Republican zombies go for brains in search of ideas.

Jonathan Rauch pings the dissonance among the members of the Lawn Jockey Caucus:

We know what happens when movements or parties continue to stagger forward after running out of ideas: They become zombies. Zombie parties are a recurrent feature of electoral democracies. Unable to articulate any coherent or workable governing philosophy, they mindlessly jab at cultural hot buttons, mechanically repeat hardwired tropes ("cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes"), nurse tribal resentments, ostracize independent thinkers. Above all, they feel positively proud of their doggedness. You can’t talk them out of it. Think of the Republicans in the FDR years, the Democrats in the Reagan years, the British Labour Party in the Thatcher period, and the British Conservative Party in the Blair period. Think of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party for most of the past half-century, or France’s Socialists today. To get a new brain, zombie parties usually need to spend years out of power or wait until a new generation rises to leadership.

"The refusal of so many of my fellow conservatives in the United States to adapt their thinking to facts and realities does not demonstrate their adherence to principle," David Frum recently wrote in Canada’s National Post. "It demonstrates a frivolous indifference to the responsibilities of political leadership." But Frum will tell you that his admonitions fall on deaf ears. "These days," he writes, "the question I hear most from political comrades is: ‘What the hell happened to you?’ " There are smart, modern people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. But the movement is in no mood to listen to them.

For a few years, movement conservatism will be able to subsist on recycled Reagan and opposition to Barack Obama’s liberalism. It will be dominated by its noisiest and most zealous elements: for example, by Palinism, the aggressive provincialism on display at the 2008 Republican convention. (Sarah Palin, it should be said, is herself a victim of Palinism; in a healthier party she would have blossomed into a more thoughtful politician.) Eventually, however, the movement will come to understand the need for a rethink. We will know its brainwaves are stirring when conservatives–mainstream ones, not just a few oddballs–begin to reconsider three self-defeating myths which today hold the movement prisoner.

One is that tax cuts make government smaller. This idea has had the great political merit of uniting supply-siders who never saw a tax cut they didn’t like, libertarians who want to shrink the government, and fiscal traditionalists who oppose deficits. But the past several decades have disproved it. When tax cuts increase deficits (that is, when they are not balanced by spending cuts), they reduce government’s apparent cost. They put government on sale, so to speak. When something goes on sale, people want more of it, and government is no exception. Instead of reducing the supply of government, unbalanced tax-cutting has increased the demand for it.

A second myth misunderstands Reagan, reducing him to a far less subtle figure than he was. An admirer of FDR and the New Deal, he had no interest in dismantling the welfare state. He never tried to do that. He raised taxes as both governor and president, and in 1983 he shored up Social Security, thus demonstrating, as he proclaimed, "for all time our nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security." True, he preferred a smaller government to a larger one, but his governing priority was to reduce the burden of government, and he understood that the most realistic way to do that was by limiting (not reversing) government’s growth while expanding the economy. Restrain the numerator, yes, but focus primarily on increasing the denominator.

Reagan was a conservative, all right: He sought to conserve the welfare state by making it sustainable and by expanding the zone of liberty around and beneath it. He largely succeeded. It was this achievement, not some non-existent assault on the New Deal or Great Society, that won Republicans the allegiance of millions of former Democratic voters.

Alas, a subsequent generation of conservatives, like the Apostles of the New Testament, never really grasped the master’s teachings. They accepted Reagan’s rhetoric at face value and imagined that what the public wanted was smaller government. That was the third myth. There is not a scintilla of evidence that voters, when presented with real trade-offs instead of merely with slogans, want government to shrink. Not even most conservative voters want that. Nor has any conservative, Reagan included, succeeded in chopping back the government’s size.

Sooner or later, American conservatism is going to have to make its peace with big government, as America’s Democrats and Britain’s Labour eventually made their peace with market capitalism. Sooner or later, conservatism will have to stop trying to relitigate the New Deal and the Great Society. And sooner or later it will do so, if only because it will have no alternative.