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Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
"Memo to John McCain: Please, please READ THIS BOOK. It can help you win the election and guide Republicans in shaping the political future.
Memo to Democrats: Don't read this book. It's going to be THE political book of 2008. Republicans will be better off if you choose to ignore it."
--William Kristol, editor, The Weekly Standard
In a provocative challenge to Republican conventional wisdom, two of the Right's rising young thinkers call upon the GOP to focus on the interests and needs of working-class voters.
Grand New Party lays bare the failures of the conservative revolution and presents a detailed blueprint for building the next Republican majority. Blending history, analysis, and fresh, often controversial recommendations, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue that it is time to move beyond the Reagan legacy and the mind-set of the current Republican power structure.
In a concise examination of recent political trends, the authors show that the Democrats' cultural liberalism makes their party inherently hostile to the interests and values of the working class. But on a host of issues, today's Republican Party lacks a message that speaks to their economic aspirations. Grand New Party offers a new direction "a conservative vision of a limited-but-active government that tackles the threats to working-class prosperity and to the broader American Dream.
With specific proposals covering such hot-button topics as immigration, health care, and taxes, Grand New Party will shake up the Right, challenge the Left, and force both sides to confront and adapt to the changing political landscape.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Ross Douthat
19 books359 followersRoss Gregory Douthat is a conservative American author, blogger and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor at The Atlantic and is author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party (Doubleday, 2008), which David Brooks called the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head." He is a film critic for National Review and has also contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, the Claremont Review of Books, GQ, Slate, and other publications. In addition, he frequently appears on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv. In April 2009, he became an online and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page. Douthat is the youngest regular op-ed writer in the paper's history.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
October 23, 2008
My interest in this book was sparked by an interview with the authors on NPR's "Fresh Air". Douthat and Salam are trying to create a new direction for the GOP by re-focusing traditional conservative ideals in a direction that the party hasn't, other than through lip service. Their goal is to make the GOP more relevant to the needs of working-class Americans (which they define as non-college graduates) by creating policies that address W-C concerns: job instability, instability in the traditional family unit, and health care.
They provide an interesting take on these issues, and some of their plans I wouldn't mind seeing implemented: like tax credits for parents who choose to take time off from work to raise young children, and governmental supplements for "sub-living wage" workers. Additionally, they are smart enough to acknowledge that anti-government rhetoric is self-defeating (although they don't point out that it is also anarchistic), and what most American's actually want is government that works efficiently.
However, there are some serious problems with the book. First of all, I find their lack of citations annoying. I don't believe that they are just making things up, I just like to know where they are getting their information from, especially when they make claims that divorce is a bigger problem for working-class families than middle-class ones. I'd like to know their sources to help me judge their credibility. Additionally, it would help if they would clarify claims like that one; by reading the book, the implication is that divorce does more economic damage to the W-C than the M-C, which while I don't have the evidence to dismiss that claim, they did not provide me with any to support it either. Having a number of these claims sans support really undermines their credibility.
Another problem was their history of the GOP of the last 60 years. I think they made a valiant effort to re-frame that history of GOP reformers who want to help the W-C being defeated by the short-sighted members/special interests in their own party and the Democrats who had their own agenda for the W-C. However, after this pattern is repeated over and over, it started to run thin, and the left-critique that the Republicans only care about the W-C during elections seemed more credible. Additionally, some of their defenses for the rise of uber-wealthy in the last 20 years because they created so much wealth for the nation seemed very dated considering the current economic state of the US.
Additionally, while I wouldn't claim that they are necessarily advocating the anti-intellectualism that has been rampant in the recent Right, their set-up does create and opposition between those with college education and those without. Additionally they ridicule the idea of liberal education in favor of more job training and vocational education, citing the example of English majors who can't write a business letter right out of college. The point that is missed is that while English majors might not learn the genre of business letters in their classes, they learn how to adapt to different genres, so can easily learn writing business letters, as well as reports, presentations, press releases, etc. Additionally, they gain analytical skills that can make them useful in other capacities to the company. Someone who is only trained to write business letters does not get the meta-skills involved. While might be nit picky of me, it seems that they want people to be productive workers, not necessarily productive contributors to both work and society.
But what troubles me more about their argument is that they are calling for the GOP to focus upon those who do not have college degrees (which isn't necessarily bad) based upon the idea that college education provides more economic stability. Considering that a college education is supposed to be so helpful, wouldn't it be better for them to advocate for better programs to help the W-C to get this benefit rather than advocate for more training/vocational programs? If getting a college-education makes them M-C and the M-C has an advantage, why not make college for everyone the focus in education, other than the W-C would no longer be W-C in their definition. That seems to be the crux of the problem. They are dependent upon having a group that does not have what they claim is an advantage. Ultimately, they are trying to make up for a disadvantage that does not have to exist.
They provide an interesting take on these issues, and some of their plans I wouldn't mind seeing implemented: like tax credits for parents who choose to take time off from work to raise young children, and governmental supplements for "sub-living wage" workers. Additionally, they are smart enough to acknowledge that anti-government rhetoric is self-defeating (although they don't point out that it is also anarchistic), and what most American's actually want is government that works efficiently.
However, there are some serious problems with the book. First of all, I find their lack of citations annoying. I don't believe that they are just making things up, I just like to know where they are getting their information from, especially when they make claims that divorce is a bigger problem for working-class families than middle-class ones. I'd like to know their sources to help me judge their credibility. Additionally, it would help if they would clarify claims like that one; by reading the book, the implication is that divorce does more economic damage to the W-C than the M-C, which while I don't have the evidence to dismiss that claim, they did not provide me with any to support it either. Having a number of these claims sans support really undermines their credibility.
Another problem was their history of the GOP of the last 60 years. I think they made a valiant effort to re-frame that history of GOP reformers who want to help the W-C being defeated by the short-sighted members/special interests in their own party and the Democrats who had their own agenda for the W-C. However, after this pattern is repeated over and over, it started to run thin, and the left-critique that the Republicans only care about the W-C during elections seemed more credible. Additionally, some of their defenses for the rise of uber-wealthy in the last 20 years because they created so much wealth for the nation seemed very dated considering the current economic state of the US.
Additionally, while I wouldn't claim that they are necessarily advocating the anti-intellectualism that has been rampant in the recent Right, their set-up does create and opposition between those with college education and those without. Additionally they ridicule the idea of liberal education in favor of more job training and vocational education, citing the example of English majors who can't write a business letter right out of college. The point that is missed is that while English majors might not learn the genre of business letters in their classes, they learn how to adapt to different genres, so can easily learn writing business letters, as well as reports, presentations, press releases, etc. Additionally, they gain analytical skills that can make them useful in other capacities to the company. Someone who is only trained to write business letters does not get the meta-skills involved. While might be nit picky of me, it seems that they want people to be productive workers, not necessarily productive contributors to both work and society.
But what troubles me more about their argument is that they are calling for the GOP to focus upon those who do not have college degrees (which isn't necessarily bad) based upon the idea that college education provides more economic stability. Considering that a college education is supposed to be so helpful, wouldn't it be better for them to advocate for better programs to help the W-C to get this benefit rather than advocate for more training/vocational programs? If getting a college-education makes them M-C and the M-C has an advantage, why not make college for everyone the focus in education, other than the W-C would no longer be W-C in their definition. That seems to be the crux of the problem. They are dependent upon having a group that does not have what they claim is an advantage. Ultimately, they are trying to make up for a disadvantage that does not have to exist.
October 24, 2018
While I do not consider myself among the most fierce partisan warriors of my time, my general political views are pretty conservative and the political works I favor reflect those views [1]. That said, I do not spring from monied wealth but rather from a family of modest working-class background and of a notably broken family background. In short, I am precisely the sort of person that the author is aiming this book to, at least in terms of my own personal experience, and as such I am intrigued by how the author seeks to portray how it is that the Republican party could answer the concerns of working class Americans and forge an enduring majority, and why that has not yet happened despite the general abandonment by Democrats of the sort of concerns of working class Americans in their own policies. Humorously enough, at present we are facing a dramatic shaking out of political matters that suggests at least some of the reasons why many Republicans were wary of making the sort of populist appeals that the author supports.
