have confidence in your ability to succeed -- that are absolutely essential in the marketplace.
Progressive conservatives understand that while culture matters most, government can alter culture. It has done it in bad ways, and it can do it in good ways. Government agencies are now trying to design programs to encourage and strengthen marriage. Early- childhood intervention programs were not a conservative idea, but they work, and any decent party will embrace them.
Wage subsidies, originally a Republican idea, would also strengthen families. The welfare reform movement has lifted people off welfare and into jobs, but it has not lifted them out of poverty in sufficient numbers. If we're to encourage work, then we must be sure that work is rewarded. The earned income tax credit does that. Other wage- subsidy ideas have been proposed, for example a simplified family credit that would replace the E.I.T.C., the child tax credit and other tax credits and exemptions to provide working families with one, simple benefit.
Then there are the schools. For most of the 20th century, Republicans reacted with horror at the thought of a significant federal role in education. ''Local control'' was the mantra. That's over. More and more conservatives understand that local control means local monopolies and local mediocrity. Most Republicans, happily or not, have embraced a significant federal role in education -- to smash the education monopolies, enforce consequences for schools that don't meet achievement standards and free individual schools and principals to find the best ways to succeed.
We've had wave after wave of education reforms over the past two decades. Each one of them gets sucked into the bog of the system. We have given principals faux responsibility for their schools. We have laid down faux standards for achievements. We have given a few parents faux choice. It's time to shake up fundamentally the self-serving network of bureaucracies and unions. Charter schools, in which school leaders can actually control their own enterprises, can still make a difference, despite the problems many are having in getting started (and despite the premature attacks that have recently been leveled against them). There should be a federal Homestead Act for charters, providing them with start-up capital for new buildings and equipment. Vouchers can make a difference, especially in areas where schools are demonstrably failing.
Certification rules need to be revamped so a wider variety of Americans can teach. Compensation shouldn't be based primarily on seniority but on performance. Innovators should get bonuses, as in any other field. Principals should not be drawn exclusively from the ranks of teachers but also from the ranks of business, the military and other fields. The federal government needs to insist, through national tests like the current national assessment exams, that all American students graduate with a basic knowledge of American history and institutions, simply as a matter of good citizenship.
Restore the integrity of our institutions. Not long ago, there was a clear distinction between conservatives and Republicans. Conservatives believed in principles; Republicans sold out. Conservatives admired capitalism but understood that businesspeople fundamentally did not like competition and would much rather use their lobbying power to induce government to protect them from competition, to confer unfair advantages, to offer them subsidies and to issue regulations that blocked future competitors.
Over the past few years the distinction between conservative and Republican has eroded. Under Tom DeLay, the conservative movement has fused with the K Street brigades. There are now few ideological checks on the corporate community's desire to use government to stifle competition. Now it is conservatives who often embrace special tax breaks, special subsidies, special regulatory sinecures. This is a cancer on modern conservatism, and most every conservative in his or her heart knows it.
People in the strong-government tradition do not believe in active government for the sake of active government, but for the sake of competition. Some future president needs to go through the budget and rake out the tens of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies. They can be reduced only all at once, in a great sweep that overwhelms the parochial lobbying campaigns that groups will mount on behalf of each one. They can be reduced only as part of a larger tax-reform effort that will simplify the code, flatten rates and clean out the morass of credits, deductions, phaseouts, differential taxation arrangements, double-taxation provisions, alternative-minimum-tax fiascoes and growth-inhibiting distortions.
Everybody understands that our budget and tax systems have become dishonorable, favoring the well connected, neglecting everybody else, breeding cynicism and sapping national morale. These systems will never be pure and pork-free. But every few years somebody has to come in and clean out the encrustations that inevitably develop.
The energy revolution. Our current energy supplies are economically unsustainable and politically dangerous. For conservatives, the first task is to move the debate beyond its politically ruinous confines. Republicans currently stand for production, the cultivation of existing technologies and a sometimes callous disregard for the environment. Democrats stand for conservation, the cultivation of environmentally sensitive but unrealistic technologies and a sometimes callous disregard for economic growth.
In halting and inconsistent ways, the Bush administration is trying to crash through all this. It vows to pursue ''transformational technologies.'' The administration has proposed spending $1.7 billion to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Dozens of other ideas are floating around: reviving nuclear energy, fusion, new coal extraction techniques and so on. But these proposals are too modest, out of proportion to the problems that confront us. This is a perfect sphere for limited but energetic government, for a government that stimulates innovation but does not succumb to the lure of industrial policy making, of picking one technology over another and thus, for political reasons, shutting off avenues of innovation.
National service. American society is now rife with forces that encourage people to think about their own success, to cultivate their own gardens, to segment themselves off into their own cultural cliques. There should be at least one moment in life when people are encouraged to serve a cause larger than self-interest, fuse their own efforts with those from other regions and other walks of life and cultivate a spirit of citizenship.
For the sake of character development and national union, national service should be a rite of passage for young Americans. Senators Evan Bayh and John McCain have proposed one plan. Young volunteers would go through a boot camp experience, taking them out of the rhythms of their lives, forcing them to endure a fiber-testing ordeal along with people unlike themselves. They could either join an expanded AmeriCorps or serve for 18 months in the military, helping out with noncombat duties.
As William F. Buckley, Jr. once wrote: ''Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight. National service, like gravity, is something we could accustom ourselves to, and grow to love.''
y using government in limited but energetic ways, conservatives could establish credibility that would enable them to reduce the size of government where it is useless or worse -- export subsidies, agricultural subsidies and the like. Then they could use that credibility to reduce the increases in entitlement spending -- the giant set of programs that crowd out everything else.
More than that, conservatives have it in their power to refashion the political landscape. American politics is now polarized, evenly divided and stagnant. It has become like World War I. Each party is down in its trench, lobbing the same old arguments, relying on the same old coalitions. Neither party is able to gain a lasting advantage. Neither party is able to accomplish much that it is proud of.
Trench warfare finally ended because somebody invented the tank. It is time for one party or another to invent the tank, some new governing philosophy that will broaden its coalition and transform the partisan divide. For Republicans, the progressive conservative governing philosophy is the tank. It is the approach to politics best suited to the emerging suburban civilization, best suited to life during a war on Islamic extremism. It is the way Republicans can build a governing majority and leave a positive mark on the nation and its destiny.
David Brooks is a Times columnist. His latest book is ''On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense.''
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s regressive milestones go, few are as frightful in this new era of homeland security as the decision by Congress and the Bush administration to allow the expiration of the 10-year-old law protecting the public from assault rifles and other rapid-fire battlefield weapons. The law - a far from perfect but demonstrably effective restraint on high-tech gunslingers - expires on Monday with not a whimper from the White House. 
here are two sorts of people in the information-age elite, spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.
ach time 
t was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head shots captioned with good old American names:
t's the dishonesty, stupid. The real issue in the National Guard story isn't what 
ondon — The most remarkable feature of the modern workplace has nothing to do with computers, automation or globalization. Rather, it lies in the Western world's widely held belief that our work should make us happy.
ITH oil prices hovering above $40 a barrel, experts have calmed frayed nerves by noting that today's services-driven American economy is much less addicted to the black stuff than yesterday's industrial economy. From 1973 to 2003, after all, the amount of oil and gas needed to create a dollar of gross domestic product fell by half. Structural changes in the economy have let the nation absorb the recent shock of rising crude. 
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