Well! As I noted here a few days ago, the bleak uplands of Republican policy intellection are coming alive with the sound of ground-breaking challenges to the four-cheers-for-capitalism, Bronx-cheers-for-government ideology that has kept American conservatism fogbound for 40 years. There's talk of a New Deal for white, working-class voters who backed GOP not out of any love for small government, "free markets," and war-making but out of indignation at liberal Democrats' policies on the family, welfare, crime, and race.

These voters need help with health care, education, even wages and pensions, help that strengthens their families and neighborhoods, as the liberal-Democratic welfare state too often didn't. (See my The Closest of Strangers, Chapter 2, "The Liberal Nightmare".) Supposedly, these voters want Republicans to do it right. So we are all parsing the policy proposals as Republicans prepare to lead us from Bush to Bismarck, from DeLay to Disraeli! (The 19th-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pioneered conservative welfare states.)

Okay, it's a only thought experiment, and more power to the thinkers. But it leaves something out. You might call it the elephant in the room..

Calls for this Republican re-awakening abound from neoconservatives (who were never very hostile to big government, anyway) like David Brooks, who has been Ross Douthat's and Reihan's champion, and from Charles Murray, Michael Lind, and lately even Pat Buchanan. Some would even slash corporate welfare to fund wage supplements, early-childhood intervention, and pensions that reward home labor.

To understand what's driving this, you needn't be a conservative government-hater who's suddenly lost his home, let alone an apocalyptic Marxist who can't wait for the whole house of cards to fall. If millions of Americans do lose not only their present homes but every prospect of owning another, more than Reagan Democrats will be up for grabs.

The country will need not a Republican makeover but trans-partisan, civic-republican realignment that transcends both political parties to ask some hard questions about corporate welfare and deregulation that are still pretty taboo. Republican reformers don't touch those taboos. Can we talk about them?

Start with the fact that Democrats have been where Republicans are now. In the 1980s and '90s they tried moving from left to center, as Republican reformers are trying to move in from the right. When chastened Democrats held the White House but not Congress or many statehouses and big-city mayoralties, books like David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector were all the rage among rising liberal Democrats such as New York City Council President Carol Bellamy (later head of UNESCO), for whom I wrote speeches in City Hall from 1980-82.

Even older Democrats found themselves crawling or triangulating toward the center, ending welfare as we knew it (at least Bill Clinton did, over howls from the base) and making other public services more "market-oriented" and "customer-friendly." That wasn't enough for conservative Republicans, and as a New York Daily News columnist I watched Rudolph Giuliani go much further than Democrats had.

Short-term gains were impressive; there had been a lot to clean up. But now it turns out that many of those changes betrayed the legitimate expectations and strained the loyalties of Reagan Democrats who found themselves relying on governments that are too slavishly responsive to the riptides of corporate and global capital that are upsetting their jobs, neighborhoods, homes, and hearts. Take the New York Fire Department, the heroes of 9/11. It turns out the NYFD is rather like a medieval guild forged in Catholic Youth Organization basketball leagues -- a rebuke not only to the politically correct but also the managerially corrrect, the market-friendly executives like Giuliani.

Painful though it was for Democrats to "reinvent government," at least they were moving with the tides of capital I've just mentioned, and they were being rewarded for it in corporate donations. That isn't so for Republican reformers who are serious about helping Reagan Democrats. They may have to raise revenues by up-ending the current tax code and slashing the corporate welfare system. They may have to fight big Republican funders and corporate investors, not to mention believers in small-government that pack the party's noise-machines and a chunk of its base.

I doubt they can do it. Reagan Democrats will soon look for a better vessel for their hopes, one that really does couple big spending with strong values by reconfiguring how capital invests and disinvests, here and abroad. Since capital is global, not national, some of those steps can be taken only in concert with other republics.

Yes, the paradigm-shift we'll need is that big, and neither Democrats nor Republicans alone can handle it. Only a new cross-section of American leaders and activists can. And, first, two taboos will have to be broken.

The first keeps us from making serious challenges to today's corporate capitalism, which is no longer John Locke's or Friedrich Hayek's capitalism and no longer sustains republican virtues. (Even Molly Ivins couldn't say that, could she? Well, she tried, a little early, perhaps....)

The second taboo keeps our thinking locked in binary, "left" vs. "right" (or "liberal" vs. "conservative") and Democrat vs. Republican dichotomies that have emptied and discredited so much American political discussion.

You might think that the biggest bar to challenging today's corporate capital comes from conservatives themselves. True enough, but let me put in a bad word for the old left, whose rigid economic determinism and, in Communist states, tyrannical ideologizing of all social pain and hope threatened human dignity and even survival and thereby discredited fundamental and legitimate doubts about capitalism for decades.

That sorry record gives legs to hopes like Ross Douthat's of defending "American exceptionalism in all its forms ... against the idea that we need to change America in pursuit of some abstract form of justice," as he told Bill Moyers recently. I'm with him on that, if by "American exceptionalism" he means the country's historic, sometimes breathtaking civic-republican efforts to ground the universal in the national without succumbing to the tribal.

What an incredible accomplishment the American republic is! But surely the greatest enemy of civic-republican stability, comity, and opportunity right now isn't dialectical materialism but corporate capitalist materialism. Global and anomic, it is eroding both national sovereignty and domestic Lockean independence, family stability, and civic virtue.

A week after hosting Douthat (and two hours after I put up this post), Moyers offered a devastating look at predatory lending, featuring unbelievale recent and ongoing destruction in Cleveland wrought by bankers who give new meaning to the term "bank robber" because, irrefutably, they are the robbers. Literally. Watch it. Moyers presents a chilling, systemic national overview in an interview with The Nation's William Greider. If I could make participants in this conversation do only one thing, it would be to click this link and watch this show.

