Modest Conservative "Solutions"

Reihan continues the conversation:

My sense is that Ezra and I have some basic agreements about the scale and nature of the problems we’re setting out to solve. One smart and curmudgeonly conservative recently argued that the so-called reformist conservatism I believe in is a trap: in a bidding war with the liberal left, conservatives will never win. And I think that’s right: if I really did accept the center-left diagnosis of American discontent and were simply stingier about tackling it through the expansion of government, I wouldn’t be making a terribly compelling case. (That’s one danger John McCain faces, incidentally.) But of course I think the anxieties of the middle class are rooted in a complicated mix of causes, only some of which are susceptible to government solutions.