So what is serious here, and what amounts to repackaging? David Frum, a true conservative heretic, argues that many on the right know that their product is not selling as they would wish. He uses the analogy of a failing pizza chain to ask the key question: How much are they willing to change the pizza, and how much are they merely changing the box?

The answer turns out to be complicated. At times, reform conservatism does seem more concerned with the box than its contents—more infatuated with the idea of new ideas than with new ideas themselves. But it’s also true that the Obama years produced such a large lurch to the right within conservatism that many Reformicons accept the need for readjustment and for something that looks like a governing agenda.

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, thus speaks of an “unemployment crisis,” particularly for the long-term jobless, and is willing to entertain Keynesian remedies. It is a sign that progressive arguments about inequality have gained sufficient purchase that Senator Marco Rubio is willing to acknowledge, as he did in a speech earlier this year, that “from 1980 to 2005, over 80 percent of the total increase in income went to the top 1 percent of American earners,” and that “70 percent of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class.” That these realities are familiar to liberals does not diminish the importance of a conservative acknowledging them. Some on the right, such as Gerson and Wehner, have taken the Tea Party’s anti-government attitudes head on, pointing to “the inadequacy of the oppositional and negative approach to the question of the government’s purpose and role.” And a few have broken with conservative conventional wisdom altogether, as columnist Josh Barro has done in supporting the Affordable Care Act.

Although McCain’s maverick years suggest that some conservatives have long been aware of the need for new departures, the reformist impulse blossomed in the final years of the Bush presidency, when many on the right and within the Republican Party came to see it as a failure. In political terms, the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections made this conclusion inescapable. The early reform conservatives saw an opening for a less fierce approach focused on problem-solving. They hoped to speak to the less well-off voters who rejected the right and Bush. But their early efforts were buried under the Tea Party insurgency.

The Early and Premature Reform Conservatives

Bookish types were important to the early rumblings of reform conservatism. And some of the earliest books on the need to rethink conservatism quickly put their authors on the Index of Forbidden Thinkers.

David Frum might be seen as a “premature reformer,” in the manner of those whom parts of the left once labeled as “premature anti-Communists” because they broke with the Popular Front before others decided it was fashionable to do so. Frum’s searing criticisms of his own camp (beginning with his open disgust at McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate in 2008) made many conservatives unhappy enough to excommunicate him. Although the story is told differently by different sides, Frum’s dissidence had something to do with his departure from (or his being asked to leave) the American Enterprise Institute in 2010. His break with AEI happened to come only a few days after he lambasted the Republican Party for its failure to negotiate with the Obama White House over the Affordable Care Act. Frum’s heresy included acknowledging that the ACA had “a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan,” building on “ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.”