All but the most ostrich-like of conservatives recognize that their movement is at its lowest ebb in more than three decades. Democrats control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, and the polarization of the two major parties has rendered conservatives more isolated and irrelevant to policymaking than in their previous stints in the minority. Democrats are using their majorities to pass sweeping changes in public policy that will reshape the contours of the American state for decades to come, and it hardly matters whether these changes are impelled by the exigencies of crisis, pre-existing ideology or some of both. Whatever its engine, the upward ratchet of American state-building, which conservatives thought they had stopped, has suddenly sprung back to life.

Looking forward, the picture darkens.Two-thirds of younger voters supported Obama in 2008, and if the past is any indication, these voters will maintain their political preferences into adulthood. Combining this trend with a profound weakness among ethnic minorities and unmarried women, Republicans are likely to become weaker still in the great expanses beyond their Southern firewall. And in the South, Obama's victories in North Carolina and Virginia suggest that the more cosmopolitan Southern states are far from safe for the GOP. Worst of all, conservative politicians and the movement's intelligentsia seem incapable of finding a plausible path out of their current doldrums. Most resist any reassessment of the nostrums they have peddled for the past three decades. Even as the world around them calls their orthodoxies into question, conservative ideas seem set in stone.

These challenges have led some Republicans to look back to the Reagan presidency for inspiration. While the presidencies of Bush the elder and younger and the era of Republican control of Congress now seem tarnished at best, the Reagan presidency shines on as an inspiring example of what a popular, ambitious, optimistic and reforming conservatism would look like. And indeed, a good argument can be made that our current era holds many similarities to what Steven Hayward calls the "Age of Reagan." The difference is that President Obama is the one who resembles Reagan while the Republicans look increasingly like the hapless Democrats of the 1980s. It's Obama who is the avatar of change, Obama who has captured the rhetoric of renewal, Obama who epitomizes a new "can do" tone--and above all, Obama who symbolizes the American capacity for reinvention.

An observer with an even darker perspective might look across the Atlantic for parallels, seeing Obama in the role of Margaret Thatcher and the Republicans as the Michael Foot-era Labour Party. A more recent example is that of Britain's Conservative Party, which took a dozen years to transform itself into a plausible alternative to the Labour government. One could cite plenty of other examples, but the point is already clear enough: Successful political parties in Western electoral democracies typically owe their accomplishments less to their own virtues than to the vices of their opponents.

To avoid replicating these and other depressing precedents, Republican conservatives may need to look farther back in time for inspiration. Precisely because he looks so far back and is so unorthodox in his choices of what counts as conservative, Patrick Allitt's recent book, The Conservatives, provides intriguing clues for what a reinvigorated Republican Party might look like. If Republicans are to avoid a protracted period in the wilderness, they would do well to pay close attention to his lively and at times surprising history of American conservatism.

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