This book of a bit more than 200 pages contains nine chapters in two parts, and the book has a clear political agenda in mind that is strikingly similar to that offered by Rick Santorum in 2012 as well as Trump in the general campaign in 2016. The author begins with a look at political history in the first part, showing an unfinished realignment after the collapse of the FDR coalition in 1968 (I), beginning with a look at the old consensus in the 1950's (1), the crack-up in the face of anti-war and racial demonstrations (2), the search of the new majority by Republicans and Democrats alike (3), the conservative 90's in their combination of Republican congresses and Clinton's turn to the right in the aftermath of 1994 (4), and the age of Bush (5). By and large the author shows himself to be a moderate here, conservative in self-estimation only because he lives in areas that are far further to the left than he is. The author then finishes the book with four chapters that provide a look at what the party of Sam's Club would provide its working class voters (II) in looking what is going wrong with the working class (6), how to put families first (7), what comes when you go up from compassion (8), and what things look like in a contemporary frontier society (9).
Is the plan that the authors provide feasible for Republicans to follow? In many ways, Trump has been the ironic recipient of the populist feeling among many of the people that the authors are writing about, and one can guess that this was not something the authors would have seen coming. Nevertheless, even as far back as 2008 it was clear that there was at least a potentially strong populist conservative moment to take advantage of and the only question was whether there would be the right sort of people to capitalize on that moment. The competition between Hilary Clinton and Trump in 2016 allowed a chance for the left to recognize that its desire for an emergent "new majority" of social liberalism and appeals to various subaltern groups could highly alienate potential voters and that a Republican party less beholden to plutocrats and more sensitive to bread and butter concerns could succeed. How long that lasts, though, is anyone's guess. Suffice it to say that the authors do get a lot right, but that their advice is at least partly obvious and partly self-serving given their own political agendas.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
This book of a bit more than 200 pages contains nine chapters in two parts, and the book has a clear political agenda in mind that is strikingly similar to that offered by Rick Santorum in 2012 as well as Trump in the general campaign in 2016. The author begins with a look at political history in the first part, showing an unfinished realignment after the collapse of the FDR coalition in 1968 (I), beginning with a look at the old consensus in the 1950's (1), the crack-up in the face of anti-war and racial demonstrations (2), the search of the new majority by Republicans and Democrats alike (3), the conservative 90's in their combination of Republican congresses and Clinton's turn to the right in the aftermath of 1994 (4), and the age of Bush (5). By and large the author shows himself to be a moderate here, conservative in self-estimation only because he lives in areas that are far further to the left than he is. The author then finishes the book with four chapters that provide a look at what the party of Sam's Club would provide its working class voters (II) in looking what is going wrong with the working class (6), how to put families first (7), what comes when you go up from compassion (8), and what things look like in a contemporary frontier society (9).
Is the plan that the authors provide feasible for Republicans to follow? In many ways, Trump has been the ironic recipient of the populist feeling among many of the people that the authors are writing about, and one can guess that this was not something the authors would have seen coming. Nevertheless, even as far back as 2008 it was clear that there was at least a potentially strong populist conservative moment to take advantage of and the only question was whether there would be the right sort of people to capitalize on that moment. The competition between Hilary Clinton and Trump in 2016 allowed a chance for the left to recognize that its desire for an emergent "new majority" of social liberalism and appeals to various subaltern groups could highly alienate potential voters and that a Republican party less beholden to plutocrats and more sensitive to bread and butter concerns could succeed. How long that lasts, though, is anyone's guess. Suffice it to say that the authors do get a lot right, but that their advice is at least partly obvious and partly self-serving given their own political agendas.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
December 20, 2008
This book promises a lot and fails to deliver. The authors' central insight is a good one: the GOP can renew itself and its electoral appeal by focusing its policy prescriptions on "Sam's Club Republicans," a group that is really what used to be known as Reagan Democrats, soccer moms, or just the good old fashioned working class. However, the actual policy suggestions put forth by the authors take up little more than 70 pages of this 230 page book. Almost half is given over to the authors' version of political and economic history from 1900 to now, and how the GOP has struggled to define itself to working class voters. Sorry, boys, but any history of the GOP that fails to include Abraham Lincoln, and the limited gov't GOP that was the dominant political party from 1860 - 1929 during the period of America's industrial and international rise, will never be able to grapple with the ideas that give the GOP its saliency.
The authors include all of this history to show why the working class is in trouble, and why the GOP can help. Fine. The authors' social history is OK, but too often it falls into the conventional "working class voters felt hemmed in by the excesses of the Sixties." Their history of American social conditions is actually a history of American social conditions as put forth by the distorting lens of the media. When they name check the "Spur Posse" to show the decline in values, I had to roll my eyes.
After wasting all this time on a history lesson, the authors' policy prescriptions are anodyne. Mostly, it's tax breaks, and marginal changes in health, education, and immigration. The authors have nothing to say about two of the GOP's biggest groups of supporters: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs. They also have nothing to say about national security issues, which is an especially glaring hole. National Security is one of the GOP's strengths, even after the Iraq War. It's also one of the legitimate functions of government, regardless of how expansive or limited you would like the government to be. They also skirt veterans issues, another missed opportunity. For heavens sake, veterans are obvious potential GOP supporters, and the present state of the VA is a scandal.
The biggest hole in the authors' analysis is their failure to grapple with the philosophy that has defined the GOP from its birth, and which has united the voting blocks that have been drawn to it: the philosophy of individual freedom combined with a limited national government. The authors are clearly very comfortable with using the tax code and the various arms of the government to appeal to voters. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a government that tries to do everything, will be unable to anything particularly well. This book is little more than Democrat Lite in this regard.
All told, I would say this book was very disappointing. Douthat is a thoughtful writer, but that rarely comes through in this book. if you are looking for a good book on renewing the GOP, "Comeback" by David Frum, or "How To Beat the Democrats" by David Horowitz are much more useful.
.
The authors include all of this history to show why the working class is in trouble, and why the GOP can help. Fine. The authors' social history is OK, but too often it falls into the conventional "working class voters felt hemmed in by the excesses of the Sixties." Their history of American social conditions is actually a history of American social conditions as put forth by the distorting lens of the media. When they name check the "Spur Posse" to show the decline in values, I had to roll my eyes.
After wasting all this time on a history lesson, the authors' policy prescriptions are anodyne. Mostly, it's tax breaks, and marginal changes in health, education, and immigration. The authors have nothing to say about two of the GOP's biggest groups of supporters: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs. They also have nothing to say about national security issues, which is an especially glaring hole. National Security is one of the GOP's strengths, even after the Iraq War. It's also one of the legitimate functions of government, regardless of how expansive or limited you would like the government to be. They also skirt veterans issues, another missed opportunity. For heavens sake, veterans are obvious potential GOP supporters, and the present state of the VA is a scandal.
The biggest hole in the authors' analysis is their failure to grapple with the philosophy that has defined the GOP from its birth, and which has united the voting blocks that have been drawn to it: the philosophy of individual freedom combined with a limited national government. The authors are clearly very comfortable with using the tax code and the various arms of the government to appeal to voters. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a government that tries to do everything, will be unable to anything particularly well. This book is little more than Democrat Lite in this regard.
All told, I would say this book was very disappointing. Douthat is a thoughtful writer, but that rarely comes through in this book. if you are looking for a good book on renewing the GOP, "Comeback" by David Frum, or "How To Beat the Democrats" by David Horowitz are much more useful.
.
July 20, 2023
Merely a raging Neoconservative lunatic, who went to Harvard.
Converted from Evangelicism to Catholicism.
oh and he hates Trump
Actually, you learn way more from him in an interview than his writings....
---
Douhat avoids the elephant in the room.
[and nearly every comment to his NYT column which addresses the title of this book]
Why does half of America hate us?
The blue collar, working class and poor should LOVE us!!
oh wait, we're a party of the Corporations and the Richest 1%
Douthat basically always gets into the most bizzarro-world arguments
Like this from the New York Times:
"A more significant concession would be to acknowledge the ways in which liberalism itself has undercut the two-parent family — through the liberal-dominated culture industry’s permissive, reductive attitudes toward sex, and through the 1970s-era revolution in divorce and abortion law."
"In the first case, liberals tend to feign agnosticism about pop culture’s impact on morals (even though a link is common-sensical and well supported), or...."
Letters to his column are endless:
"It is remarkable that yet again abortion, a medical procedure that can only happen to women, is portrayed as a contributor to the ruination of society AND if banned, as a bargaining chit in a grandiose scheme to put the country back on track. Does Mr. Douthat ever miss an opportunity to inject his unilateral opposition to abortion into the debate?"
