The Democrats are in a swoon over the fact that Senator Dole is complaining about the Republicans. The former Republican leader in the upper house told Christopher Wallace of Fox News that the GOP “ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘closed for repairs.’” He reckons the GOP lacks for “ideas and positive agendas.” Mr. Wallace asked Mr. Dole whether he could make it in today’s Republican Party “I doubt it,” Mr. Dole said dolefully. “Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, cause he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.”

Mr. Dole mightn’t want to get too far up on his high horse. Oh, we understand, he was a war hero who twice rose to the Republican national ticket — once, in 1976, as the vice president candidate running with President Ford. The two of them got defenestrated by a peanut farmer from Georgia. It was one of those campaigns where the two parties vied to see who had the fewest ideas. The Democrat was the winner, but a lot of people thought the Republicans ran the more vapid campaign. Ford’s idea for defeating the burgeoning monetary crisis was a button that said “Whip Inflation Now.”

President Nixon hadn’t exactly run a presidency of ideas, either, save for pressing the brainstorms of détente with the Kremlin camarilla and of dealing with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system by setting up wage and price controls and then moving to fiat money. We comprehend that it wasn’t all Nixon’s fault. Eisenhower had run on a platform of the restoration of full gold convertibility of the dollar, only to betray it, and Lyndon Johnson tried to have both guns and butter. By the time the two of them were done wrecking the dollar it required a greater man than Nixon to turn things around.

That turned out to be Reagan. Mr. Dole wasn’t what you would call a big fan of Reagan when the Californian was in the wilderness. Reagan was the right-wing radical, remember, the one who held down the most conservative edge of the party the way, say, Ted Cruz or Scott Walker or Rand Paul do today. Reagan stood for a rejection of the flapdoodle of the Ford-Dole ticket and of the Keynesian economics of which Nixon had declared all were followers. Also of détente. Reagan was for supply-side measures, radical tax cuts, and roll-back of the Soviet Union.

It was only later, after Reagan was proven right, that people like Bob Dole began to perceive Reagan as a hero. It’s just rich to read the Left wing writers kvelling about the way Republicans of an earlier era were the party of ideas. When Mr. Dole got a chance to run as the GOP nominee for president, on what ideas did he run? His big foreign policy moment was his meeting with Saddam Hussein. By that time it Mr. Dole ran for president, it was President Clinton who was declaring that the era of big government was over and who was the tribune of welfare reform.

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The jibe that Republican Party today lacks for ideas we don’t buy. The most important idea today is constitutional conservatism. We have remarked on this before. It is different than either paleo- or neo- or libertarian- or Christian-conservatism, to number the varieties that have given good service in recent decades. It looks on the principles that animated the American founding and were enshrined in the parchment that is the supreme law of the land. It welcomes all races, classes, and creeds (or those who hold no religious creed), so long as they are prepared to pursue a close reading of the Constitution. It’s a glorious idea that leads to a strong foreign policy, limited government, and sound money. It protects rights not by grants from the government but by restricting the power of the government. If these ideas triumph it will be because of the rising generation of the GOP.