Pethokoukis is one of a number of conservative analysts who over the past three years have undergone something of an intellectual conversion. Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a Washington Post columnist, and Peter J. Wehner, also a Bush speechwriter and now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published “A Conservative Vision of Government” in the winter 2014 edition of the journal National Affairs. Their essay is an attack on the idea cherished by many Tea Party activists that all (or nearly all) government action and intervention is bad.

Gerson and Wehner criticize the domination of Republican economic policy by “rhetorical zeal and indiscipline in which virtually every reference to government is negative, disparaging, and denigrating. It is justified by an apocalyptic narrative of American life: We are fast approaching a point of no return at which we stand to lose our basic liberties and our national character.”

The two writers develop an argument rare in Republican circles. They cite the liabilities of an economic worldview that doesn’t recognize the need for government “to help those who cannot individually do for themselves, to advance justice in an unjust world, and to lift up the weakest members of society.” They go on to make the case that “many conservatives fail to see the extent to which equal opportunity itself, a central principle of our national self-understanding, is becoming harder to achieve. It is a well-documented fact that, in recent years, economic mobility has stalled for many poorer Americans, resulting in persistent intergenerational inequality.”

Conservative reformers have sparked interest on the left, but some liberal commentators remain distrustful of the willingness of intraparty insurgents to seriously challenge Tea Party commitments.

E.J. Dionne Jr., writing in the most recent issue of Democracy, contends that conservative reformers on the right “are far too timid in their approaches to economic injustice and to the structural problems in the economic system.” Jonathan Chait takes a harder line in New York magazine: “The reformers are massively understating the obstacles before them. There are reasons Republicans have fought so hard to claw back subsidies for the least fortunate. Active philosophical opposition to redistribution is one. A general detachment from the poor is another. The unforgiving zero-sum math of budgets, which means a dollar spent on helping a Walmart mom is a dollar in higher taxes or lower defense or politically painful cuts in retirement benefits, is a third. I do think the Republican reformers can nudge their party to a better, or at least less terrible, place. But I don’t think they’re being very straight about it.”