"I'd like to know what Ross Douthat has in mind, specifically, when he proposes 'modest limits on unilateral divorce.' "
"he'd like go go back to the 50's, when men were men and women were in the kitchen"
"What evidence is there that rank & file conservatives support stricter divorce laws?"
"The United States has the highest divorce rate in the developed world. It is also the only country that does not have 1. comprehensive medical coverage for everyone; 2. mandated minimum paid vacation 3. worker protections (an employee can be fired at will, evident discrimination aside) 3. mandated paid parental leave 4. mandated paid sick leave .... Coincidentally, the number one reason for spousal arguments is money. The conservatives wring their hands and lament the decline of "family values" but their political platform does everything possible to undermine relationships. Enduring relationships require a certain amount of stability and time. Couples, families need to be able to spend time together and be reasonably sure that they will have a job tomorrow and know what hours they will work next week and next month. They also need to be paid a wage that will enable them to support themselves on a single 40-hour work week. That is what will help families survive."
"There is something very disturbing to me about the way Douthat divides the population into two distinct groups, liberals and conservatives, which are so clearly defined in his mind that he can write about what they think - or will think - about any given topic or issue."
"Just once, I would like to hear Mr. Douthat shed his Catholic perspective on how the GOP's constant funding and encouragement of the perpetual war machine affects middle class and poor families, rather than his quaint ideas about how other families should structure and live their lives. This is really getting old........."
"Ross, of course Liberals think two parent family is better. But what do you want them to do? Have government make law that stipulate all women when reach the age of 20 and men 22 should get married or else pay a penalty? Liberals cannot force people to get married as much as conservatives cannot make people to forgo per-marital sex. You speak as if only Liberals are having sex and conservatives are having none of those."
"Social engineering from a conservative? Why should a conservative care about mobility anyway? Divorce is sometimes needed; domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness that does not resolve with appropriate treatment, intense and persistent marital conflict. In these cases, children are better off with a single parent."
"Wow what a string of sophisms. As if restricting abortion would help and produce more marriages... As if it was laws helping, generally women to leave their husbands, that had destroyed the value of the institution... Do you really believe the institution of marriage was more valuable when women who were beaten or abused (and the same for men) were forced to stay married for financial reasons? How is this institution more valuable because people stay married together their entire life despite being chronically unhappy together?"
"People seem to agree that two-parent homes are better than single-parent homes for children. But I remember living as a child in an unhappy home in which our parents were bitterly yoked and stayed together because they were right-wing religious people, staying together, as the saying went, for the children."
"Hogwash! Imperfect Unions are the result of imperfect people, imperfectly working together to make their marriage fail. We are all imperfect in one way or another so the key is trying to work together for a more perfect union. It has nothing to do with conservative or liberal philosophies and politics but everything to do with love and respect for one another and the ability of each member of the union to want to work hard together to make it work. That is not rocket science, statistical science or political science. It is the love and mutual respect each brings to the union, something that is in short supply in too many of today's unions. It must be a slow news day for Mr. Douthat to end up writing so much gibberish."
"I'm so tired of the double-talk. Have everyone get married and you are still going to have the same jobs paying the same wage. Our economic structure impoverishes those who are forced, whether by lack of talent, bad luck, a no-dad home, medical issues, etc, etc., to take the lower-end jobs. The upper end leverages the lower end into poverty."
"Want to end poverty in the U.S.? Start by not allowing developing countries to export their poverty to us; don't allow capital to roam the world looking for the most desperate workers to cheat and exploit, which should start here at home: How can we tolerate an economic culture which allows the Waltons to become as rich as Croesus with a business model which pays its workers so little they have to be supplemented by government welfare to be able to live and show up for work? The marriage issue is deflection by those who want to continue cheating the worker."
"Two timing problems with this article. The stagnation was not a result of Carter but Nixon's policies. Second the growth of the income divide in the United States began with Reagan's huge tax cuts and other policies that allowed the rich to leverage their wealth and power for even great income and wealth."
My point is that Douthat asks all these questions about what changes need to happen in his party, yet, most of the solutions he seeks, are rooted in the readers of his NYT columns.
And well, some political writers, the very last thing they do is listen to their readers who disagree with them!
---
Dissent Magazine
[talking about Donald Trump]
Douthat: He’s a man of the 1980s. It’s his instinct to be racially polarizing around issues of crime and urban decay. But the locus of racially inflected anxiety has shifted from crime to immigration. And that’s why to my mind the equivalent of welfare reform and better policing for our era would be figuring out a more stable settlement on immigration. I think he is the politician who in certain ways would be best positioned to do that, but for other reasons can’t.
Douthat: My biggest concern with Trump was that essentially chaos would be unleashed, meaning that my colleague Paul Krugman would be right that after a Trump election the stock market would crash, Putin would send troops into Eastern Ukraine in large numbers, there would be this escalating series of global crises joined to economic disarray. But the world has turned out to be more self-stabilizing than I expected, in spite of Trump’s frequent incompetence.
Douthat: As for those trying to make something out of Trumpism, whether they are the national conservatism intellectuals or Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio: I think you can tell a story about conservatism in the modern era where the Republican Party often moves back toward the center after a period of libertarian purity. The Reagan administration was not just an exercise in implementing all of Milton Friedman’s policy priorities. Henry Olsen wrote a whole book about Reagan as a working-class conservative, which I think is overstated, but it’s an actual part of the history. The “Contract with America” is not a document of libertarian purity. Compassionate conservatism is obviously a very conscious attempt to claim a sort of centrist economic vision.
Douthat: What I want is not just a conservatism that tacks toward the center, but a conservatism that has a specific, affirmative economic policy vision of how you’re going to rebuild the working and middle classes in the United States. And that’s harder to get to. People on the left would say, “Well, you can’t get there because you need unions as a base of support for that,” and conservatives don’t like unions, and that’s partially plausible. This is the big question with all the nationalist and populist forays: Where does the institutional support come from? Where does the money come from? Where do the donors come from?
Douthat: I think that’s possible. It would be foolish for anyone who has lived through the rise of Trump to say it’s easy to separate populism from nativism. If it were easy, the two would not be so tightly conjoined. And we have a larger history that I don’t think is repeating itself. The story of early twentieth-century politics is a story of cultural conservatives figuring that they could make successful alliances with nationalists against the menace of communism, or liberalism, and ending up with the nationalists in charge and often very bad things happening.
Douthat: I also think that in politics, you’re never not going to have an enemy. The trick is to make it be the right enemy. The question is not whether conservatism has an other or has an enemy. The question is whether it can get away from a place where the descendants of slaves and immigrants are seen as the other, and get to a point where instead it’s just Upper West Side liberals again, as it should be.
Douthat: Trump won the election for reasons that are contingent on our two-party system and the Electoral College and so on, but it’s not clear that populism is that much more potent in the United States than it is in some very socially democratic parts of Europe. If the Trump administration proposed some of the Danish policies around assimilation, they would be viewed as horrifyingly right wing and racist. That alone suggests that while there is clearly an economic component to this story, there’s something more going on. You can tell a story where left-wing welfare policies are fine for dealing with the worst forms of poverty but struggle to figure out what you do with a working class that feels itself to be economically obsolete. There’s clearly people who feel they are in economic trouble but don’t respond well to a Democratic Party that says, “Don’t worry, we’ll just take care of you with stronger welfare spending.” They want jobs and self-sufficiency.
Sitman: Your book is called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. It reminded me of Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, in that you both argue that liberalism’s failure is actually the result of its successes. Is this a particular conservative way of doing analysis? What is it about the conservative mind that looks for those kinds of ironies?
Douthat: It’s undoubtedly the case that the conservative mind is always on the lookout for how what seem like development and transformation will ultimately lead to disaster. I think what distinguishes my argument from some other conservative arguments is that it lays a heavier emphasis on stagnation, drift, and repetition than it does on looming catastrophe. My thinking is premised on the assumption that we’re actually not about to descend into the Marxist gulag or the fascist nightmare. The defining feature of our age is a kind of stasis and repetition where it’s very hard for institutions and movements and individuals to achieve what feels like forward momentum and progress.
Douthat: We have these deadlocks that in the United States are at least in part a feature of our constitutional system, but that also show up in different ways in different systems. Brexit may have been a breakthrough, but for several years it’s been a perfect example of gridlock and chaos. What I try to do in the book is link that view of our politics to a bunch of other areas—to demography and declining birth rates and the aging of our society. I link it to the argument that you get from everyone from Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen to David Graeber: we’ve had much less technological progress in the developed world over the last couple of generations than people think. That argument is more contentious, but at the very least we’ve had outsized progress in technologies of simulation and communication relative to progress everywhere else.
