[Jeff Bergner has served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assistant secretary of state, and professor of government. His forthcoming book is on the role of German idealist philosophy in shaping the modern idea of a human being.]

Recent electoral successes, including Scott Brown’s landmark victory in Massachusetts, have positioned Republicans once again for a role in governing, and far sooner than they might have supposed. But are they ready to govern? It all depends, for the problem with many Republicans (and I am a Republican) is that they, along with liberals, subscribe at a visceral level to The Narrative.

What is The Narrative? The Narrative is the official story about America. It is a story composed by the political left, which entered American public life with the progressive movement in the early 20th century and was elaborated in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s.

The story runs like this. America was founded on the ideal of equality, though that ideal at first was barely put into practice. The story of America is one of progress toward the fulfillment of the ideal of equality. The end of slavery and the achievement of women’s suffrage are landmarks in this story. All fair enough. So is—less plausibly—the federal income tax, originally established to fund the government but later used to redistribute wealth and tax advantages among Americans. Then came the many programs of direct payments to individuals, the so-called entitlements, beginning with Social Security and extending to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid to dependent children, farm subsidies, and myriad others. And today the health care
reform bill before Congress takes its place in America’s advance toward equality. Each and every policy that aims to level distinctions between Americans has found its place within The Narrative....

That The Narrative should move many Republicans as well as Democrats is hardly surprising. It is, after all, pervasive. This is the story presented to children at school by teachers and textbooks all across the nation. And, while the left-leaning American professoriate may think of itself as contrarian or skeptical, it operates in lockstep to offer The Narrative as the official view on virtually every college campus. It is reinforced at every turn by the print and electronic media, in the arts, and in every mainstream avenue of American culture....

Herein lies the problem for Republicans who subscribe to The Narrative. Even when they doubt the wisdom of “moving too fast” on a given policy initiative, they remain captive in a larger sense to The Narrative. Even as they argue that “the time is not right” to endorse the latest progressive project, they concede the substance. Now, it may be true that it is peculiarly inappropriate to launch a massive new health care entitlement, for instance, at a time of deep recession, double-digit unemployment, and low tax revenues. But that begs the larger question whether there is actually any time when it would be good to establish a government-run health care system in the United States. “Not now,” “not so fast,” “not just yet”—these are the stock-in-trade of Republicans, arguments hinting that at some later date the reform they currently oppose might win their vote. In a very real sense, Democrats are correct: Republicans these days are the party of no.

Republicans captive to The Narrative are thus condemned to a perpetual rearguard action against the consolidation of government-imposed equality. For them, the very definition of a successful administration or Congress is one that doesn’t lose too much ground too fast. This is dispiriting for Republicans. It is also dispiriting to a sizable segment of the American electorate, which is uncomfortable with such a limited range of political options. Consider conservative voters: Why should they care about the 2010 elections? A Republican victory might slow the consolidation of government power, but does anyone think it would reverse it or chart a significantly different course? Is this even the goal?...

From time to time individuals break out of The Narrative. Leading radio talk show hosts do this, rhetorically, and are subjected to vicious personal attacks for their trouble. This is because The Narrative denies any legitimacy to a genuinely different point of view; any such view has been predefined as backward, regressive, self-interested, and evil. There can be no reasonable debate with opponents of The Narrative. When opponents, or even mere skeptics, question not just one or another policy notion but the story itself, the political left goes into overdrive. The entire machine is activated—political progressives, left-wing bloggers, the mainstream media, academics, late night TV hosts, and the arts community all descend with fury to attack the intelligence, the background, and the character of anyone who questions The Narrative. To question The Narrative is to question the self-ascribed virtue of the left.

Occasionally political leaders arise who go outside the official story line. Ronald Reagan was one. He was a threat, and a very attractive, genial, and well-grounded one at that. He was a candidate who had the temerity to question The Narrative. Worse yet, if elected he actually threatened to do something about it. He threatened to roll back taxes, eliminate the Department of Education, and reduce the size and scope of the federal government. To add insult to injury, he made a point of holding American exceptionalism—the “shining city on a hill”—at the very center of his political views....

What if Republicans took back the House in 2010? Or, to enlarge the fantasy, what if Republicans enjoyed the numerical advantage of today’s Democrats in the House and Senate? Would they actually do anything to reverse the growth of government? Republican majorities would surely strive to slow the rush to national financial ruin and rein in unsustainable deficits, and that’s all to the good. Government-imposed equality might advance more slowly. But what are the chances it would be halted or reversed? For that matter, what did Republicans do as recently as five years ago, when they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House?

So long as Republicans are enthralled by The Narrative, they will be stuck in rearguard actions. There will be no coherent set of policies toward which Republicans aim steadily over time, such as characterizes the progressive left. There will be only the (almost endearing) Republican embarrassment about governing at all....

What if our national history were recast and understood in this new light? What if we reminded ourselves that it was the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass that ended slavery and the Democratic party that dragged its feet? That it was the Republican party that pushed through women’s suffrage? That Republicans like Senator Everett Dirksen were leaders in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s? The overthrow of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, the end of segregation all empowered people vis à vis their government. And these advances in citizen empowerment were then wrongly put to the service of (seemingly well-intentioned) egalitarian programs that result not in the improvement of America’s citizenry but in their perpetual dependence?

This would be arduous work. It would require Republicans not simply to oppose current Democratic policy initiatives, but to reinterpret the broad course of American history. It would also require Republicans to end their blind acquiescence to the Democrats’ demand to be judged by the purity of their intentions. The so-called purity of the Democrats’ intentions should count for nothing, nothing at all. One cannot have witnessed the effects of the left’s policies over the past 60 years—the poverty, the destruction of families, the coarsening of public life, the despair of dependency, the financial bankruptcy, the politicization of everything, and the lack of a global compass—one cannot have seen this and think that good intentions should count for anything....

What if? What if a new Republican interpretation of American history succeeded in breaking apart the false conflation of Democratic efforts to consolidate power with political virtue?

First, Republicans might lose their shame about actually governing. The Republicans’ badge of honor—their reluctance to govern, their hesitance to press an affirmative agenda of their own—might be overcome. Republicans might actually learn to use the levers of power, if only to reverse our national course.

Second, Republicans would discover what they have lacked so long: a cornucopia of policy ideas that could shape a legislative and regulatory agenda for decades to come. It is not that Republicans haven’t put forward good initiatives from time to time; what they’ve lacked is a long-term vision that produces a wide and coherent menu of policies. Though correct in principle, the mantra of “lower taxes and less regulation” is too narrow to amount to such a vision. An affirmative vision of ever-expanding citizen empowerment is one that can generate initiatives and policies that build upon each other, unlike today’s almost random occasional departures from the unrelenting growth of the left-Hegelian administrative state....

None of this will go down easily. There will be bitter claims that Republicans are “politicizing” matters. This is straight out of the left’s playbook: Politicize everything, and then scream loudly if anyone seeks redress.

Formulating a new American narrative and governing in accord with it is not a task for the faint-hearted. But the effort is worth it. Unlike the left’s initiatives, too many of which must be disguised and misrepresented at every turn, these initiatives can be crafted to win genuine popular support. These initiatives, moreover, are likely to achieve their stated purposes, unlike those of the left, and can be expanded and developed over time. Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s that strong forces in modern democracies press toward equality and passivity at the expense of liberty and self-government. But he also noted that these forces are not fated to prevail.