As go the Tories, so go the Republicans?

David Brooks writes today that the GOP has a lot to learn from the way the Conservative Party in Britain has revived and renewed itself. Excerpt:

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to [Tory leader David] Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, “On Fraternity.” These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As such, the Conservative Party has spent a lot of time thinking about how government should connect with citizens. Basically, everything should be smaller, decentralized and interactive. They want a greater variety of schools, with local and parental control. They want to reverse the trend toward big central hospitals. Health care, Cameron says, is as much about regular long-term care as major surgery, and patients should have the power to construct relationships with caretakers, pharmacists and local facilities.

Cameron also believes government should help social entrepreneurs scale up their activities without burdening them with excessive oversight.

This focus means that Conservatives talk not only about war and G.D.P., but also the softer stuff. There’s been more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate. Cameron has spent an enormous amount of time talking about marriage, families and children.

I like it -- I think (Peter Hitchens sounds the caution). I wrote about crunchy conservatism and Cameronism for the Sunday Times of London a couple of years ago. More recently a Times essayist wrote:

When David Cameron set out on his long media march to modernise the Conservative Party, he could have done with a look at the idea of “crunchy conservatism”. Crunchy conservatism sounds like a new breakfast cereal, but in these marketing-friendly times that might be no bad thing. It began life in the US when Rod Dreher, a journalist at the conservative National Review, mentioned to his colleagues that he was off to shop for organic vegetables and became the office laughingstock. Crunchy conservatives are as anticonsumerist and as sceptical about big business as the Left; they detest suburban sprawl, shopping malls, fast-food eateries and all the other detritus of the consumer society. They distinguish themselves from hippies of the Left because they are more interested in beauty and aesthetics.

Rather than invoke regulation, the crunchies seek to lead by example. The Dreher household, he proudly tells us, rarely watches any television and makes its own muesli and apple butter.

Dreher is too much of a God-botherer for British tastes, but his insistence that there is more to life than money echoes Cameron’s campaign. And, like Cameron, the crunchy conservative cares as much about aesthetics as about the environment.

God-botherer, c'est moi. I will be devoting my column a week from Sunday to answering http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26376 list of ways the Republicans can save themselves with a list of my own. To be honest, I don't think they can save themselves this year; the Congressional GOP is too scattered and clueless to pull its intellectual act together in time to mount a credible challenge to the left. But after the wipe-out, they will need some fresh ideas. Brooks is right to say that they'll need to study what Cameron has done, and figure out how to make it work in an American context. But there's much more to be said about this. I'll not give away my column here -- especially because it hasn't been written yet -- but I do want to ask you conservative readers who would like to see the GOP renewed what ideas and policies you think would make sense for post-Bush Republicans to pursue.

(Please, let's try to think creatively, and beyond the usual Reagan nostalgia and the "they've got to get rid of the religious right" stuff. Neither is possible. Reagan and the world that made him is gone. Religious conservatives are going to be a vital part of any Republican coalition, just as the union voters and African-American voters are going to be a vital part of any Democratic coalition.)

What should tomorrow's Republicans be thinking about and talking about if they want to regain their strength in the years to come?