Despite titling their recent essay for National Review “The Next Coalition of the Right,” Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru are less focused on the future than on the past. Levin and Ponnuru were leading lights of “reform conservatism,” an intellectual and political movement now deceased. Their essay is a postmortem of sorts: It sets forth an explanation for why the reformocon attempts to redefine the conservative agenda failed, and seeks to draw lessons from this failure for the future. The trouble: Levin and Ponnuru have learned the wrong lessons from the fall of their movement. At the zenith of the reformocon moment, reformocons were fiercely critical of the Republican establishment for mistaking the problems of the present with the problems of the past. Now the mandala has turned: Today it is the reformocons themselves who are trapped in the lens of a generation out of date.
The phrase “reform conservatives” is most closely associated with the people who staffed or wrote for the Conservative Reform Network (also called the YG Network) in the early 2010s, which includes both Ponnuru and Levin. In this piece I will also lump outsiders who shared the general vision of this Beltway clique but had no formal ties to it (for example, Michael Lotus and James Bennett’s America 3.0 remains the most compelling statement of the basic reformocon vision I have read, though neither author ever adopted the title “reformocon”) in with them. The movement was first and foremost a response to the victories of Barack Obama and the failures of the Bush presidency. The central tenet of the reformocons was that the then-existing conservative consensus was three decades behind the times. A conservatism fit to 21st-century conditions demanded more than rewarmed platitudes from the Reagan era. There was an implicit generational lens to this critique: Almost all of the reformocons hailed from Generation X, and many explicitly portrayed their ideas an attempt to seize intellectual terrain from fogey old Boomers frozen in a past forever gone. Their job was to take the energy that Republican defeats and the Tea Party revolt had poured into conservative politics and channel it into a more coherent, practical, and forward-looking framework of ideas and policies.
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