Thumpin' to conclusions: Republicans are drawing all the wrong lessons from their midterm loss.

In the days after last fall's midterm election, Republican leaders and conservative pundits quickly unified around an explanation for the party's woeful showing. The GOP, they informed us, had lost Congress because it just wasn't conservative enough. "Our voters stopped thinking of us as the party of principle because we lost our commitment to and confidence in our core principles," wrote Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a letter sent to his House Republican colleagues the day after the loss. Or, as conservative columnist George Will put it a day later in the Washington Post, the party "was punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism."

It was comforting for Republicans to believe that the election's result, horrifying as it was, had validated rather than repudiated their core ideology. But this was, of course, a fiction. Conservative voters largely remained loyal to the party: self-identified Republicans shifted only 1 point toward the Democrats, and declined as a percentage of the electorate by only 2 points. What doomed the GOP was that it lost independent voters by 18 points--a 15-point swing from 2004. In other words, the GOP lost because it alienated moderates. Pushing more cuts to Medicaid or farm subsidies would hardly have helped.

Of course, both parties long ago mastered the art of post-election spin, and the notion that voters had been yearning for true conservatism was useful in convincing many in the press that the Democrats' own agenda lacked public support. But in the months since the Republican loss, the party has given every sign that the line wasn't just for public consumption. On the two issues that voters most cared about, according to exit polls--Iraq and corruption--Republicans have made few concessions to the country's desire for change. Even more remarkably, on the underlying issue of the proper size and role of the federal government, they've reacted by choosing, consciously and deliberately, to double-down on the brand of small-government ideological purity that once energized their movement but has lately led to its decline.

That Republicans have drawn all the wrong lessons from their loss of power isn't merely a case of tone-deaf political positioning, or even of simple stubbornness. Rather, in each of its separate responses, the party has chosen the path that best allows it to avoid the wrenching process of looking critically at some of its fundamental ideological assumptions--assumptions that remain cherished by its core supporters but that have been politically and substantively disastrous: that government should always be made smaller and that taxes should always be cut, never raised; that applying or threatening military force is the most important way we can influence the world, while diplomacy is for wimps; and that what's good for Washington business lobbyists is good for the economy.

No party relishes having to question the continuing relevance of its bedrock principles, but it's possible to emerge stronger from the process. During the 1980s and '90s, prompted by a series of electoral defeats, Democrats eventually came to acknowledge that the era of their supremacy, which had begun in the 1930s with FDR's New Deal, was over. Gradually, an increasing number of voices in the party began to challenge some of the basic precepts that Democrats had long held as close to sacrosanct but whose value for addressing the major political and policy questions of the day had declined: that government programs by definition help the poor; that crime can't be brought under control without first addressing its root causes; and that overseas military interventions are bound to end, like Vietnam, in a bloody quagmire. This journey was long and often painful, but it turned out to be crucial to Democrats' ability to win back the trust of voters and govern effectively. Without it, the party probably couldn't have balanced the budget, reformed welfare, or liberated Kosovo.

If Republicans are going to help solve any of today's most challenging problems, from fixing our health care system to fighting global warming to restoring America's ability to lead the global security system--and if they hope to win elections again--they'll have to undergo a version of this same process. And that's the problem. For decades, their party, and the broader conservative movement on which it depends, has prided itself on the appealing, bumper-sticker simplicity of its core ideology: limited government and a strong defense. (Indeed, this formula had until lately been so successful for the GOP that in recent years liberals have actively tried to develop a similarly succinct expression of their own governing philosophy--without notable success.) Little wonder, then, that most Republicans prefer to misunderstand the message voters sent last fall. If their ideological pillars crumble, Republicans will face a troubling question: What's left, beyond a cultural traditionalism that younger Americans are rejecting, for their party to stand for?

Iraq, of course, is the single most important reason why the GOP's twelve-year hold on Congress is over. But what few Republicans want to admit is that it isn't just the administration's incompetence and poor judgment, or the neocons' arrogance, that lie behind our failure there, and the other foreign policy failures--from Iran to North Korea--of the Bush era. Despite the tradition of Republican isolationism, conservative thinking on national security since the beginning of the cold war--long before the ascendance of neoconservatism--has been characterized by a basic, Hobbesian worldview: that the world is a dangerous place; that military force, or the threat of it, should be at the center of our national security strategy; and that efforts to negotiate with or accommodate adversaries are naive, if not morally suspect. In 1960, Barry Goldwater became the first standard-bearer of the resurgent right by penning The Conscience of a Conservative, a 127-page manifesto that thrilled the movement's true believers not only by denouncing big government at home but by advocating a more confrontational policy toward the Soviets. Movement conservatism's most revered figure, Ronald Reagan, continued in that vein, breaking with the cautious rapprochement of the 1970s by declaring the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire" and building up the armed forces in a largely successful attempt to ramp up, and win, an arms race.

