Subterranean windowless “ballrooms” are the bane of contemporary political confabs, but the setting for the National Review Institute’s summit this past weekend, in the lower basement level of the Omni Shoreham in Washington, seemed fitting. After all, the rhetoric coming from Republicans has been increasingly bunkerish: President Barack Obama, the line goes, is not just out to destroy the American free enterprise system—that was the line for the first term. Now he’s out to destroy the Republican Party itself—or rather, to render it gradually extinct, a la the Whig fadeout of the mid–19th century. So we had House Speaker John Boehner last week telling the Ripon Society (apparently, it still exists) that Obama wanted to “annihilate” the GOP. And the National Review summit kicked into gear with Paul Ryan on Saturday morning repeating the threat, in somewhat milder terms: Obama, he declared, “needs to delegitimize the Republican Party—and House Republicans, in particular. He’ll try to divide us with phony emergencies and bogus deals. He’ll try to get us to fight with each other—to question each other’s motives—so we don’t challenge him.” The message got through to the several hundred disconsolate attendees. One, an accountant from New Jersey by the name of Tony (“not Soprano”) told me that he saw Obama’s goal being to “make [Republicans] irrelevant. That’s how he’s going to get rid of [them].” And how would he encourage that irrelevance? “By lying. Like he’s been doing for four years.”

But it’s easy to come to post-defeat events like the National Review summit looking for flashes of irrational resentment or paranoia. More interesting is to try to find glimmers of self-scrutiny, and the summit, which was held close on the heels of a Republican National Committee confab in Charlotte, did not disappoint. To their credit, some of the conservative luminaries in attendance were candid and searching to an extent I had not seen whatsoever on the campaign trail last year. Here are a few such glimpses that stood out to me:

1. George W. Bush exists! One of the most surreal things about the 2012 campaign was the utter absence of the fellow who had been in the White House for the eight years prior to Obama. He was a Person Not To Be Mentioned during the Republican primary debates and his only appearance at the GOP convention in Tampa was via a rather odd Bush family video. Yet here at the Omni Shoreham was the beginning of a reckoning with him and his legacy for the party. Joe Scarborough quoted William F. Buckley’s observation that the war in Iraq “wasn’t a conservative venture” and declared that Bush “completely muddied the brand when it came to our core issue: that we are the party of small government.” Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist and longtime advocate for Republican policies geared to help working-class voters, countered that Bush, with his purported compassionate conservatism and spending on things like the Medicare drug benefit, had at least tried to respond to the problems foremost in voters’ minds, such as rising health care and education quality, the sort of issues that Bill Clinton had “thumping Republicans up and down Washington for six years." “The Republican Party will never get back from the wilderness if it just says we have to keep our brand pure and make sure Americans know we’re the party of small party,” Douthat said. “Voters are pretty confident right now in the Paul Ryan era that the Republican Party is the party of small government, and they didn’t vote for the Republican Party in the last election cycle, even with Paul Ryan on the ticket… Ultimately, Barack Obama won the election because people thought he cared about people like us.” That was a sentiment that conservatives have trouble inspiring, he said, and one that “George W. Bush, for all his many flaws, was better at dealing with than any other leader of the party since.”

2. The financial collapse was kind of a big deal. Another striking absence on the campaign trail, particularly during the GOP primaries, was any substantive grappling with the 2008 financial meltdown, beyond vague condemnations of the “bailouts” that followed it. But here was Bill Kristol reminding the summit audience that the “worst moment, economically, in middle-class Americans’ lives” in recent years was the 2007-2008 collapse, “and Barack Obama wasn’t president then and people were better off by 2012, or seemed to be.” The collapse, he said, “remains a searing experience and Republicans don’t have a clear explanation about it.” He even went so far as to mock the favored conservative talking point for the collapse: that the housing bubble was created by the Community Reinvestment Act passed years earlier to encourage lending to low-income homebuyers.

3. Governing might involve, you know, government regulation. It was Commentary’s John Pohoretz who broke the news that when a party spends several decades declaring all government regulation off limits, it makes it sort of hard for elected representatives to pass regulations and laws to their liking. It’s one thing to decry Dodd-Frank or the Affordable Care Act, but if you aren’t able to propose rules and regs to replace them, you’re not going to be taken seriously. “The problem with three decades of movement thinking is that it ends up creating dead ends,” he said.