Ross Douthat explores the role of social issues for the project of conservative reform:
As much as cultural outreach matters, I wouldn’t want the kind of conservative political party that essentially declines to represent populist and social conservatives at all on many issues, enforcing an elite consensus instead of representing its own constituents wherever those constituents seem too disreputable or insufficiently cosmopolitan. This is what you have on the center-right in many European countries, Sullivan’s native isle at times included, and I don’t think it’s worked out particularly well...
Meanwhile,
Quin Hillyer argues that reform conservatism has Reaganite roots:
The point is not that today’s reformers are merely copying Reagan’s policies. They aren’t. Much of their thinking, their reimagining of how to apply conservatism in the real world, is fresh and valuable. But it still is a reimagining, not a new imagining.