Of course, Republican presidents haven't always given in to the yearnings of the party's extremist wing. Eisenhower held off the hardliners in his cabinet who wanted a military response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Nixon reestablished relations with China, and George H. W. Bush understood that trying to depose Saddam and occupy Iraq after the Gulf War would likely have caused as many problems as it solved. Even Reagan was willing to sideline administration hawks and sit down with Gorbachev when he felt the time was right. But each of these moves required a conscious effort to resist powerful voices within the party that were clamoring for confrontation.

Today, after six and a half years of encouragement from the White House--not to mention the galvanizing effect of 9/11--those voices are even stronger, both among the party's Washington elite and its rank and file. When, in a rare triumph for the administration's moderates, the State Department announced a nuclear deal with North Korea in February, it was promptly denounced by prominent conservative ideologues and opinion leaders like John Bolton and Bill Kristol as overly favorable to Pyongyang. And when John McCain recently, in response to a question from a South Carolina Republican about the need to "send an airmail message" to Tehran, began singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," the assembled crowd of GOP activists laughed and cheered, and his ratings among Republican primary voters briefly spiked.

This tradition of thought played a key role in uniting the Republican Party almost lockstep behind Bush's plan to invade Iraq, and helps explain why, today, even after voters sent a clear message in opposition to the president's approach, and even as the share of the country favoring withdrawal approaches 60 percent, congressional Republicans remain remarkably unified behind Bush. Nor have any of the major GOP presidential candidates--perhaps the most sensitive bellwethers for the mood of conservative voters--broken with Bush's stay-the-course strategy. Almost the only Republicans to do so are Chuck Hagel, who, for his efforts, has become persona non grata within the party, and those few senators like Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Gordon Smith of Oregon who are more worried about facing moderate voters in a general election than conservative ones in a primary.

Of course, the foreign policy failures of the Bush years should by now have made clear, and not just to liberals, the damage that this worldview can do to our national interests. This knee-jerk preference for force will need to be confronted head on, and marginalized, if Republicans are going to play any kind of constructive role in solving the national security challenges of the future--from Iran to North Korea to Islamic fundamentalism to global poverty and AIDS.

And yet, thanks to a strange double standard that centrist opinion shapers are in part responsible for perpetuating, few people want to point this out. Since the dawn of the Bush era, Democrats have grown used to being told, often by their fellow liberals, that if they want to be taken seriously on national security, they'll need to sideline the extremist, knee-jerk antiwar wing of their party. And they largely have: none of the first- or second-tier Democratic presidential candidates is reflexively opposed to the use of military force, and the one minor candidate who is, Dennis Kucinich, is polling around 1 percent. But almost never do Republicans face serious calls, from their fellow conservatives or anyone else, to similarly distance themselves from their own extremists, despite the fact that those extremists are in far more powerful positions, and have wreaked far more damage in recent years, than antiwar Democrats. Questioning the wisdom of a reliance on military force to solve our problems remains an act of apostasy in the GOP. And while that's the case, Republicans will continue to stand in the way of efforts to develop a sane approach to national security.

The sleeper issue of the midterms, though, according to exit polling, was corruption. Both parties underestimated the degree to which the string of influence-buying scandals involving Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and others soured voters on the GOP. But in the postelection House leadership contest, Republicans compounded their mistake by opting for the two candidates, John Boehner and Roy Blunt, most associated with their party's K Street alliance--the very alliance that had led directly to the corruption of Abramoff and his cronies. Sure enough, under this new management little has changed. While Democrats showed they got the voters' message by quickly passing lobbying--and ethics-reform measures, the GOP resisted, thereby missing a chance to signal the arrival of a new, more honest party-wide approach. One hundred and fifty-two House Republicans, including the entire leadership team, even voted against a measure requiring members to disclose their sponsorship of earmarks.

There is a minority of Republicans--including a few up-and-coming leaders of the party's small-government wing, like Representatives Mike Pence of Indiana and Jeff Flake of Arizona--who have shown they understand the need to loosen their party's ties to K Street. The week after the election, writing in support of Pence's unsuccessful leadership bid, conservative columnist Bob Novak complained: "While abandoning conservative principles, the spendthrift House had become chained to special corporate interests." But the direction they're urging their party to move in suggests that, like the business-as-usual crowd that reelected Boehner and Blunt, they too have drawn the wrong lesson from defeat. Only in this case, their mistake could be even more damaging.