Douthat: In the arts, something similar is happening, which is unprovable but I think somewhat persuasive. The trajectory of the Star Wars saga is a perfect example of what decadence, in my definition, means. The prequels are not actually decadent. They are bad movies. But they’re movies in which George Lucas is trying and failing to do something new. Out of that failure comes the latest trilogy, where we’re just going to repeat the movies we made forty years ago. That’s what decadence is: You try and get out, it doesn’t work, and then you just go back to doing the same things again.
Adler-Bell: In your column on the 2010s, “The Decade of Disillusionment,” you characterize the 1990s as an age of hubris where we thought the “end of history” was upon us and the liberal order was stable. The 2000s is a nemesis era with inevitable realities striking down hope. Then comes the 2010s, which is an age of disillusionment: “The sense of crisis, alienation and betrayal emerged more from backward glances than new disasters, reflecting newly awakened—or awokened, if you prefer—readings of our recent history, our entire post-Cold War arc.” The idea that we’re seeing a reckoning with the misdeeds of the past is compelling to me. I see this as a moment where Trump could win again or Bernie could win, and each outcome would be a different sort of reckoning with the 2010s.
Douthat: That’s roughly what I was arguing, except that because I believe in decadence, I’m skeptical that Bernie will win. I think Trump was a first reckoning. If you think of the big things that happened from the late 1990s through 2008, it’s deregulation, it’s the opening to China, it’s the Iraq War and the War on Terror, and then the financial crisis. Trump represents a partial reckoning with that on the right. If Bernie gets the nomination, or Warren to some extent, that would represent a partial reckoning on the left. Then you would have both more compelling right-wing and left-wing narratives about what went wrong than you had when Romney was running against Barack Obama. To me, in certain ways, that election was more decadent than Trump-Bernie would be. With Obama and Romney, we weren’t reckoning with anything, we put up a vain finance guy against the incumbent. Now we’re in a moment where history is creeping back in.
Douthat: I wrote a column a few years ago where I said that in 2016 Trump and Bernie were both revolts against decadence, revolts against the idea that this is the best we can do. “Make America Great Again” is reactionary futurism, the idea that there is a past that could be linked to a better future.
Douthat: And Bernie is doing something similar on the left. I’m just skeptical, and we would find out in a Sanders presidency if I’m right, that that’s enough to get us through the structural forces that make us decadent and make it hard to change anything dramatically.
Douthat: I think Trump’s presidency has mostly vindicated the idea that you can elect a slightly insane-seeming demagogue and in fact not that much will change.
Douthat: Maybe Bernie will be different. But my basic view is that there might be a crisis of liberalism, a real one, this century—by 2050. This is the dress rehearsal. But I’ll be proven wrong, happily or unhappily, I’m sure.
---
Amazon
Original ideas, but ignores the central problem with the GOP
Douthat and Salam have put together the most serious attempt to date of diagnosing the party's woes and prescribing a plan for its restoration. Their critique of Republican politics frankly acknowledges its descent into anti-intellectualism and big spending, yet the strength of these admissions is diminished by weak attempts to justify them to the reader.
The project upon which Douthat and Salam have embarked upon is to describe "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream".
How seriously can the reader take such a mission when the authors fail to acknowledge that the main reason for working class misery is that the Republican Party has become the marketing arm of the wealthiest 1% of Americans?
The authors conspicuously avoid this topic, as it reveals the folly of their endeavor.
This is tantamount to penning a treatise on how using a particular brand of sail will enable one to win a boat race, without mentioning that the sail-maker in question previously earned his living by boring holes into the hulls of sailboats.
For all its many shortcomings, "Grand New Party" is the most promising effort to date of what a renewed GOP could look like.
Published in 2008, "Grand New Party" does not include the Republican party's more recent slide into madness, the rise of the Tea Party, the war on women, the Night of the Long Knives against moderate Republicans like short-lived presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, the utter captivity to Wall Street marked by the ascension of Mitt Romney, or of the growing popularity of libertarianism as the panacea to conservative troubles.
The Republican party will need to suffer ruin and defeat in at least two more election cycles before it is ready to give serious consideration to the ideas outlined in "Grand New Party". That day cannot come soon enough.
Sagar
Converted from Evangelicism to Catholicism.
oh and he hates Trump
Actually, you learn way more from him in an interview than his writings....
---
Douhat avoids the elephant in the room.
[and nearly every comment to his NYT column which addresses the title of this book]
Why does half of America hate us?
The blue collar, working class and poor should LOVE us!!
oh wait, we're a party of the Corporations and the Richest 1%
Douthat basically always gets into the most bizzarro-world arguments
Like this from the New York Times:
"A more significant concession would be to acknowledge the ways in which liberalism itself has undercut the two-parent family — through the liberal-dominated culture industry’s permissive, reductive attitudes toward sex, and through the 1970s-era revolution in divorce and abortion law."
"In the first case, liberals tend to feign agnosticism about pop culture’s impact on morals (even though a link is common-sensical and well supported), or...."
Letters to his column are endless:
"It is remarkable that yet again abortion, a medical procedure that can only happen to women, is portrayed as a contributor to the ruination of society AND if banned, as a bargaining chit in a grandiose scheme to put the country back on track. Does Mr. Douthat ever miss an opportunity to inject his unilateral opposition to abortion into the debate?"
"I'd like to know what Ross Douthat has in mind, specifically, when he proposes 'modest limits on unilateral divorce.' "
"he'd like go go back to the 50's, when men were men and women were in the kitchen"
"What evidence is there that rank & file conservatives support stricter divorce laws?"
"The United States has the highest divorce rate in the developed world. It is also the only country that does not have 1. comprehensive medical coverage for everyone; 2. mandated minimum paid vacation 3. worker protections (an employee can be fired at will, evident discrimination aside) 3. mandated paid parental leave 4. mandated paid sick leave .... Coincidentally, the number one reason for spousal arguments is money. The conservatives wring their hands and lament the decline of "family values" but their political platform does everything possible to undermine relationships. Enduring relationships require a certain amount of stability and time. Couples, families need to be able to spend time together and be reasonably sure that they will have a job tomorrow and know what hours they will work next week and next month. They also need to be paid a wage that will enable them to support themselves on a single 40-hour work week. That is what will help families survive."
"There is something very disturbing to me about the way Douthat divides the population into two distinct groups, liberals and conservatives, which are so clearly defined in his mind that he can write about what they think - or will think - about any given topic or issue."
"Just once, I would like to hear Mr. Douthat shed his Catholic perspective on how the GOP's constant funding and encouragement of the perpetual war machine affects middle class and poor families, rather than his quaint ideas about how other families should structure and live their lives. This is really getting old........."
"Ross, of course Liberals think two parent family is better. But what do you want them to do? Have government make law that stipulate all women when reach the age of 20 and men 22 should get married or else pay a penalty? Liberals cannot force people to get married as much as conservatives cannot make people to forgo per-marital sex. You speak as if only Liberals are having sex and conservatives are having none of those."
"Social engineering from a conservative? Why should a conservative care about mobility anyway? Divorce is sometimes needed; domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness that does not resolve with appropriate treatment, intense and persistent marital conflict. In these cases, children are better off with a single parent."
"Wow what a string of sophisms. As if restricting abortion would help and produce more marriages... As if it was laws helping, generally women to leave their husbands, that had destroyed the value of the institution... Do you really believe the institution of marriage was more valuable when women who were beaten or abused (and the same for men) were forced to stay married for financial reasons? How is this institution more valuable because people stay married together their entire life despite being chronically unhappy together?"
"People seem to agree that two-parent homes are better than single-parent homes for children. But I remember living as a child in an unhappy home in which our parents were bitterly yoked and stayed together because they were right-wing religious people, staying together, as the saying went, for the children."
"Hogwash! Imperfect Unions are the result of imperfect people, imperfectly working together to make their marriage fail. We are all imperfect in one way or another so the key is trying to work together for a more perfect union. It has nothing to do with conservative or liberal philosophies and politics but everything to do with love and respect for one another and the ability of each member of the union to want to work hard together to make it work. That is not rocket science, statistical science or political science. It is the love and mutual respect each brings to the union, something that is in short supply in too many of today's unions. It must be a slow news day for Mr. Douthat to end up writing so much gibberish."
