It began in 1973 with a score of Ronald Reagan acolytes meeting in a Washington hotel and forming the advance guard of a “Reagan revolution” that promised to reclaim American vitality from the economic and social morass of the 1970s. Some 42 years later, when the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington last week, it required a 5,000-seater conference hall to accommodate the multi-million-dollar industry that American conservatism has become. And yet paradoxically, for all the obvious material progress the movement has achieved since that first meeting at the Madison Hotel, last week provided yet another reminder that American conservatives still instinctively look backwards, not forwards when seeking solutions to the challenges they face.

Nearly 30 years after he left office, the ghost of Ronald Reagan was summoned to the CPAC stage on an almost hourly basis, as speaker after speaker lined up to bash Obama’s America and lament the passing of Reagan’s mythical “shining city on a hill”.

As Republicans consider how they will win the 2016 general election — after losing five of the last six popular votes — it was remarkable how little time potential candidates spent enunciating what a new American century might actually look like under Republican leadership.

For two days, a long list of potential nominees to take on Hillary Clinton in 2016 pandered to an audience of pitchfork political activists who rejoice in defending what’s left of old, white, God-fearing America rather than seizing territory that is new.

On the economy, the CPAC promise was the old one of slashing regulation and cutting taxes to promote growth. Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky promised the “largest tax cut in American history”, while Scott Walker, the budget-slashing Wisconsin governor, promised more of the same. But in a globalised economy where wages for the low and medium-skilled are flat even as corporate profits are rising, the wider conversation about what will deliver better living standards has moved on even from the Bill Clinton era — let alone that of Ronald Reagan.

Part of that conversation is about skills and education, but efforts to raise national standards through the nationwide “Common Core” standards were pilloried by Tea Party types such as Ted Cruz and Paul as “big government” attempt to crush aspirations, not free them.

Republicans should ask themselves whether parents care more about raising school standards and holding teachers to account, or the defending a state’s right to educate them poorly. On immigration, America’s shifting demographics have — like it or not — changed the electoral calculus, but CPAC’s hall still echoed to familiar calls to “close the border” and preserve what jobs remain for the hard-working “real” Americans, whoever “real” American might be these days.

Only Jeb Bush, who was openly attacked by several speakers, tried to stake out what winning ground would look like for a Republican Party. “The simple fact is, there is no plan to deport 11 million people,” he said, taking a swipe at all the wishful-thinking while pointing out the obvious — that the Republicans need to win back the votes of “Latinos, and young people and other people that you need to win to get 50 [per cent]”. And lest anyone missed the point, Bush spoke that word “Latino” with the inflection of a fluent-Spanish speaker whose wife is Mexican — and who could very easily use a 2016 conference speech to address Hispanic voters in their native tongue.

That is one of the reasons why, in private, Democrat strategists say Bush is still the candidate Hillary Clinton fears the most. Reagan, whose own coalitions realigned the political landscape of the 1980s, would surely have seen the necessity of adapting to America’s new reality. As he once observed, and Republicans would do well to heed, there are “no barriers to progress except those we ourselves erect”.

–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015