1. Ethics and government accounting reform: these are prime opportunities for traditional conservative/libertarian skepticism and policies — particularly since the Right and the Progressives are at least philosophically aligned on the underlying goals.
2. Entitlement and tax systems: these areas are fundamentally unsustainable and a bureaucratic mess, as well. As the tax system and entitlement burden grow worse — and they likely will in the near future – there should be opportunities for reforms that simplify each and reduce the disconnect between future costs and benefits.
3. Energy policy: the “Manhattan Project” metaphor is invoked often, and it’s quite appropriate. There is a potentially large coalition that could be mobilized behind nuclear energy as a solution to a variety of problems, many of which would appeal to the Right and Center, which McCain needs to win public approval.

McCain needs to divorce himself from many of the trite and ineffectual tactics of the Right, but that can be a reinvigoration of, rather than a divorce from, the Right. Indeed, much as was the case with the Democrats over the past 10 years, there is a genuine hunger on the Right for better representation — better people and better ideas to accomplish core ideals.

McCain could be that politician for the Right, but the current environment and McCain’s “Progressive Republican” orientation strongly suggest he will be more likely to triangulate to solve the political issue du jour than to be a policy innovator for the limited government movement.

Third, Schmitt indulges in the common liberal (Lefty? Progressive?) argument that the current state of affairs came about “not because [the Republican Party] failed conservatism but because conservatism failed.” I am a pragmatic libertarian – a skeptic of government -- and not a conservative, so I won’t defend the particulars of the conservative philosophy, only the broad sense on which libertarians and conservatives generally agree. Glenn Greenwald once described conservatism as “a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens.” If skepticism of government and belief in the restraint of government power is the “fundamental” basis of the ideology, then it’s hard to see how the ideology has failed. The Right made the “limited government” arguments, but never had the politically viable game plan for doing something about it; once elected, they were captive to the systemic incentives to distribute rewards to the rent-seeking interest groups.

It is not the ideology that has failed. Indeed, while the politicians themselves have failed, that is not even the root of the problem. What has really failed is the movement itself. A political movement’s support system is its destiny. The Right has a support system that ultimately supports the Republican Party, not the ideology. Rather than creating an infrastructure that develops and implements politically viable ideas for effectively limiting government, the Right has built an infrastructure for a political party that can appeal to the public’s range of “conservative” interests, but cannot implement them. The Right’s infrastructure is sustaining only half of the equation – the maintenance of power, without the implementation of the vision.

A half-vast right wing conspiracy is not enough.

As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, the Right’s grassroots coalition is fundamentally anti-State and anti-Left. But when the Republicans controlled the State and the Left controlled nothing, it was difficult to maintain an anti-State/anti-Left coalition. It was even more difficult to maintain an anti-State, anti-Left narrative about the putative goals of the Right. Directionless, the party and the movement mainly focused on maintaining power which in turn lead to a directionless, frequently corrupt, race by conservatives to maintain and consolidation institutional and personal power. With no countervailing grassroots force that could deliver messaging, mobilization and money for a constructive limited government vision, the Right had, to borrow from Benjamin Disraeli, merely climbed to the top of the greasy pole.

The Right does not need to build a better Republican Party. The Right needs to build a better Movement. Specifically, the Right needs…

1. A politically viable vision for limited government, focusing on changing the underlying incentives that make good government so difficult in the first place: more legislative and accounting transparency, ethics oversight and reform, a more rational, less distortion tax policy with a price mechanism for spending, reforming entitlements into genuine safety nets that protect the poor.
2. A communications infrastructure to promote that vision.
3. A political infrastructure to get people who support that vision elected.
4. A grassroots activist infrastructure that exists outside the political establishment to prevent the legislative capture of Republican politicians — to operate as a de facto grassroots whip for the vision of limited government being pursued, responsive not to the exigencies of maintaining power, but to the viable political interests of the base

We have two and three, to some extent, though they need dramatic modernization. We still need the encapsulation and distribution of #1 that will allow the Right to create #4. The best motivator for that, of course, will be a period of Democratic dominance. If the Republican Party merely reinvigorates its anti-Left wing, then -- at some distant date in the future, when the public is again tired of the political culture, but thinks it is just tired of Democrats -- we will likely see a normal political pendulum swing back to Republicans. And Republicans will probably reproduce the “reformation, consolidation of power, corruption” cycle that typically occurs. That won’t advance the ball for the Right.

Instead, the Right must develop its anti-State sentiments -- the Leave Us Alone coalition, as some call it -- to make an effective argument for changing, not just the politicians, but the political culture itself. If history and public choice theory are useful guides, I expect the Democrats will provide the fuel necessary to re-build and re-arm the anti-State and anti-Left coalitions. Hopefully, when Democrats reach their inevitable, indulgent phase of self-propagation and political corruption, we will have movement and an infrastructure that genuinely believes in the restraint of political power: a Republican Party, if we can keep it.

--Jon Henke