The Conservative Descent

"Holding aside whether these policies would work--I leave that question to the policy experts--such ideas, at least for the moment, have no prospect of support inside the Republican Party, as currently dominated by three key constituencies: the religious right, the neoconservatives, and the pro-business, anti-tax radicals. The age of Reagan, growing out of the distempers of the 1960s and 1970s, gradually produced a Republican Party very different from the one he led to victory. Ever since, the GOP has devoted itself to conducting crusades rather than to conducting the business of politics and government. Gone is the willingness to compromise and maneuver that helped make Reagan himself a successful politician and president. Gone, too, is almost any trace of the moderate Republicanism that, under Reagan, helped check the more zealous ideologues inside the White House. With Bush leaving office, there will no longer be even a remnant of the old party establishment that Reagan married to the New Right."

In The American Prospect, Sean Wilentz reviews Donald T. Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, David Frum's Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, and Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.