WASHINGTON DC -- With all of Washington lost in coup-coup land, wondering whether Newt will be newtered, it seems like a good time to cast a light on the cognitive dissonance at the heart of public sentiment today. For a long time conservative thinkers have beat their rice bowls over the following paradox: If you poll people in the abstract about conservative policy ideas, such as devolution, privatized Social Security, medical savings accounts, school choice, the flat tax, deregulation, and so forth, you typically find strong majorities expressing support. But if you describe these as Republican ideas, public support plummets in polls. What accounts for how this stigma beats up our dogma? A hostile media and a relentlessly unscrupulous opposition certainly bear a large portion of the blame, but shouldn't, in my mind, bear the whole blame. A simpler factor might well be old-fashioned consumer resistance to change, even when consumers say they favor change in the abstract.

A good object lesson can be found in the saga of the New Coke way back in 1985. Coke, like the Democratic party a few years ago, found itself losing market share to the competition. Enter the New Coke and "New Democrats." According to blind taste tests, consumers actually preferred the taste of New Coke formula by a wide margin, but we all know what happened when Coke actually brought the New Coke to the market: Massive consumer rejection, based mostly on a resistance to big change.

Good old American folk cynicism spontaneously generated the conspiratorial view that the New Coke was all a big hoax (probably hatched in Roswell, New Mexico), intended simply to revive sales of the old Coke-the ultimate "bait and switch" gambit. In the case of politics, this scenario is more plausible. People thought they were getting a New Democrat in 1992, but ended up with an Old Democrat in the person of Bill Clinton. Clinton's own equivalent of New Coke-health care reform-foundered for some of the same reasons as the New Coke: Consumer resistance to wholesale change. Now Clinton is the master of the small, mostly symbolic change, while all the while really just defending the status quo (or the "statist quo"), which is a much easier task than real change.

Consumer resistance, whether in the market or in politics, is an aspect of what the jargon-meisters call "path dependence." In politics it may more closely resemble what the psychobabblists call "co-dependence," but that is the main object of the welfare state anyway.

The point is, it will take more than holding hands around the House Republican campfire and singing "Kumbayah," or switching to New Faces in the leadership, to fix the problem of a stalled conservative agenda. It is no use talking endlessly about being a "change agent" if you neglect the necessity of repetitive communications and marketing, like Clinton's monotonous repetition of M2E2 ("Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment") throughout the last campaign. Clinton recovered from his health care debacle in much the same way Coke recovered from the New Coke. Republicans should study this lesson, and apply it with patience and consistency.

-By Steven Hayward