"I'm so tired of the double-talk. Have everyone get married and you are still going to have the same jobs paying the same wage. Our economic structure impoverishes those who are forced, whether by lack of talent, bad luck, a no-dad home, medical issues, etc, etc., to take the lower-end jobs. The upper end leverages the lower end into poverty."
"Want to end poverty in the U.S.? Start by not allowing developing countries to export their poverty to us; don't allow capital to roam the world looking for the most desperate workers to cheat and exploit, which should start here at home: How can we tolerate an economic culture which allows the Waltons to become as rich as Croesus with a business model which pays its workers so little they have to be supplemented by government welfare to be able to live and show up for work? The marriage issue is deflection by those who want to continue cheating the worker."
"Two timing problems with this article. The stagnation was not a result of Carter but Nixon's policies. Second the growth of the income divide in the United States began with Reagan's huge tax cuts and other policies that allowed the rich to leverage their wealth and power for even great income and wealth."
My point is that Douthat asks all these questions about what changes need to happen in his party, yet, most of the solutions he seeks, are rooted in the readers of his NYT columns.
And well, some political writers, the very last thing they do is listen to their readers who disagree with them!
---
Dissent Magazine
[talking about Donald Trump]
Douthat: He’s a man of the 1980s. It’s his instinct to be racially polarizing around issues of crime and urban decay. But the locus of racially inflected anxiety has shifted from crime to immigration. And that’s why to my mind the equivalent of welfare reform and better policing for our era would be figuring out a more stable settlement on immigration. I think he is the politician who in certain ways would be best positioned to do that, but for other reasons can’t.
Douthat: My biggest concern with Trump was that essentially chaos would be unleashed, meaning that my colleague Paul Krugman would be right that after a Trump election the stock market would crash, Putin would send troops into Eastern Ukraine in large numbers, there would be this escalating series of global crises joined to economic disarray. But the world has turned out to be more self-stabilizing than I expected, in spite of Trump’s frequent incompetence.
Douthat: As for those trying to make something out of Trumpism, whether they are the national conservatism intellectuals or Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio: I think you can tell a story about conservatism in the modern era where the Republican Party often moves back toward the center after a period of libertarian purity. The Reagan administration was not just an exercise in implementing all of Milton Friedman’s policy priorities. Henry Olsen wrote a whole book about Reagan as a working-class conservative, which I think is overstated, but it’s an actual part of the history. The “Contract with America” is not a document of libertarian purity. Compassionate conservatism is obviously a very conscious attempt to claim a sort of centrist economic vision.
Douthat: What I want is not just a conservatism that tacks toward the center, but a conservatism that has a specific, affirmative economic policy vision of how you’re going to rebuild the working and middle classes in the United States. And that’s harder to get to. People on the left would say, “Well, you can’t get there because you need unions as a base of support for that,” and conservatives don’t like unions, and that’s partially plausible. This is the big question with all the nationalist and populist forays: Where does the institutional support come from? Where does the money come from? Where do the donors come from?
Douthat: I think that’s possible. It would be foolish for anyone who has lived through the rise of Trump to say it’s easy to separate populism from nativism. If it were easy, the two would not be so tightly conjoined. And we have a larger history that I don’t think is repeating itself. The story of early twentieth-century politics is a story of cultural conservatives figuring that they could make successful alliances with nationalists against the menace of communism, or liberalism, and ending up with the nationalists in charge and often very bad things happening.
Douthat: I also think that in politics, you’re never not going to have an enemy. The trick is to make it be the right enemy. The question is not whether conservatism has an other or has an enemy. The question is whether it can get away from a place where the descendants of slaves and immigrants are seen as the other, and get to a point where instead it’s just Upper West Side liberals again, as it should be.
Douthat: Trump won the election for reasons that are contingent on our two-party system and the Electoral College and so on, but it’s not clear that populism is that much more potent in the United States than it is in some very socially democratic parts of Europe. If the Trump administration proposed some of the Danish policies around assimilation, they would be viewed as horrifyingly right wing and racist. That alone suggests that while there is clearly an economic component to this story, there’s something more going on. You can tell a story where left-wing welfare policies are fine for dealing with the worst forms of poverty but struggle to figure out what you do with a working class that feels itself to be economically obsolete. There’s clearly people who feel they are in economic trouble but don’t respond well to a Democratic Party that says, “Don’t worry, we’ll just take care of you with stronger welfare spending.” They want jobs and self-sufficiency.
Sitman: Your book is called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. It reminded me of Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, in that you both argue that liberalism’s failure is actually the result of its successes. Is this a particular conservative way of doing analysis? What is it about the conservative mind that looks for those kinds of ironies?
Douthat: It’s undoubtedly the case that the conservative mind is always on the lookout for how what seem like development and transformation will ultimately lead to disaster. I think what distinguishes my argument from some other conservative arguments is that it lays a heavier emphasis on stagnation, drift, and repetition than it does on looming catastrophe. My thinking is premised on the assumption that we’re actually not about to descend into the Marxist gulag or the fascist nightmare. The defining feature of our age is a kind of stasis and repetition where it’s very hard for institutions and movements and individuals to achieve what feels like forward momentum and progress.
Douthat: We have these deadlocks that in the United States are at least in part a feature of our constitutional system, but that also show up in different ways in different systems. Brexit may have been a breakthrough, but for several years it’s been a perfect example of gridlock and chaos. What I try to do in the book is link that view of our politics to a bunch of other areas—to demography and declining birth rates and the aging of our society. I link it to the argument that you get from everyone from Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen to David Graeber: we’ve had much less technological progress in the developed world over the last couple of generations than people think. That argument is more contentious, but at the very least we’ve had outsized progress in technologies of simulation and communication relative to progress everywhere else.
Douthat: In the arts, something similar is happening, which is unprovable but I think somewhat persuasive. The trajectory of the Star Wars saga is a perfect example of what decadence, in my definition, means. The prequels are not actually decadent. They are bad movies. But they’re movies in which George Lucas is trying and failing to do something new. Out of that failure comes the latest trilogy, where we’re just going to repeat the movies we made forty years ago. That’s what decadence is: You try and get out, it doesn’t work, and then you just go back to doing the same things again.
Adler-Bell: In your column on the 2010s, “The Decade of Disillusionment,” you characterize the 1990s as an age of hubris where we thought the “end of history” was upon us and the liberal order was stable. The 2000s is a nemesis era with inevitable realities striking down hope. Then comes the 2010s, which is an age of disillusionment: “The sense of crisis, alienation and betrayal emerged more from backward glances than new disasters, reflecting newly awakened—or awokened, if you prefer—readings of our recent history, our entire post-Cold War arc.” The idea that we’re seeing a reckoning with the misdeeds of the past is compelling to me. I see this as a moment where Trump could win again or Bernie could win, and each outcome would be a different sort of reckoning with the 2010s.
Douthat: That’s roughly what I was arguing, except that because I believe in decadence, I’m skeptical that Bernie will win. I think Trump was a first reckoning. If you think of the big things that happened from the late 1990s through 2008, it’s deregulation, it’s the opening to China, it’s the Iraq War and the War on Terror, and then the financial crisis. Trump represents a partial reckoning with that on the right. If Bernie gets the nomination, or Warren to some extent, that would represent a partial reckoning on the left. Then you would have both more compelling right-wing and left-wing narratives about what went wrong than you had when Romney was running against Barack Obama. To me, in certain ways, that election was more decadent than Trump-Bernie would be. With Obama and Romney, we weren’t reckoning with anything, we put up a vain finance guy against the incumbent. Now we’re in a moment where history is creeping back in.
Douthat: I wrote a column a few years ago where I said that in 2016 Trump and Bernie were both revolts against decadence, revolts against the idea that this is the best we can do. “Make America Great Again” is reactionary futurism, the idea that there is a past that could be linked to a better future.
Douthat: And Bernie is doing something similar on the left. I’m just skeptical, and we would find out in a Sanders presidency if I’m right, that that’s enough to get us through the structural forces that make us decadent and make it hard to change anything dramatically.
Douthat: I think Trump’s presidency has mostly vindicated the idea that you can elect a slightly insane-seeming demagogue and in fact not that much will change.
Douthat: Maybe Bernie will be different. But my basic view is that there might be a crisis of liberalism, a real one, this century—by 2050. This is the dress rehearsal. But I’ll be proven wrong, happily or unhappily, I’m sure.
