I very much enjoyed Artur Davis’s review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s Rule and Ruin, a history of the postwar Republican party that emphasizes the decline of liberal and moderate Republicanism and the rise of the right:

[I]n the book’s last pages, after getting the dismay over the far right out of his system, Kabaservice turns to the theme of gridlock, and makes a compelling, albeit brief case, why the decline of moderates has contributed to it: the absence of a center has meant no natural base of deal-makers, no platform for the kind of smart compromises that achieved welfare reform in 1996 or Social Security reform in the mid eighties. It is never clear whether Kabaservice actually means to influence Republicans or conservatives. By denigrating the period from 1980 to the present as “ruin” or “destruction”—when to conservatives it is an era in which they rose from near death to become the most popular philosophy in the country—he leaves the sense that persuading his subject is not exactly his goal. But it is in the end, in the book’s reflective, powerful conclusion, that he gets around to making a conservative friendly case for why some alternative Republican governing vision does deserve another turn on the stage.
As he argues, one major virtue of centrist Republicans is that they defended federalism and personal accountability when a major portion of liberalism was bent on rolling over both principles. The centrists wrestled with liberals over the vitality of free markets and the limited returns of massive spending, and the notion that moderates aided and abetted the sixties explosion of government is more flawed memory than fact. Furthermore, the Republican center engaged policy challenges around poverty and public education without the compromising strings of ties to liberal interests; and in so doing, they helped their party fend off the notion that it was better at opposition than governing. In other words, these “centrists” did the conservative cause much good during times when Republicans were in deep peril.
The kind of moderate Republican the press wants to revive is one to the left of every tenet in the modern Republican universe—that’s not likely to happen at a leadership level anymore than a right of center Democrat will flourish in time for 2016. But if “moderate” is amended to mean a conservatism that is reform-oriented, middle-class friendly, not exclusively entrenched in the wonders of an unfettered market–in other word, a conservatism with many of the old moderate virtues–it’s a force that is actually gaining ground.

I’m inclined to agree with Davis, and I see some of the reform-oriented spirit he describes in the efforts of Rep. Paul Ryan to inject more substance and rigor into the GOP’s domestic policy agenda. Many of my friends and colleagues have been critical of Ryan’s recent budget proposal, and some of these criticisms are valid; yet it’s important to remember how much progress has been made since the DeLay years. And as Davis notes, Republicans like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels have demonstrated a conservative pragmatism that has allowed them to achieve a number of policy successes in domains like education, health, and public sector efficiency that haven’t traditionally been Republican strengths. He also makes a number of worthwhile points regarding the ideological drift of the Democratic Party. My only regret is that Davis didn’t elaborate on the role of campaign finance regulation in intensifying ideological polarization; one hopes he’ll write more about this subject in the future.