William Voegeli, who is always worth reading, wrote an essay about Room to Grow and “reform conservatism” for the Claremont Review of Books (which is also always worth reading). CRB asked Peter Wehner and me to respond to the essay. Those responses, and Voegeli’s reply, are now online; Voegeli describes himself in his reply as a “skeptical well-wisher” of the reformist tendency.

Here’s part of my contribution:

To my mind, “reform conservatism” largely consists of undertaking a practical task. Conservatism has generally excelled at propounding a philosophy of government, with great stress on government’s limits. It has not, especially in recent years, been as good at outlining an agenda that would be attractive to the public. Conservative politicians have not, by and large, presented an agenda that offered tangible advantages to many people or explained how it did so. This is not a defect inherent to conservatism.
Conservatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s made the case that the conservative agenda would make American life better for most people: reducing crime, providing tax relief, ending gas lines. This was not the whole of the conservative case. But it was a politically indispensable part of it. It remains indispensable today. So it seems to me that conservatives should identify public concerns, think through how we can address those concerns by applying conservative insights, and then argue for the resulting agenda. We should shrink government—especially in the places, and the ways, where it would do the most good. And that, of course, depends on circumstances. Robert Stein’s chapter [of Room to Grow] makes that point with respect to tax policy. In 1981, a 70 percent top tax rate badly needed to be brought down. Today the payroll tax and taxes on business investment are more pressing issues, the former because it imposes a heavier burden on middle-class families and the latter because they impede economic growth.
Occupational licensure and the college-accreditation oligopoly (to pick examples from Michael Strain’s and Andrew Kelly’s chapters) have both become bigger and bigger obstacles to opportunity. Overcoming those obstacles, through fairly straightforward conservative policies of deregulation, should therefore become conservative priorities.