In the wake of their loss, many conservatives blamed their party's corruption scandals on its abandonment of small-government principles. The corruption, they claimed, was a product of "big government," which is inherently crooked, while small-government conservatism is by nature honest and virtuous. "The GOP came to power in 1994 promising lean government, and became the party that needs to unbuckle its pants and loosen its belt two notches after every lobbyist-paid meal," wrote conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg two days after the election. In other words, the sins of Abramoff et al. became just another data point in support of the small-government ideology to which Republicans have long subscribed. So, nothing serious to worry about there.

There's a problem with this logic, however. Government certainly got bigger in the last few years under Republican control, but not that much bigger. What it really got was more corrupt--as measured by the number of GOP congressmen and their aides who've been indicted or convicted. It wasn't so much the growth of government that invited the corruption, but the attitude toward that government. After all, if you don't believe that government is capable of doing anything of value for people, why not use it, as Bush and DeLay did, to reward cronies and perpetuate political power?

Corruption aside, many conservatives have lately argued that a renewed commitment to limiting the growth of government is the key to the party's effort to rediscover its ideological moorings. Indeed, if there has been one consistent theme that conservatives have continued to sound since their defeat--and there has been--it's the need to return to principles of fiscal restraint. As Boehner told his GOP colleagues in a January speech: "Republicans at all levels must recommit to the principles of limited and accountable government. It's that simple." And last month, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) sounded the same theme in an interview with NPR: "If we say we're for small government, and we don't act like that, then we're going to have consequences. But I'm also confident if we will be true to our principles, that the pendulum will swing back."

But this is exactly the wrong conclusion, both politically and substantively, for the party to draw. Politically, there's almost no evidence that, beyond the GOP base, small-government conservatism is an electoral winner. Bush, Rove, and DeLay implicitly understood this, which explains why they championed the creation of a half-a-trillion-dollar prescription-drug benefit. To have resisted the cries for help from seniors who depend on pricey medication would have been electoral folly. And when Republicans then tried to scale back government by privatizing Social Security, they paid a huge political price. In January 2005, 48 percent of voters disapproved of the GOP Congress, according to a Gallup poll. Six months later--after the failure of Bush's privatization plan--that figure had ballooned to 59 percent. The signs are piling up that the appeal of small-government conservatism is on the wane: In 1996, 61 percent of respondents to a Pew poll favored a smaller government with fewer services over a bigger government with more services. By last year, that number had declined to just 45 percent. In 2005, Coloradans voted to repeal a constitutional amendment that restricted the state legislature from increasing public spending. And a spate of recent surveys makes clear that on almost every issue that relates to the size and role of the federal government, Americans prefer the Democrats' approach. In short, by heightening still further their commitment to small-government conservatism, Republicans would likely doom themselves to years in the minority.

Most Democrats would be fine with that. But the GOP's renewed zeal for cutting government won't help the country either. A philosophy that believes only in the power of the private sector simply can't offer serious solutions to the major domestic problems--health care costs, growing inequality, economic insecurity caused by global trade, even the coarsening of the culture--that Americans will look to Washington to address over the next few years, and that will all require a strong role for the federal government. That's why if Republicans are going to participate constructively in this process, or even offer their own positive vision for tackling these issues, they'll have no choice but to take on this basic ideological assumption that views any expansion of the state as a step toward socialism.

It may be premature to expect Republicans to launch the kind of reckoning with their ideological assumptions they desperately need. Having lost only one election since enjoying full control of Washington, they're perhaps where Democrats were around 1981, when they'd just lost the White House and the Senate. It wasn't until fifteen years later that the Democratic Party's ideologues had been marginalized enough that President Clinton could break with tradition by passing welfare reform and signing a balanced budget without committing political suicide.

Still, it would be hard to overstate the lengths that today's GOP appears willing to go to in order to avoid serious thought about its future. That's what lies behind the party's increasingly desperate hunt for a "real conservative" presidential candidate. Rallying around a Fred Thompson or a Newt Gingrich may or may not offer Republicans a winner in 2008. But at least it'll allow them to put off, for another few precious years, the inevitable process of looking critically at some of their most basic beliefs about governing. Ducking this confrontation isn't in Republicans' long-term interest, or the country's. But it's not so hard to understand why they don't quite feel up for having it just yet.

Zachary Roth is an editor of the Washington Monthly.