Published: Wednesday, 7 Oct 2009 | 10:37 AM ET

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Successful economic ideas usually end up being taken too far.

Democrats dominated the middle part of the 20th century, thanks in part to their vigorous response to the Great Depression. They used the government to soften the effects of the Depression and to build the modern safety net. But they failed to see the limits of the government’s ability to manage the economy and helped usher in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Ronald Reagan then came to power promising to cut taxes and unleash the forces of the market. And the Democrats spent the next dozen years struggling to absorb the lessons of their failures.

More than a few people believe the Republican Party is in a similar place today.

When I asked Dale Jorgenson, the eminent expert on productivity (and a Republican), what had been the positive aspects of President George W. Bush’s economic policy, Mr. Jorgenson said, “I don’t see any redeeming features, unfortunately.” After Republicans opposed the stimulus package this year, The Financial Times, not exactly a liberal organ, called the party’s ideology harebrained. When Olympia Snowe was recently explaining why she might be the only Republican senator to vote for health reform, she suggested it was because her party had moved so far to the right.

But perhaps the most persistent — and thought-provoking — conservative critic of the party has been Bruce Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett has worked for Jack Kemp and Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He has been a fellow at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He wants the estate tax to be reduced, and he thinks that President Obama should not have taken on health reform or climate change this year.

Above all, however, he thinks that the Republican Party no longer has a credible economic policy. It continues to advocate tax cuts even though the recent Bush tax cuts led to only mediocre economic growth and huge deficits. (Numbers from the Congressional Budget Office show that Mr. Bush’s policies are responsible for far more of the projected deficits than Mr. Obama’s.)

On the spending side, Republican leaders criticize Mr. Obama, yet offer no serious spending cuts of their own. Indeed, when the White House has proposed cuts — to parts of Medicare, to an outdated fighter jet program and to subsidies for banks and agribusiness — most Republicans have opposed them.

How, Mr. Bartlett asks, is this conservative? How is it in keeping with a party that once prided itself on fiscal responsibility — the party of President Dwight Eisenhower (who refused to cut taxes because the budget wasn’t balanced) or of the first President Bush (whose tax increase helped create the 1990s surpluses)?

“So much of what passes for conservatism today is just pure partisan opposition,” Mr. Bartlett says. “It’s not conservative at all.”

He became well known several years ago for attacking the younger Mr. Bush, in a book called “Impostor.” But Mr. Bartlett has turned out to be more interesting than most people who publicly break from their own party. In a series of columns for Forbes and in a book that comes out next week, “The New American Economy,” he has started to describe a new conservatism. He is, in effect, laying intellectual groundwork for a Republican Bill Clinton — the politician who curbs his party’s excesses.

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You can argue that this sort of reassessment should not make conservatives feel insecure. In many ways, they have won. Mr. Obama, like Mr. Clinton, has proposed raising the top marginal tax rate to a level that’s lower than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Most Democrats now acknowledge the central idea of supply-side economics: tax rates matter.

The best parts of supply-side economics have been “completely integrated into mainstream economics,” Mr. Bartlett writes. “What remains is a caricature — that there is no problem that more and bigger tax cuts won’t solve.”

His conservatism starts with the idea that high taxes are no longer the problem, even if complaining about them still makes for good politics. This year, federal taxes are on pace to equal just 15 percent of gross domestic product. It is the lowest share since 1950.

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