---
Amazon
Original ideas, but ignores the central problem with the GOP
Douthat and Salam have put together the most serious attempt to date of diagnosing the party's woes and prescribing a plan for its restoration. Their critique of Republican politics frankly acknowledges its descent into anti-intellectualism and big spending, yet the strength of these admissions is diminished by weak attempts to justify them to the reader.
The project upon which Douthat and Salam have embarked upon is to describe "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream".
How seriously can the reader take such a mission when the authors fail to acknowledge that the main reason for working class misery is that the Republican Party has become the marketing arm of the wealthiest 1% of Americans?
The authors conspicuously avoid this topic, as it reveals the folly of their endeavor.
This is tantamount to penning a treatise on how using a particular brand of sail will enable one to win a boat race, without mentioning that the sail-maker in question previously earned his living by boring holes into the hulls of sailboats.
For all its many shortcomings, "Grand New Party" is the most promising effort to date of what a renewed GOP could look like.
Published in 2008, "Grand New Party" does not include the Republican party's more recent slide into madness, the rise of the Tea Party, the war on women, the Night of the Long Knives against moderate Republicans like short-lived presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, the utter captivity to Wall Street marked by the ascension of Mitt Romney, or of the growing popularity of libertarianism as the panacea to conservative troubles.
The Republican party will need to suffer ruin and defeat in at least two more election cycles before it is ready to give serious consideration to the ideas outlined in "Grand New Party". That day cannot come soon enough.
Sagar
July 29, 2016
The first half of the book is a history of American politics (including various critiques of previously written histories) from the New Deal to the Republican defeats in '06. They criticize conservatives who believe in a Reagan myth by showing he was no Goldwater small-government conservative, he believed in a powerful goverment that was helpful and not harmful. They explain why the middle class,"Sam's Club voters", keep swinging back and forth between parties in their voting patterns.
The authors identify some major demographic and economic problems that threaten the American way of life, including the growing divide between the upper class and the working class. They then propose a list of (mostly economist-produced) legislative solutions to win the Sam's Club voters and renew the Republican Party. Among them:
1. Expanded child tax credits and other subsidies for parents.
2. Embracing suburban expansion rather than urban renewal. Ideas include funding new interstate construction and implementing congestion pricing and such.
3. They propose Brad Delong's health care plan of requiring all workers to put 15% of income into an HSA, and allowing the gov't to pick up the tab once that money has been spent as a way to reduce health care costs.
4. Replacing the current income tax system with a consumption tax instead (Huckabee's Fair Tax).
5. Scrapping farm subsidies and replacing them with green technology subsidies or other subsidies to encourage business development in the farm states.
6. Providing college tuition credits to every high school graduate.
7. Replace wasteful subsidies with federal money to local gov'ts for the expansion of police forces. (This would create jobs for low-educated people as well as teach them discipline and curb the crime that is likely to appear...this makes sense as part of a stimulus package during a recession, IMO).
8. Smarter immigration reform by...well, this part wasn't quite clear.
Douthat and Reihan have undoubtedly discussed some of their ideas with economists like Tyler Cowen, but they really gloss over some of the weaknesses of their arguments. Some of their ideas make great sense but require more political will than currently found. What the book really lacks is a works cited, they give a whole bunch of facts, quotes, and figures with no citations.
I found much of the history to be informative, but seeing how the GOP has devolved since this book was written is rather depressing. I was hoping this book would inspire me and renew my faith in the GOP. It has given me some ideas but seems to do little to address the current pressing problems. If the GOP makes gains in Congress in 2010 then I'll be interested to see how many have read this work, if not the party is probably doomed. David Brooks also said:
"It may take a few defeats for the G.O.P. to embrace a Sam’s Club agenda, but sooner or later, it will happen. Trust me. "
My favorite quote from the book (on the ever-increasing divide between the upper-class and the working-class):
"As the educated class became dismissive of religious faith, the religous traditions they had abandoned turned increasingly anti-intellectual, with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell suceeding Reinhold Niebuhr and Thomas Merton; this, in turn, made America's meritocrats more contemptuous still toward organized religion. As highly educated consumers abandoned Newsweek and the networks in favor of the more highbrow pleasures afforded by cable television and NPR and HBO, the mass-market magazines and the networks turned to bread and circuses--game shows and blockbuster movie coners, reality TV and self-help columns--to keep their audiences hooked, which only encouraged further defections by their highbrow readers and further cultural polarization. The more that elites kept patriotism at arm's length and treated national pride with a sophisticate's tolerance, the more the breach was filled by Sean Hannity-styled jingoists. The mor the mass upper class seemed to look down on the rubes in "Red America," the more the rubes returned the favor, embracing a self-conscious anti-intellectualism that ran from George Wallace to Ross Perot and reached its apotheosis, perhaps, in the era of George W. Bush."
In all, I give it 3.5 stars out of 5.
April 9, 2021
This 2008 book from Reformicon duo Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam proved mightily forward-looking. If I had to sum up this work, it would be a quote from page 110: "the right can succeed only if it champions a politics of solidarity as well as a politics of liberty". Frankly, there's something for the left to learn too. Both parties are fighting for the allegiance of a diverse group of economically center-left and socially center-right voters. This is part of why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016! Douthat and Salam in 2008 understood this group far better than most in the intervening 8 years prior to Trump.
They analyze the political sphere by drawing connections that others tend to miss. For the authors, culture and economics are linked, especially as Americans feel economically unsteady. Social conservatism is therefore a natural reaction to "economic consequences of atomization" (140). Through economic change, a robust culture must provide "a sense of solidarity and moral guardrails" (20), but our current one has begun to fray. Therefore, there is no neat divide between the social and the economic. To me, as the left has lost sight of these basic but well-articulated points, they've also lost their support among working-class voters. 2016 epitomized this. So, "Grand New Party" turned out to be one of the most prescient books I've read from the 2000s. As today we stare at "a slow and steady degradation of everyday working-class life"*, we can look back and see exactly where populism came along, which the authors predict throughout the book, including trenchantly on page 9. Oh, and they also kinda foresaw the lib-owning GOP, describing Nixon as building a personal majority on "deep-seated working-class resentments" (71). Remind you of anybody?
A sizeable part of the book deals with the authors' telling of American political history, which adequately (although imperfectly) supports their interpretation of the path forward. The New Deal to them represented the kind of economics that uses government to provide "basic institutional support" while also treating people "as a free individual rather than a client, a citizen rather than a subject" (229). This was very popular around the country, even becoming accepted by the Republican mainstream. But through the 1960s, rapid change dismantled the New Deal coalition. Democrats failed to respond to the challenges to public order, family stability, economic growth, and cultural solidarity (42). Instead, they turned towards the professional class. Accordingly, Douthat and Salam pit Fred Dutton and the idea of a new Democratic coalition against Kevin Phillips' drive for a working-class Republicanism. This isn't a novel argument but it's important to keep in mind because the changes we see today have been in the works for longer than you may expect. However, the process has been filled with bumps in the road. Jimmy Carter looked ascendant for a moment but then faltered entirely, giving way to a Reagan romp with the working class (more detail on that in The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism). The present authors also remark that Bill Clinton's second term represented a number of "conservative triumphs" (105) while rightfully quipping that neoliberalism is a "half-conservative, half-libertine ideology" (91). Douthat and Salam also criticize inconsistently committed GOP policymakers like Nixon and Bush and even sort-of Reagan [they spare him too much for my taste], who they refer to as possessing a "record of temporary successes, half-grasped achievements, and squandered opportunities" (126). In essence, the road to realignment has been rather sinuous. I have a bone to pick with their characterization of George W. Bush as anything but a failure, although perhaps Reformicons like the authors were trying to build on his ideas of Compassionate Conservatism more than necessarily downplay his harmful actions in office. They do criticize the Iraq War, but not as much as some on the right, more associated with "The American Conservative" did at the time.
From this historical telling, the writers outline the problems confronting the country, in a format rather similar to Nick Timothy in Remaking One Nation: Conservatism in an Age of Crisis, a more recent British counterpart (although I haven't seen anybody draw that line) to this book. Douthat and Salam warn readers about the pernicious effects of family breakdown, which they argue (correctly) has to do with the economics of inequality and insecurity more than many right-leaning thinkers realize (143). This is another place where the book has value for both left and right. If the left wants to forestall the working-class shift to the GOP, they must moderate on culture and focus their economic policy not on profligate pipe dreams but on alleviating the basic inequality and insecurity working Americans face. They also point to the failures of the meritocracy [a topic that's been all the rage these last few years] and the specter of mass immigration [which I don't fully agree with them on, although Reihan Salam's clarification in [book:Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders|34427204] very much improves the argument]. In many ways, this diagnosis of America's maladies echoes the conclusions Trump-aligned populists arrive at. Yet it presents its claims in a much more palatable, pragmatic lens. Perhaps the answer to where the GOP should go lies broadly in a Douthatian post-Trump communitarianism, which I've covered before at "New Conservatives".
