Meet Jeb’s New New Right

[DonViejo]

James Poulos

Now that Jeb Bush is talking up “reform conservatism”, it’s time to take a look at who the reformocons actually are—and what they can do to actually win the debate.

Of Jeb Bush’s many gifts to the Washington echo chamber, one of the least predictable and most interesting is his reintroduction of “reform conservatism” to the political debate. As Reihan Salam has observed at Slate, major media outlets are looking for a way to capture how Bush differs from his brother, and one possibly fruitful way of doing it is in reference to the rising role of “reformocons” on the right.

Rather than a Republican answer to the relatively moderate New Democrats, writes Salam, or “clever marketers trying to rebrand Reaganism for the 21st century,” reformocons are “garden-variety free-market conservatives”—who just happen to insist “that government can do a lot of good, provided that it sticks to doing a few things well.”

This may have once been a not-so-controversial posture in the GOP, but today it provokes sharp disagreement, and occasionally outright disdain. Breitbart’s John Hayward, for instance, portrayed the nascent movement as nothing less than a “capitulation to liberalism” tricked out with newfangled distractions. Conn Carroll, Townhall’s White House Correspondent, recently chided reformocon Ross Douthat that “tax credits for favored constituencies is Big Government progressivism no matter who is doing it.” In the eyes of much the freedom-loving base, a reformocon is either a canny nerd lacking in principle or a clammy adherent to European-style Christian Democracy.

Reformocons aren’t really either of those things. But the confusion that surrounds them cannot be helped by an ever-deeper dive, a la Romney, into the policy weeds. For the reformocons to succeed, they need to get personal. In addition to letting their individual character show through, they should illustrate how their dedication to an agenda beyond tax cuts links up to the human predicament we Americans find ourselves in.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/13/meet-jeb-s-new-new-right.html