COMPETENCE MEANS A GOVERNOR TO START WITH:

This points to the second great wave: The need to reform and revitalize government. This should be natural territory for the right, which is mercifully free from the ties to public-sector unions that stymie the left's thinking. (Search for "government reform" in this year's Democratic platform. You won't find it.) What the right needs is a new conservatism that goes beyond the withered husk of faux-Reaganism and the heady drugs of Trumpery and Brexit.

Tomorrow's conservatives should instead draw on two things: the rich tradition of conservative and classical liberal political thought, and a pragmatic assessment of what works in government around the world. "Smart-government conservatism" should begin with the idea that if you believe in a small state, then you need a focused, efficient, competent one. That credo goes back to John Stuart Mill and the Victorian radicals who reduced the size of the British state from 80 million pounds in tax receipts in 1816 to under 60 million pounds in 1846 even as they increased its services -- simply by stripping out all the aristocratic perks and sinecures. Its modern incarnation is on display in tiny Singapore, which boasts the world's best schools and public health system by doing what Silicon Valley does: It hires selectively, pays well (its civil servants can make $1 million a year) and weeds out poor performers (including -- please note, Joe Biden -- bad teachers).

Next, smart-government conservatism should concentrate its spending on the poor. Why dole out money to hedge-fund managers, while leaving public hospitals so bereft of equipment that doctors have to bring in ski goggles to operate? A new generation of "blue-collar conservatives" who want to expand the state to help the poor are halfway there. The Republicans should get rid of all $1.6 trillion of exemptions (which go to the well-off) and introduce lower tax rates for all. Why do nine in 10 Americans need accountants to fill out their tax forms?

Conservatism has reinvented itself many times before: That is the secret of its endurance. The best way to think about its current malaise is to borrow from another Italian -- this time, a Marxist. Observing the Great Depression, Antonio Gramsci, in his "Prison Notebooks," offered this observation: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

Look around the conservative Anglosphere and morbid symptoms abound -- from the heretical (embracing protectionism) to the silly (criticizing mask wearers). But those should be a prompt to forget the old and find the new. Conservatives need to remind themselves that they have repeatedly reinvented their philosophy in the past -- in the light of the rise of democracy, the spread of industrialization and the emergence of the welfare state. 

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