Then we arrive at the solutions, which are a bit all over the place. I definitely found some more agreeable than others. For example, I contest the argument that we somehow need more sprawl. The authors point to a study concluding that suburbs are quite connected, but without telling us much about what that study is. The lack of footnotes or citations is a negative mark, although it would be more concerning if I didn't know these two authors to be even-handed and well-researched. Nonetheless, it detracts from the scholarly value of the book. Other solutions I have gripes with include their rosily-worded proposal that more Americans telecommute; Zoom has shown that to be miserable when done consistently.
Nonetheless, there are good ideas too--wage subsidies, hiring more police officers, reforming farm subsidies to better promote rural development, creating more flexible union structures, and a DARPA-style program for sustainability (the coolest one imo but also one of the boldest and less detailed). More than a few of these ideas have been resurrected and refreshed by thinkers like Oren Cass, but there's strength in proposing them together. Some proposals had a whiff of technocratic tweaking but made me wonder, like creative ideas on healthcare reform, payroll tax changes, and linking school funding to a "weighted student formula". I remain unsure if some of these ideas are enough, but as far as the American Right goes, we would all be better off if the GOP followed Douthat and Salam's general formula. Maybe not all of the policies are fleshed out, but the general idea that we need a non-extremist right that cares about the working class is essential. So, Republican friends, get a copy of this. And you Democrats should read this too, because it's about time we recommit to a sense of national solidarity and cultural moderation again. I wouldn't gripe if we acknowledged that people like the Reformicons and Jared Golden style Blue Dogs are the actual "center" of our political system, as opposed to the neoliberal/neoconservative ruling class of this era.
*As a side note, this reminded me of Douthat's more recent argument in The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. I also caught a glimpse of it in his discussion of the need for a "long-range vision ... that will prepare America's families for the unfamiliar world to come" (208).
They analyze the political sphere by drawing connections that others tend to miss. For the authors, culture and economics are linked, especially as Americans feel economically unsteady. Social conservatism is therefore a natural reaction to "economic consequences of atomization" (140). Through economic change, a robust culture must provide "a sense of solidarity and moral guardrails" (20), but our current one has begun to fray. Therefore, there is no neat divide between the social and the economic. To me, as the left has lost sight of these basic but well-articulated points, they've also lost their support among working-class voters. 2016 epitomized this. So, "Grand New Party" turned out to be one of the most prescient books I've read from the 2000s. As today we stare at "a slow and steady degradation of everyday working-class life"*, we can look back and see exactly where populism came along, which the authors predict throughout the book, including trenchantly on page 9. Oh, and they also kinda foresaw the lib-owning GOP, describing Nixon as building a personal majority on "deep-seated working-class resentments" (71). Remind you of anybody?
A sizeable part of the book deals with the authors' telling of American political history, which adequately (although imperfectly) supports their interpretation of the path forward. The New Deal to them represented the kind of economics that uses government to provide "basic institutional support" while also treating people "as a free individual rather than a client, a citizen rather than a subject" (229). This was very popular around the country, even becoming accepted by the Republican mainstream. But through the 1960s, rapid change dismantled the New Deal coalition. Democrats failed to respond to the challenges to public order, family stability, economic growth, and cultural solidarity (42). Instead, they turned towards the professional class. Accordingly, Douthat and Salam pit Fred Dutton and the idea of a new Democratic coalition against Kevin Phillips' drive for a working-class Republicanism. This isn't a novel argument but it's important to keep in mind because the changes we see today have been in the works for longer than you may expect. However, the process has been filled with bumps in the road. Jimmy Carter looked ascendant for a moment but then faltered entirely, giving way to a Reagan romp with the working class (more detail on that in The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism). The present authors also remark that Bill Clinton's second term represented a number of "conservative triumphs" (105) while rightfully quipping that neoliberalism is a "half-conservative, half-libertine ideology" (91). Douthat and Salam also criticize inconsistently committed GOP policymakers like Nixon and Bush and even sort-of Reagan [they spare him too much for my taste], who they refer to as possessing a "record of temporary successes, half-grasped achievements, and squandered opportunities" (126). In essence, the road to realignment has been rather sinuous. I have a bone to pick with their characterization of George W. Bush as anything but a failure, although perhaps Reformicons like the authors were trying to build on his ideas of Compassionate Conservatism more than necessarily downplay his harmful actions in office. They do criticize the Iraq War, but not as much as some on the right, more associated with "The American Conservative" did at the time.
From this historical telling, the writers outline the problems confronting the country, in a format rather similar to Nick Timothy in Remaking One Nation: Conservatism in an Age of Crisis, a more recent British counterpart (although I haven't seen anybody draw that line) to this book. Douthat and Salam warn readers about the pernicious effects of family breakdown, which they argue (correctly) has to do with the economics of inequality and insecurity more than many right-leaning thinkers realize (143). This is another place where the book has value for both left and right. If the left wants to forestall the working-class shift to the GOP, they must moderate on culture and focus their economic policy not on profligate pipe dreams but on alleviating the basic inequality and insecurity working Americans face. They also point to the failures of the meritocracy [a topic that's been all the rage these last few years] and the specter of mass immigration [which I don't fully agree with them on, although Reihan Salam's clarification in [book:Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders|34427204] very much improves the argument]. In many ways, this diagnosis of America's maladies echoes the conclusions Trump-aligned populists arrive at. Yet it presents its claims in a much more palatable, pragmatic lens. Perhaps the answer to where the GOP should go lies broadly in a Douthatian post-Trump communitarianism, which I've covered before at "New Conservatives".
Then we arrive at the solutions, which are a bit all over the place. I definitely found some more agreeable than others. For example, I contest the argument that we somehow need more sprawl. The authors point to a study concluding that suburbs are quite connected, but without telling us much about what that study is. The lack of footnotes or citations is a negative mark, although it would be more concerning if I didn't know these two authors to be even-handed and well-researched. Nonetheless, it detracts from the scholarly value of the book. Other solutions I have gripes with include their rosily-worded proposal that more Americans telecommute; Zoom has shown that to be miserable when done consistently.
Nonetheless, there are good ideas too--wage subsidies, hiring more police officers, reforming farm subsidies to better promote rural development, creating more flexible union structures, and a DARPA-style program for sustainability (the coolest one imo but also one of the boldest and less detailed). More than a few of these ideas have been resurrected and refreshed by thinkers like Oren Cass, but there's strength in proposing them together. Some proposals had a whiff of technocratic tweaking but made me wonder, like creative ideas on healthcare reform, payroll tax changes, and linking school funding to a "weighted student formula". I remain unsure if some of these ideas are enough, but as far as the American Right goes, we would all be better off if the GOP followed Douthat and Salam's general formula. Maybe not all of the policies are fleshed out, but the general idea that we need a non-extremist right that cares about the working class is essential. So, Republican friends, get a copy of this. And you Democrats should read this too, because it's about time we recommit to a sense of national solidarity and cultural moderation again. I wouldn't gripe if we acknowledged that people like the Reformicons and Jared Golden style Blue Dogs are the actual "center" of our political system, as opposed to the neoliberal/neoconservative ruling class of this era.
*As a side note, this reminded me of Douthat's more recent argument in The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. I also caught a glimpse of it in his discussion of the need for a "long-range vision ... that will prepare America's families for the unfamiliar world to come" (208).
June 14, 2021
I wanted to read this in preparation for Douthat's new decadence book, which looks more promising, & I'm glad I did, for it's nice to read 2 conservatives genuinely, if unconvincingly, responding to left accounts of how conservatives use race as a partial wedge against class, but it's an absurd policy package from an interesting historical document of a road half-taken by the GOP in their anti-Obama then Trump yrs. Douthat & Salam correctly identify many of the problems bedeviling the US working & professional classes in the 2010s: stagnant wages, economic insecurity, challenges to form stable families, ecological-driven economic transition, costly health care, &c., but, of course, they can never bring themselves to mention unions, living-wage job creation, or public services as solutions, instead they remain mired in neoliberal awfulness: calling for police (in advance of any crime increase) & immigration crackdowns, ever-increasing suburban sprawl, piddling tax code tweaks, privatizing K-college education, coercive health care savings accounts, targeted subsidies to greening in wholly insufficient ways, & celebrating vast increases in spending in states like Wisconsin & Michigan to complicate & deter people from receiving public assistance.
