The phrase "reform conservatives" is most closely associated with the people who staffed or wrote for the Conservative Reform Network (also called the YG Network) in the early 2010s, which includes both Ponnuru and Levin. In this piece I will also lump outsiders who shared the general vision of this Beltway clique but had no formal ties to it (for example, Michael Lotus and James Bennett's America 3.0 remains the most compelling statement of the basic reformocon vision I have read, though neither author ever adopted the title "reformocon") in with them. The movement was first and foremost a response to the victories of Barack Obama and the failures of the Bush presidency. The central tenet of the reformocons was that the then-existing conservative consensus was three decades behind the times. A conservatism fit to 21st-century conditions demanded more than rewarmed platitudes from the Reagan era. There was an implicit generational lens to this critique: Almost all of the reformocons hailed from Generation X, and many explicitly portrayed their ideas an attempt to seize intellectual terrain from fogey old Boomers frozen in a past forever gone. Their job was to take the energy that Republican defeats and the Tea Party revolt had poured into conservative politics and channel it into a more coherent, practical, and forward-looking framework of ideas and policies.

This framework began with the recognition that American political elites generally, and Republican elites in particular, had become economically and socially isolated from the mass of the American people. This isolation caused the GOP's governing class to miss the obvious: Married couples, not corporate suits and financiers, are the natural constituency of any conservative movement, and the actual backbone of Republican electoral success. Policy should strengthen families and encourage family formation. The disintegration of family life among the working classes was the greatest disaster to befall post-war America. This disaster was matched in scale by two other challenges, each of which threatened to unwind the fabric of American society. The first was the deteriorating economic security of middle-class families, who were forced to take on enormous debt and then defer marriage, children, and other joyous things to have any hope of holding place in America's meritocratic hunger games. The second was the slow death of American civic society. This collapse in social capital left the American people isolated, atomized, and lonely. Such a people lack resilience. As the reaching social and economic policies of the Obama presidency vividly demonstrated, such a people will also inevitably turn to the federal government as the first solution to their ills.

To renew American society, then, Republicans needed to empower normal Americans to solve their own problems without interference from or reliance on federal power. The reformocons favored what some of them called "decentralization" and others termed "subsidiarity": Whenever possible, problems that the federal government managed should be handled instead by state governments (or in Lotus and Bennet's more interesting formulation, compacts of states). Many things that state governments do would in turn be handed over to cities or to civic organizations and private enterprise. This would effectively end many national culture-war controversies. Tribe blue would be free do its thing in blue territory, and tribe red the same in its. Items of concern that could not be pushed downward would be evaluated according to two standards: Will this help or will this hinder middle- and working-class families? Will this help or will this hinder a renaissance in American civic life?

This last question is important. In the reformocon worldview, decentralizing meant not just devolving the federal government downward but building local communities upward. As Levin wrote for National Review in 2014:

The premise of conservatism has always been . . . that what matters most about society happens in the space between the individual and the state -- the space occupied by families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and the private economy. . . . Creating, sustaining, and protecting that space and helping all Americans take part in what happens there are among the foremost purposes of government.

That was the reformocon vision for making America good again. It was a glorious vision -- a glorious vision rendered inert.