Conservatives know that Republican strategists can't keep blaming what's happening to us on liberal universalists or Al Quaeda. They can't keep sluicing "national greatness conservatism" into national-security statism - not when our great colleges, crucibles of American civic-republican leadership in my youth, are forging a global ruling class unaccountable to any polity or moral code. They know that the Ford Motor Company no longer calls itself an American corporation, and not only because it can make cars for $1500 less in Canada thanks to that country's universal health care.

So where's the national greatness? Global capitalism doesn't make exception for American exceptionalism, we are learning the hard way. Shouldn't champions of American exceptionalism be trying out analogies between finance capital (please watch the Moyers show) and the worst British mercantilism of the early 1760s? Most American colonists then still loved, depended on, and defended the monarchy. But they were moving, sometimes half-consciously, toward the realization that, as Tom Paine put it, "'Tis time to part." Breaking with mercantilism and monarchy was daunting. It required bold advocates and architects of a new order.

Are our new Republican reformers the patriot framers of a Novus Ordo Seclorum, or are they Tory strategists for the empire? Will they really join with other small-"r" republicans around to reconfigure corporations and other powerful entities? Or would they merely redirect Republicans' "borrow and borrow, spend and spend" governance from its current boondoggles and wars to economic assistance tied cannily to a conservative social agenda?

True, that social agenda is the traditional New Deal one, too. Soon after Republican reformers floated it late in 2005, The American Prospect's Ezra Klein warned that its intended marriage of liberal social benefits and "family values" might succeed for the GOP precisely where Democrats had failed by divorcing values from benefits in the name of multiculturalism and civil rights.

But will conservative true believers and power centers allow such reforms? Writing here recently, The Nation's Chris Hayes posed that challenge to Douthat, who acknowledged, with eerie good cheer, that his effort "to blend policy ideas with political advice for Republicans" is "an uneasy marriage that doesn't always work, and one thing we don't tackle directly are the structural barriers within the GOP to implementing our various ideas."

"One thing?" Isn't it the only thing? Well, there's also Republicans' recent failure to govern, which Douthat also concedes. And there's the migration of some corporate largesse to Democrats, who've been "pro-business" since the 1970s, when Rep. Tony Coehlo showed the new post-Watergate generation in Congress the way to the trough. But the structural barriers to taking on corporate interests are so overwhelming it's small wonder the taboo against criticizing capitalism reigns supreme on both sides, with brave exceptions here and there.

Some reformers hope that if the GOP can revive even a little of the New Deal, some of their counterparts on the left will come over, along with other Americans who'd be willing to give up gay marriage, right-to-die laws, and even Roe v. Wade in exchange for millions of families' getting solid wage supplements, pensions, and mortgage insurance, along with crackdowns on predatory lenders and so on.

Maybe, but I don't think they'll stay when they see what they actually get. Yet the Democratic Party couldn't accept the values-for-benefits trade-offs I just mentioned, either, without enraging its base and its own corporate funders.

Only a truly new party could seriously engage the new capitalism that whimsically disrupts the minimal stability and values conservatives and all civic-republicans cherish -- a party as determined as Republicans were when they rose from the ruins of the Whigs, elevated Lincoln, and roused the country to stop at least one kind of secession by powerful elites and to end slavery itself.

Such a party might begin with an uneasy coalition of strong but chastened leftists and conservatives who are wise enough to craft a serious grand strategy for a new political economy, joining in transnational alliances against powerful forces no one politym let alone political party, can control.

It's in the nature of politics that people disagree and that they form groups of the like-minded to advance their positions against other groups. Conflict is natural, necessary, inevitable. But neither the Republican nor the Democratic party is fit to fight for anything really important, because neither is aligned around a discernible or defensible position on corporate capital which serious people can endorse. Both are schizophrenic because both are too beholden to the worst of capital to be honest or effective in tackling its growing, swaggering assaults on both justice and virtue.

Republicans actually still claim that "free markets make free men," and their only alternatives to the crisis are bromides or palliatives. Democrats do talk about poverty and justice, but they are no less beholden to big money, as even Obama demonstrated in rejecting public campaign finance.

Some groups become all the more viciously partisan and combative when they need to blame someone else for self-contradictions they can't face. They demand a kind of solidarity that is dangerous because it so easily overwhelms deliberation and clear thinking.

Douthat and Salam deserve praise for prompting some Republicans and others of us to think more clearly. But if they really value their proposals, why don't they form a new coalition of strong former Democrats and former Republcians? Are they serious public intellectuals, or partisan strategists? They acknowledge straddling the contradiction. Sooner or later they will have to choose.

Is a new party, dedicated to a fundamental rethinking of how we charter and enable our corporations, unthinkable? So was overthrowing the monarchy to most Americans in 1763. So was abolishing slavery in 1850. Unless we break the blinders on our thinking, we'll never break the constraints of corporate capital and of today's two-party system, as George Scialabba noted in a 2004 review of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?

To do that, we may need a Tom Paine as well as an Alexander Hamilton and a James Madison, not to mention a George Washington. I don't see that yet, although even the Tory strategists among us deserve credit for rattling our corporate and political cages, if only unintentionally, by proposing programs which their cages will not contain.

Do they - and we -- care enough for the American republic to pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, if it comes to that, to break the taboos and that still protect anti-republican capital and that sustain Democrats vs. Republicans and left vs. right, none of them vessels of hope?

The answer is, Not yet. And the reason is....?