Book of the week
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
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Working-class voters hold the key to America’s political future, say the young conservative thinkers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Ever since the collapse of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, the non-college-educated half of the American population has been zigzagging between parties only to discover that neither camp has its interests in mind. What these “Sam’s Club” voters need most, say Douthat and Salam, are tax, wage, and education policies aimed at strengthening the American family, an institution to which Republicans have long paid lip service. Anxious Americans understand, the authors claim, that family is their bulwark against fiscal distress and the economic foundation of their aspirations.
“If I could put one book on the desk of every Republican officeholder,” said David Brooks in The New York Times, “Grand New Party would be it.” Douthat and Salam, “two of the most promising” members of a new generation of conservative writers who believe that the GOP is badly in need of repair, have produced “the best single road map of where the party should, and is likely to, head.” A party that’s been bashing big government for decades might not be ready to embrace the authors’ ambitious policy proposals overnight, said Fred Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. In fact, Douthat and Salam don’t even pretend that they’re being political realists when they recommend generous wage subsidies for low-income workers and a quintupling of the federal child tax credit. But they’re absolutely correct that Republicans can’t rebuild a lasting majority without championing some kind of government activism. Even a slight shift in tone might help secure the working-class whites who already seem “most resistant to the candidacy of Barack Obama.”
If John McCain doesn’t embrace Douthat and Salam’s prescriptions fast, said Matthew Continetti in The Weekly Standard, Obama might adopt them first. He’s “just the sort of guy” who “could mix populist rhetoric and center-left economic policy” into a “potent brew.” But that possibility points to a crucial flaw in Douthat and Salam’s “judicial and enjoyable” analysis. One reason that Republicans have always resisted spending at the rate the authors recommend is that they fear government deficits can inhibit economic growth. Like liberals of the old school, Douthat and Salam assume that the public money needed for their programs will simply be there.
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