During the mid-nineteenth century, the Tory Party in Britain got a reputation as the stupid party, a moniker that many attribute to John Stuart Mill. (“Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”) It wasn’t so much that the party’s leaders were dumb—Palmerston was a clever fellow, and so was Disraeli—but that the majority of the party, the lumpen aristocracy and its hangers on, appeared to have set its face against the modern world.

Recently, the G.O.P. has been heading in the direction of the Tories. Watching last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, it was hard to see much evidence of a party coming to terms with the fact that it has lost the popular vote in five out of the last six Presidential elections. The most memorable speech came from Sarah Palin, who suggested that Karl Rove be dispatched back to Texas for having the temerity to call for some of the party’s loonier candidates to be vetted a mite more closely.

On Monday, though, there came a significant and surprising development. The Republican National Committee, the bit of the G.O.P. that is tasked with winning elections, issued a lengthy report repeating what outsiders have been saying for years: the party is too old, too old-fashioned, too intolerant, too nasty, too incompetent, and too self-referential.

From its opening paragraph, the new report, which was put together under the direction of the R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus, eschews obfuscation and euphemism. It baldly states that the party “is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another Presidential election in the near future.” “Public perception of the Party is at record lows,” the report goes on. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.”

The authors of the report were Henry Barbour, the nephew of the former Mississippi governor and R.N.C. chairman Haley Barbour; Sally Bradshaw, a political strategist from Florida; Ari Fleischer, a former White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush; Glenn McCall, an African-American banker from South Carolina; and Zori Fonalledas, a G.O.P. stalwart from Puerto Rico. As a diagnostic exercise, their work, which runs to a hundred pages, is commendably comprehensive. It contains seven chapters devoted to messaging, demographics, campaign mechanics, relationships with outside groups, fund-raising, election finance, and the primary process. From start to finish, the tone is self-critical and often brutal. From focus groups carried out in Des Moines, Iowa, and Columbus, Ohio, we learn that some ex-Republican voters consider the party to be “scary,” “narrow-minded,” and “out of touch”:

The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue. Instead of driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac, we need a Party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us.… Our standard shouldn’t be universal purity; it should be a more welcoming conservatism.

The phrase “welcoming conservatism” is redolent of “compassionate conservatism,” which is hardly surprising. George W. Bush’s nineteen-nineties makeover of the G.O.P. proved successful, and the report sounds many of the same themes that W. sounded in 2000: outreach to Hispanics and other minorities, tolerance, inclusion, and a recognition that the government can play a positive role. Just as it was easy (and necessary) to criticize Bush for trying to sell a regressive and reactionary set of policies—big tax cuts for the wealthy; drill, drill, drill; military revanchism—in the guise of moderation, it is only fair to point out that the new report is short on specific policy recommendations, particularly in the area of taxes and spending. And for all its self-criticism, it pays lip service to the myth that Americans want a “conservative alternative to big government” when the survey data it contains clearly shows they want a more moderate alternative.

Still, coming from the party of Palin and Rand Paul, the report represents intellectual progress. If the G.O.P. isn’t yet willing to change course, it has some prominent members who recognize that sticking with the current path will lead to increasing irrelevance. And simply embracing immigration reform won’t fix things, the report makes clear. Something larger is needed.

By itself, the report doesn’t go nearly far enough. It doesn’t question trickle-down economics or gun control, for example. But in several policy areas, it does break some new ground, at least rhetorically.

One such issue is gay rights. The report rightly identifies the G.O.P.’s hardline stance as one of the main reasons it does so badly among younger voters. (Among voters who are thirty-plus, Mitt Romney won by half a million votes. Among voters under thirty, Obama won by five million votes.) “For the G.O.P. to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant to alternative points of view,” the report says. “For many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.”

On gender issues, the report notes that Romney won the married-women’s vote by eleven per cent but lost the unmarried-women’s vote by a whopping thirty-six points, and suggests that the party needs to show that “our policies, principles, and vision address the concerns of female voters.” If that admonition falls a football field short of embracing Roe v. Wade and the Paycheck Fairness Act, it does acknowledge the nature of the problem. On top of calling on the party to encourage more women to stand for office, and to provide proper training programs for them, the report makes the simple but potentially effective suggestion that it should listen to women. “Too often, female voters feel like no one listens to them. They feel like they are smart, engaged, and strong decision makers but that their opinions are often ignored…. Female candidates are far better at connecting with these voters because they are more likely to understand them.”