As to limited executive power, I don’t know that it’s been discussed much since FDR. Maybe the thought of Obama wielding the writ will restore the issue to some relevance, but as the current administration has lost so much moral authority on the topic I’m not sure how persuasive the Party could be. In my dreams Obama would at least seek the repeal of the Patriot Act, but I put the odds of that happening at -100.

Heck I wish that was a bipartisan embrace.

The first and last heresies (as Indya points out in the case of the third) suffer from the problem that the majority of the people visibly advocating those heresies happen to be on the left. That makes them ipso facto unacceptable, since in any argument the Democrats/left are always wrong (also, “the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment”). In honor of our host, I mention the original Iconoclasm, which, regardless of the “theology” behind it, was reminiscent of Islam and thus Obviously Wrong. Again, I am not taking a position either way on Iconoclasm in Christianity, lest Daniel exile me to the Crimea (for Daniel – I don’t actually know if any Iconoclasts or Iconodules were actually exiled to Crimea, but it seems a plausible punishment).

The problem with the second heresy is that you have mistated Ross and Reihan’s position – I submit that a better statement which makes the heresy clear is “maybe the [Federal] Government should do something for the middle class”. Since Government is Teh Problem, the heresy is obvious.

If I had to sum up the pundit heresies that the so-called mainstream republicans object to it wou be as follows: Larison – “Let’s invade fewer countries”; Douthat – “Maybe we should do something for the middle class”; Dreher – “How about a more sustainable lifestyle?”

These all sound like pretty common-sense notions to me. I bet they would be good politics too. I don’t for the life of me understand the resistance to the goals themselves.

One can imagine a very fruitful “fusionism” on the right between Paul’s non-interventionism, Hunter’s protectionism, and a much more fleshed out Huckabee economic populism, but those (like Limbaugh) who want to party like it is 1980 all over again are going to have to lead the party to a few consecutive defeats for the ground to be fertile for that sort of wide-spread policy re-thinking. The reformists may have the head start, but the purists are as we speak very successfully reading the reformists out of polite company. The reformists are also crippled by the sheer incompatibility (you and David Brooks probably don’t make the beginnings of much at all) of dissident conservatives, broadly defined.