What happened to all those GOP ideas?

Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads that periodically sweep through Washington, the political class became obsessed with the notion that conservatives had unambiguously won what everybody was calling “the war of ideas.”

The notion was everywhere. The right gloated. (“Conservative thought,” boasted right-wing foundation maven James Piereson, “has seized the initiative in the world of ideas.”) Republicans scolded the opposition. (President Bush chastised Democrats in Congress: “[I]f they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.”) And Democrats internalized the accusation. (“It makes me realize,” observed labor leader Andrew Stern in 2005, “how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we’re defending sixty-year-old ideas.”)

We don’t need the benefit of hindsight to grasp how silly it was to claim that the Bush-era Republican Party had risen to power on the crest of policy ideas whose time had come, or that the Democratic Party lacked an agenda of its own. The taunts about Democrats’ lacking ideas was less a serious analysis than an attempt to bully the party into cooperating with Bush’s plan to gradually privatize Social Security. (Click here to read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women's suffrage and child labor laws.)

In reality, both parties have plenty of ideas that they would like to implement if given the political power to do so. Republicans’ policy ideas primarily involve cutting marginal tax rates and regulations. The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.

In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality--not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.