BEFORE political movements can be understood by others, they need to understand themselves: what they want to be, what they actually are and how they might bridge the gap between aspiration and reality.

Today, the post-George W. Bush, post-Mitt Romney conservative movement is one-third of the way there. Among younger activists and rising politicians, the American right has a plausible theory of what its role in our politics ought to be, and how it might advance the common good. What it lacks, for now, is the self-awareness to see how it falls short of its own ideal, and the creativity necessary to transform its self-conception into victory, governance, results.

The theory goes something like this: American politics is no longer best understood in the left-right terms that defined 20th-century debates. Rather, our landscape looks more like a much earlier phase in democracy’s development, when the division that mattered was between outsiders and insiders, the “country party” and the “court party.”

These terms emerged in 18th-century Britain, during the rule of Sir Robert Walpole, the island kingdom’s first true prime minister. They were coined by his opponents, a circle led by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who were both conservative and populist at once: they regarded Walpole’s centralization of power as a kind of organized conspiracy, in which the realm’s political, business and military interests were colluding against the common good.