Dick Cheney's emergence as Leader of the Opposition delights two groups, one small and shrinking, the other large and growing. The small group is movement conservatives, who regard the former vice president as their grumbling tribune. The large group is the Democrats, who see in Cheney the scowling face of a minority party that intends to stay that way.

The only people unhappy about Cheney's prominence, in fact, are members of that dwindling, persecuted not-even-a-faction known as moderate Republicans. Colin Powell made an eloquent plea for this anachronistic viewpoint recently on Face the Nation. "If we don't reach out more, the party is going to be sitting on a very narrow base," Powell said. He proposed party leaders get together to frankly assess what the hell has gone wrong.

It's not going to happen. Half a year after their catastrophe at the polls, Republicans remain more inclined toward self-immolation than self-examination. At its most recent meeting, the Republican National Committee spent its time discussing ways to tag Democrats as "socialists." After Arlen Specter switched teams, bringing Democrats to the brink of a filibuster-proof majority, Jim DeMint of South Carolina said he'd rather have 30 principled Republicans in the Senate than 60 flexible ones. Do I hear 25? Few on the right seem capable even of acknowledging how bad things are.

So let's get the recriminations started for them. In the Reagan era, it was said that Democrats searched for heretics while Republicans looked for converts. Now it's the other way around. The campaign of John McCain, who came from the reasonable wing of the GOP, illustrates the problem. McCain got shaken down at every activist tollbooth, culminating in the big one on the way into Minneapolis, where he was told he couldn't choose Joe Lieberman as his veep. By the time the movement got done with him, the nominee was stripped of his crossover appeal. Litmus tests on issues like taxes, abortion, guns and immigration are compounding the party's longer-term demographic peril. In a nutshell, the white, middle-class, rural and suburban churchgoing families that reliably vote right are shrinking as a share of population. Latinos, Asians and young people who like Republicans less are voting more.

As daunting as the GOP's challenge looks, it isn't hopeless. One encouraging model for the Republicans is the way Democratic centrists moved from marginalization to preeminence in the late 1980s and early '90s. After Reagan's reelection in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Council was founded as a counterweight to free-spending, interest-group liberalism. The New Democrats promoted personal responsibility and market-based policies. They cultivated nonideological politicians who could still win in the South and West. This approach led to open conflict within the party and a presidential victory in 1992.

Another encouraging model for the right is the British Conservatives, poised to return to power after 12 years in the wilderness. David Cameron, who took over as party leader in 2005, has focused on appealing to the center and modernizing his party's fusty image. While hewing to the old values of free enterprise, family and individual liberty, Cameron has accommodated new realities by making the Tories pro-environment, gay-friendly and sympathetic to immigrants.

It's past time for the GOP to abandon Gingrich-era, pseudo-libertarian antigovernment rhetoric and to accept the social consensus behind progressive taxation, retirement security, action to slow climate change and a government role in health care. It also might want to quit defending torture. It needs to move to a neutral or big-tent approach on most social issues, the way Democrats did with gun control and the death penalty. A Sister Souljah moment would help. A respected party leader should give a swift, symbolic kick in the rump to a fringe figure who epitomizes the intolerance of the religious right—perhaps Jerry Falwell Jr., whose "Liberty" University recently booted its beyond-the-pale campus Democratic Club.

Obama's open-ended expansion of government creates an opportunity for the GOP to propose a leaner, meaner alternative vision with more space for private enterprise, individual initiative and dynamic growth. Efficiency-promoting tax reform, like Reagan backed in 1986, would be a big improvement on unfunded tax cuts. After Obama, the GOP needs to try again for minority votes, both through the kind of immigration reform Bush ineffectually favored and the sorts of empowerment policies supported by the late Jack Kemp. The strongest card may be one no Bush ever dared play: education vouchers for the poor. On health care, Republicans might get behind a subsidized, individual-mandate framework as an alternative to Democratic plans that will have a tendency to morph into a single-payer system over time.

Republicans need to learn to function again as a conservative force, in the traditional, Burkean sense of the term. They need to get a grip on the Internet as a political tool. They need to recruit some new faces and let some fresh air into their stifled conversations. Failing all that, they could just stick with Cheney.

Weisberg is the Editor In Chief of The Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy. A version of this column also appears on Slate.com.

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