How do you fix a broken society? As conservatism tries to find its moorings after the long wilderness years in Britain and the debacle of George Bush’s presidency, this is becoming the question. David Cameron asked it last Monday in Glasgow. The continued decline of the traditional family, the rise in antisocial behaviour, the emergence of a resilient underclass, the growth of social and economic inequality: worrying about these is – or should be – a Tory concern.

From Burke on, conservatives have argued that culture is the central political fact, that the small ways in which human beings understand, help and relate to one another – far too complex for a government adequately to manage or control – are what make a country successful, stable and democratic. The British way of life is as crucial to British success as any economics or government programme.

The paradox is: conservatives also realise that for these very reasons, government’s ability to change the culture is extremely limited. The forces that shape culture and give it direction are almost always too diffuse and complex to be tackled directly. If government plays its hand too heavily, it can make matters worse. Cameron embraced this paradox rather well last week. Here he is in classic Tory mode: “Changing our culture is not easy or quick. You cannot pull a lever. You cannot do it top-down. But you can give a lead. You can give a nudge. You can make a difference if you are clear where you stand.”

Here he is adding some pragmatic ideas to help: “Saying to parents: your responsibility and your commitment matter, so we will give a tax break for marriage and end the couple penalty. Saying to head teachers: you are responsible and if you want enforceable home-school contracts and the freedom to exclude, you can have it and we will judge you on your results. Saying to police officers: you are responsible and the targets and bureaucracy are going, but you must account to an elected individual who will want answers if you fail. Saying to business: if you take responsibility you can help change culture and we will help you with deregulation and tax cuts.”

It’s no accident that Cameron took these ideas directly to Gallowgate. It’s exactly an appeal to those mired in these disturbing trends, with few resources to rise above them, that conservatives have missed in the recent past. There is, it turns out, something called society. And it needs tending.

That, too, is the goal of some young Republicans in the United States. They want the Republican party to hone its appeal to the working poor and to shift American conservatism away from its traditional emphasis on free-market economics and small government toward a more Disraelian “one nation” bid to rally the suburban and rural working poor. They come, of course, from a different place to the Cameron Tories. The Bush-Rove Republicans have already shifted from the broader Reagan coalition of libertarians, anticommunists, moral traditionalists and tax cutters to one that is rooted in the South and skewed towards the rural heartland. They are losing the educated elites at a fast clip, accelerated by Barack Obama’s class appeal. What some younger conservatives now want is to capitalise on this and take it one step further.

That’s the central thrust of a book just out, Grand New Party, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The title is a play on America’s nickname for the Republicans, the Grand Old Party, or GOP. The authors are in their twenties, undeniably brilliant and (full disclosure) friends and colleagues at The Atlantic Monthly, the American magazine whose website hosts my blog. They are the first generation of American intellectuals to have emerged from the blogo-sphere. And so they think widely and outside some of the guard rails of the professional think tank class.

At the heart of Grand New Party is a belief that what has fuelled social breakdown is the collapse of the stable two-parent family, caught in the pincers of the 1960s sexual revolution and the globalised economy of the 1990s and since. Not only have divorce, premarital sex, illegitimacy and single parenthood become more socially acceptable among the working poor – leaving a new generation with less social capital than the last – but the economy has forced many couples into two-job households in which caring for children has become much harder. Social stratification and inequality – in part a function of greater meritocracy – have also intensified the dysfunction at the bottom of the heap. Young families are barely making it – and are suffering. When families suffer, so do societies.

I’m crudely summarising a complex argument. But the diagnosis is a simple one and Salam and Douthat offer a variety of policy proposals to deal with it. They sound similar to Cameron’s in some critical respects. Cameron proposes tax credits for parents who stay home to take care of children, allowances for parents with children under three and government money for low-in-come families. Douthat and Salam propose a $5,000 tax credit for every child a woman produces. Call it conservative maternalism.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. It smacks a little too much of social engineering and the forces it is supposed to counter – the past few decades’ cultural shifts regarding sexuality, marriage and family and the economic pressures of an increasingly globalised world – are almost certainly too powerful to be held back.

On the other hand, if the policy is designed merely to mitigate some of the ways in which socially crucial behaviour – such as good child-rearing – are discouraged, it may be worth trying. If a tax credit can help one parent devote more time to children, the long-term ripple effects on the next generation could be profound. It’s a tricky balance – between clumsy government intervention and a helpful government nudge– but one perhaps worth putting on the table.

Conservatism, after all, has always been a strange mixture of dismay at social loss and pragmatism in helping to ameliorate it. It is not an ideology; it’s a flexible, pragmatic, modest approach to the necessary evil of government. In one era, big tax cuts, deregulation and a much smaller state may be appropriate. In another time, a different emphasis may be more fitting. This is the Tory genius – and it’s encouraging to see conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic grope gradually towards reinvention.

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