This is, at best, a caricature of liberal conceptions of social science. But 13 years later, Levin clings to this view. In conversation, he describes liberal government as a “technocratic” monolith, with a master class of experts who construct and administer large-scale programs that subordinate the needs and wishes of the public to the appetites of the policy-makers themselves, who are less interested in making people’s lives better than in seeing their pet theorems worked out. It is an old idea, most commonly associated with the attack on the self-infatuated, power-besotted “new class” that Irving Kristol and other neoconservatives made a generation ago. Levin has updated the argument for the Obama years, the “tyranny of reason” having resulted, for instance, in a complex health care system designed and administered by a cadre of experts, when it would be better left to the homely market. And yet the unfettered market has historically failed to protect citizens from the ravages of economic downturns, including the recent Great Recession. If any species of blind faith has in fact damaged our democracy, it was blind faith in “the market,” which gave us the deregulatory fever that began under Reagan and lasted through Obama’s election in 2008.

For all his temperateness of tone, and for all the meticulously reasoned arguments that he has shepherded into the pages of National Affairs, Levin justly says his ideas are radical. He envisions not just a shrinking or scaling-back of government, but an entire reimagining of it. He accuses both parties of being filled with pork-hungry “appropriators” who still think of Washington, even in these gridlocked years, as the lavish dispenser of services. Debates today — about “runaway spending,” about big versus limited government — reduce, in most instances, to haggling over how much to dispense and who gets what. A true Burkean conservatism, Levin argues, would recast the federal government as the facilitator and supporter of local institutions who are a function of, and a contributor to, a “civil society.” “The agenda is not a moderate agenda,” Levin told me. “It’s a very conservative agenda, more so than a lot of what’s going on in our politics that’s argued at a different pitch and so might seem like it’s more radical.”

But it is also true that Levin and other reformers share the social conservatism that animates many Tea Party members. He is a protégé of the University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass, who led Bush’s Council on Bioethics (which advised him on his policy on stem-cell research) and installed Levin, then in his mid-20s, as the council’s executive director. He worked closely at the council with Robert P. George, the Princeton professor known for his uncompromising social conservatism. “Yuval is one of the pro-life movement’s leading intellectuals,” George told me, pointing out that Levin serves on the board of Americans United for Life, an organization whose “legal team has been involved in every abortion-related case before the U.S. Supreme Court since Roe v. Wade,” according to its website. Today Levin doesn’t bring up this aspect of his conservatism. Neither does Ramesh Ponnuru, who studied with George at Princeton and drew on his teaching in his Bush-era manifesto, “Party of Death,” about the Democrats’ “extremism in defense of abortion.”

Levin and Ponnuru and other reformers also oppose same-sex marriage, but again choose not to make an issue of it, recognizing that the battle is lost — or soon will be, as indeed the culture war in general has been. That, in addition to the bleak facts of the weak economic recovery and irrefutable demographic trends, explains the reformers’ decision to channel their energies into economics and to become champions of middle-class America. This places them in a tradition that dates to the 1960s and ’70s, when Moynihan broke with liberal orthodoxy by tying the country’s social ills to the decline of the traditional family.

While the media’s response to Eric Cantor’s loss was to frame the party’s dynamic as a Tea Party versus reformer death match, the reformers were more sanguine. “I think the Tea Party has been a very great good for the kind of change that needs to happen,” Levin said. “It’s a source of great energy. It’s a reaction to the right kinds of problems. It didn’t arise with a policy mentality. A real grass-roots movement doesn’t, generally.”

Levin and company, who do have the policy mentality, will happily fill in the blanks. In the wake of Cantor’s defeat, April Ponnuru said she was still hearing from legislators interested in connecting with the ideas of the YG Network, and she had more events scheduled to spread the word. Rubio volunteered to speak at one such event in late June. He, too, shrugged off Cantor’s defeat. “I don’t think Eric Cantor lost because he gave a few speeches advocating reforms,” said Rubio, who seems to understand that being elected as an insurgent — riding the crest of a movement — doesn’t mean he has to govern as one. American politics is the story, in large part, of outsiders who became skilled insiders, not by selling out but by growing into the demands of the office. It happened to Barry Goldwater and also to Reagan. It might happen again. When I spoke with him, Rubio also stood by his own antipoverty proposal, acknowledging it would not save any money but suggesting it might in the long run since it would lift many out of poverty. This is exactly the case Lyndon Johnson and Democrats made generations ago. “Our debt isn’t driven by discretionary spending on poverty programs,” Rubio said. “We’re not going to balance the budget by saving money on safety-net programs.”

It is hard to imagine the Republican candidate who will say this in a closely contested Red State primary in 2014 or during a presidential race in 2016. But some politicians say otherwise, including Levin’s own favorite senator, Mike Lee, the Tea Party firebrand from Utah, who stood by Ted Cruz’s side during the October shutdown but also has adopted the reformers’ middle-class agenda as well as its idioms. Mere weeks before the shutdown, Lee drew favorable press for introducing a reform idea, the child tax credit, lifted straight from the pages of National Affairs. It was a big moment for Levin, “something we can really point to.” When I talked to Lee in June, he equated reform with conservatism and with the issues he expects his party to address in 2014 and in 2016. The current crisis, he said, “shows up in the form of immobility in the poor, insecurity in the middle class, with cronyist privilege at the top of the ladder.” Lee has spoken with Levin several times about these problems. “Without question, he’s important and influential,” he said, adding that “government’s job should be to facilitate the free market and civil society.” But is the reform agenda viable? “It’s not just viable,” Lee replied. “I think it’s the argument.”