Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, delivered the third of the 2003-2004 Bradley Lectures on November 3. Edited excerpts follow.

The Republican Party in 1969 was divided along fault lines that dated back to the 1940s and are almost incomprehensible in terms of the politics of 2003. In those days, you were either a hawk or a dove. Political candidates could not easily gauge public opinion, so you were not always sure how large a segment of the electorate you were pandering to. Sometimes you had no choice but to say what you actually believed.

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year of the emerging Republican majority. Great Depression Democratic power was replaced by Republican power stemming from white middle-class resentment of the Great Society. Middle-class resentment truly blossomed in the election of 1978, which made Republicans the tax cut party, the party of optimism, and not the party of party-poopers or guys with rimless glasses and clipped midwestern accents.

Although this Republican era was still going strong in the 1980s, by 1988, there were clues that the era of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan was about to end. In retrospect, it should have been clearer than most people realized. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis carried ten states in 1988 to Republican candidate Walter Mondale's two states in 1984. In many ways, the 1988 election was the beginning of class inversion.

The 1992 Republican convention indicated the fracturing of the Republican Party. In 1980, when a seemingly odd coalition elected Reagan, many people thought: "These people have only one thing in common. They hate communists." In 1992, we discovered that when there were no communists, Republicans would fight among themselves instead and lose elections.

Although Bill Clinton easily won again in 1996, the elections of 1994 produced a Republican earthquake in Congress. Another crucial development of the mid-1990s was the emergence of the "Republican megaphone": talk shows and think tanks. By 1996, Clinton was complaining that the Democrats lacked the intellectual firepower, speechwriters, and lobbyists to make an impact and that the intellectual Left had been neutralized on economics and foreign policy. Clinton was right: an impressive intellectual Right had replaced any organized support for his projects. Hillary Clinton used the famous words "vast right-wing conspiracy," which has become embedded in the national discourse.

We reached the end of the 1990s with Republicans holding many of the important cards and all the technical advantages of talent and money. But apparently not all the advantages. The Republicans were embarrassed in the elections of 1998, and they did not win the popular vote in the presidential contest of 2000. In 1984, Reagan got 60 percent in New Jersey and Connecticut, more than his national average, but in 1996, Clinton carried both states. In 2000, Al Gore got 56 percent in both Connecticut and New Jersey. This electoral evolution revealed that the bastions of moderate eastern republicanism were gone and the new electorate in those areas contained mostly Democrats.

The evidence from all of these elections is ambiguous. Describing the elections of 2002 as indicative of conservative strength is difficult because those contests were overshadowed by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush made sure that it was September 12 every morning until Election 2002 occurred, as if we had just been terrorized, and we were in the midst of an anti-terror campaign.

But that approach will not work in the elections of 2004, and the hold of 9/11 is loosening. It is remarkable how little media saturation coverage there was this September 11, two years after the attacks, as compared to one year ago. Of course, Iraq has burst that bubble to a great extent. It does not mean Bush will lose, but he will not win the way he did in 2002 on terrorist rhetoric. Republicans go into the next elections with great advantages, but they have to watch their score on the arrogance meter. They have amassed great resources, real intellectual energy, and self-confidence, but it is only a short step to an arrogant attitude that the American people are unlikely to reward over a long period of time. I would not be surprised if Democrats started planting this seed.

In the elections of 1952, there were three sorts of conservatives. You had Robert Taft, who believed more than anything else in limited government. You had Dwight D. Eisenhower, who stood for the cautious and prudent use of American power. You had Adlai Stevenson, who was a New Dealer but held a tragic view of human life. These are important parts of conservatism as an intellectual doctrine, and we do not have anything resembling that election scenario at present. I would make a simple plea: if there is indeed a vast right-wing conspiracy, there should be a place for each of these types of conservatives in it.