With George W. Bush suffering low approval ratings, the situation in Iraq remaining unsettled and the Republican party beset by internal squabbles over religion, foreign policy and immigration, the American conservative movement is facing an identity crisis. In a new book, excerpted below, National Post columnist David Frum proposes a way forward.

This is part two of three. Read parts one and three.

Resident Fellow  David Frum

In a pensive moment late in 1997, U.S. president Bill Clinton observed: "There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past." He was right: A lot of people, brilliant and not so brilliant, do believe that. Republicans and conservatives do not. And it is this disagreement that increasingly defines the difference between America's two great parties.

Democrats are consistently less likely than Republicans to describe themselves as "extremely proud" to be Americans. As of January, 2005, for example, 71% of Republicans described themselves as "extremely proud," but only 54% of Democrats did so. On the eve of the Iraq war in March, 2003, 72% of Republican high school seniors described themselves as "very" or "extremely" patriotic, while only 41% of Democratic high school seniors did so.

Liberals and Democrats believe in government. They put much less trust in the people who elect that government. Democrats are less likely than Republicans to express confidence in the ability of the United States to solve its problems, a gap that widened to an astonishing 13 points in 2003 and then to a record 19 points in 2007. Democratic voters are much more likely to attribute success or failure in life to forces beyond individual control, and to express pessimism and passivity in the face of personal adversity.

Believing in government, but lacking faith in America and Americans, Democrats are naturally attracted to institutions of global governance. Mistrusting traditional American culture as racist, violent and generally defective, Democrats bring little enthusiasm and less perseverance to that culture's defense.

Many on the left yearn to build new structures of international governance: the Kyoto Accord, an international criminal court, an aggrandized UN Security Council. These new institutions differ radically from the institutions created after 1945: NATO, the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Inter-national Monetary Fund.

The post-1945 institutions were created to enhance the effectiveness of nations, to provide greater military and economic security to their populations, to support and enhance democracy. The new globalism, by contrast, aims not to strengthen nations, but to subordinate them; not to consolidate democracy, but to constrain it.

The hottest of hot-button issues in early-21st-century America are the issues that challenge Americans to define what it means to be an American: immigration, affirmative action, bilingualism, national sovereignty, community loyalty and the role of the United States in the world.

More than one in nine residents of the United States were born abroad. Court rulings since the 1970s have conferred quasi-official status on the Spanish language in American schooling and balloting. The mechanisms by which past waves of migration were assimilated have either (like the draft) vanished or else (like the public schools) abandoned their former mission. So weak is the assimilationist ideal that the two most visible American Muslim groups felt emboldened to condemn the Afghanistan war barely six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Over the decades, Republicans have been many things: the party of the Union, the party of the gold standard, the party of temperance, the party of free enterprise and the pro-life party, among others. Amid all these changes, there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood.

Democrats, by contrast, have historically tended to attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: slaveholders, indebted farmers, immigrants, intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays--people who identify with the pluribus in the nation's motto, e pluribus unum. As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger.

Each party has performed important services in its historical role. In moments when Americans are tempted to abuse their power or disregard the legitimate concerns of others, those who issued prophetic warnings have been Democrats more often than not. But when the nation's sovereignty is threatened, when its interests need to be defended, when its values require more than lip service--at those moments, it is usually the Republicans to whom the nation turns.

Peter Beinart, former editor of the liberal New Republic magazine, collected some amazing polling data about the modern Democrats in a book he published in 2006. Asked in early 2005 to describe their top foreign policy priority, self-described conservatives listed "destroying al-Qaeda." The top priority of self-described liberals? "Withdrawing from Iraq."

As their #2 foreign policy goal, conservatives listed halting the spread of nuclear weapons to hostile groups or nations. The second-place liberal foreign policy priority: halting the spread of AIDS.

By the end of 2005, only 59% of Democrats (as opposed to 94% of Republicans) still approved of the Afghanistan war. Only 57% of Democrats (as opposed to 95% of Republicans) would favor the use of force to destroy a terrorist training camp.

Democrats are not pacifists exactly. But they do recoil from force unless it has some kind of international authorization. And international authorization is not easily obtained. You might be able to persuade international electorates to approve international humanitarian rescue missions like that in Kosovo. But the use of military force to advance specifically American national interests and to assert distinctively American values--that will not easily garner the kind of international backing that Democrats crave. A Gallup poll conducted the week after 9/11 found that only 29% of the French, 21% of Italians, 18% of the British, 17% of Germans and 12% of Spaniards supported military action against countries that harboured terrorists.

American voters understand well the inhibitions and qualms that would have hobbled a Democratic president's response to 9/11. It's hard to win a war when you instinctively flinch from force, hard to summon the nation to unity when it is diversity that delights you, hard to lead a nation you are not sure you love.

But these same voters now want more from politicians. From foreign policy to health care, from immigration to energy, this is a moment when a great national constituency is gathering for change and reform.

Conservatives have long been the party of liberty, and the party of liberty we must remain. But this is not 1964. The ideals under threat today are not the nation's liberty, but the nation's security, its unity, its effectiveness and--yes, Republicans can care about this, too--its beauty. It was one of the greatest of conservatives, Edmund Burke, who declared that to be loved, a nation must be lovable. A nation that preserves its natural environment, that protects its endangered species and whose cities delight the eye is a nation more lovable than one that shrugs off despoliation, extinction and ugliness as the necessary price of freedom.

To vindicate our claim to be the party of the nation, we must make clear that we value public service as much as private wealth creation; that we appreciate the duties of government fully as much as we defend the rights of the marketplace. We cherish our principles, but our first principle is the public good. From Lincoln to Churchill to Reagan, the greatest conservatives have recognized that sometimes the only way to conserve is to change.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI. He is the author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday, 2007).