August 13, 2020
Look at how well the old white men from the Democratic party have pulled it off! Now, why should old white men from the Republican party suffer the disgrace of an average home and be limited to the generous social offers without enough spending money for every day necessities like five star hotels and Michelin starred restaurants?
May 23, 2021
Interesting reading this book now in the post-Trump era as it seems Trump was another one of the "what could have been for the working class" presidents as mentioned in the history section of the book.
It being a book written in 2008 it's obviously outdated a bit, but some of the ideas are still good even if they will never get purchase in an increasingly polarized time.
It being a book written in 2008 it's obviously outdated a bit, but some of the ideas are still good even if they will never get purchase in an increasingly polarized time.
February 22, 2018
An intriguing artifact of a "simpler," pre-Trumpian time? Sure. But also a "what-might-have-been" primer on the modern history of American politics. A worthwhile read for its analysis of the American polity and some curios in its policy suggestions.
Of course, in the event, the book failed to move the political needle - it was President Obama, rather than 'President' McCain, after all - but it does somewhat accurately (if unintentionally) presage the source of the current populist moment. If the working class of the nation is not addressed, it does tend to revolt, after all.
Of course, in the event, the book failed to move the political needle - it was President Obama, rather than 'President' McCain, after all - but it does somewhat accurately (if unintentionally) presage the source of the current populist moment. If the working class of the nation is not addressed, it does tend to revolt, after all.
January 7, 2024
A still relevant book after 15 years but eclipsed by the cultural hegemony of the intersectional left and the rise of populism on the right. A book like this appeals to insiders and policy wonks. This is a “reformocon” manifesto, reformist conservatism that seeks to move beyond Reaganite distrust of government and faith in the market to creative uses of government to bolster civil society and working families. It’s a center right tradition informed by maternalism, christian social thought and “ordo-liberalism” (reformist classical liberalism) that emphasizes subsidiarity (decentralization) and solidarity (common interest). Another difference with left wing social justice is the family as the unit of analysis rather than individuals or those at the margin of society, so aid is given to working heads of households with children and dependents, a household rather than consumer focus. That comes with a realization American society has changed drastically so the two parent working father/stay-home mother household is no longer universal and people live more economically insecure atomized lives.
Most of the book is an analysis of how this happened and why neither side has been able to secure political dominance. The voters up for grabs are the white and “ethnic” working class (mostly hispanic now but historically european) which increasingly became a republican constituency but aren’t in tune with mainstream republican economic policy.
The policy proposals take up much less space unfortunately and amount to wage and child subsidies, vouchers and tax credits for education and healthcare. What Michael Lind calls Friedmanite voucherism. It isn’t politically feasible or fair to tie these to the traditional family unit like the authors want, but at least marriage penalties and requirements both parents work can be eliminated, so you treat single and dual income equally. Child raising like domestic work which was originally excluded from social security can also count toward receiving benefits.
As appealing as these policies may be, they assume a functional society and economy to work with which is why the populist approach has had more appeal with a greater concern with social disruption over economics. Some combination of these is the way forward I think. The regulatory welfare state itself played a major role in undermining familial and communal support so any reforms have to be those that decentralize and take money and authority from administrators which is the purpose of block grants and vouchers which are means toward this end.
Most of the book is an analysis of how this happened and why neither side has been able to secure political dominance. The voters up for grabs are the white and “ethnic” working class (mostly hispanic now but historically european) which increasingly became a republican constituency but aren’t in tune with mainstream republican economic policy.
The policy proposals take up much less space unfortunately and amount to wage and child subsidies, vouchers and tax credits for education and healthcare. What Michael Lind calls Friedmanite voucherism. It isn’t politically feasible or fair to tie these to the traditional family unit like the authors want, but at least marriage penalties and requirements both parents work can be eliminated, so you treat single and dual income equally. Child raising like domestic work which was originally excluded from social security can also count toward receiving benefits.
As appealing as these policies may be, they assume a functional society and economy to work with which is why the populist approach has had more appeal with a greater concern with social disruption over economics. Some combination of these is the way forward I think. The regulatory welfare state itself played a major role in undermining familial and communal support so any reforms have to be those that decentralize and take money and authority from administrators which is the purpose of block grants and vouchers which are means toward this end.
July 16, 2008
Grand New Party – Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are popular authors working for The Atlantic, the fabled long-lived magazine. Their new project is a book that is a call to arms for the GOP. It seems that even though times are as tough for the party as they have ever been, there is still some hope. There exists a subset of Americans that are not truly aligned with either party. Once called the Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, or the angry white males, they are a collection of non-college educated electorate that is not beholden to any party. They are the working class, but they are quite different from the working classes of previous eras. They are not union workers that walk in lockstep with organized labor therefore the Democrats have not been able to lock them down. They vote for the GOP, but quickly get disillusioned with the way the party governs.
This group, the authors refer to them as Sam’s Club voters, are concerned with social issues, to the detriment of the Democrats, but favor progressive economics. They see the social upheaval of destroyed families and a decaying culture as a minus. The Sam’s Club voters are seen as prize that the GOP can catch, if they change a bit.
The authors see the GOP as still the home of the wealthy. One can argue that they are dead wrong, as disclosures show that the DNC is now home to the wealthiest folks. Yet, the authors welcome change in the party that would cement a hold on these voters, increased spending on health and schools (disregard that more money might not help…), a change in tax law to benefit lower income and remove pay-roll taxes (the vast majority of workers are already off the income tax roles) and so on…
I must say that the writers may be right for the GOP, but by embracing these items the GOP would force out the conservatives who already see the “progressive tax system” as a civic failure and the proscribed increases in spending as a sure sign of loss. The authors are bright and want to be helpful, I just think that they have not fully thought out the entire ramifications of their plan. I also do not see that type of criticism coming from folks that should know better.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are popular authors working for The Atlantic, the fabled long-lived magazine. Their new project is a book that is a call to arms for the GOP. It seems that even though times are as tough for the party as they have ever been, there is still some hope. There exists a subset of Americans that are not truly aligned with either party. Once called the Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, or the angry white males, they are a collection of non-college educated electorate that is not beholden to any party. They are the working class, but they are quite different from the working classes of previous eras. They are not union workers that walk in lockstep with organized labor therefore the Democrats have not been able to lock them down. They vote for the GOP, but quickly get disillusioned with the way the party governs.
This group, the authors refer to them as Sam’s Club voters, are concerned with social issues, to the detriment of the Democrats, but favor progressive economics. They see the social upheaval of destroyed families and a decaying culture as a minus. The Sam’s Club voters are seen as prize that the GOP can catch, if they change a bit.
The authors see the GOP as still the home of the wealthy. One can argue that they are dead wrong, as disclosures show that the DNC is now home to the wealthiest folks. Yet, the authors welcome change in the party that would cement a hold on these voters, increased spending on health and schools (disregard that more money might not help…), a change in tax law to benefit lower income and remove pay-roll taxes (the vast majority of workers are already off the income tax roles) and so on…
I must say that the writers may be right for the GOP, but by embracing these items the GOP would force out the conservatives who already see the “progressive tax system” as a civic failure and the proscribed increases in spending as a sure sign of loss. The authors are bright and want to be helpful, I just think that they have not fully thought out the entire ramifications of their plan. I also do not see that type of criticism coming from folks that should know better.
June 23, 2016
I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Its a pretty quick read and it makes some pretty strong arguments that deserve attention. Douthat and Salam give an excellent account of american political history since the 1960s and make a good case for a direction to take for the Republican Party.
Two ideas from the book that most interested me were:
1) Much of the problems facing the American working class are the result of the breakdown of working class families. I fully and wholeheartedly agree with this and think that the Republican Party (which I am a member of) could benefit a lot from focusing on strengthening families and seeing families as the core of society. I think that the GOP is often too individualistic which is unfortunate. This idea is very welcome and very neatly and strongly presented. Essentially, the educated get good jobs and make money, and those with stable families are much more likely to get a good education (there is more nuance than that, but that's it in a nutshell).
2) The GOP needs a new New Deal. This is the idea that is definitely the most controversial in GOP circles and I'm not sure how much I buy into. Douthat and Salam explain that though the New Deal was a vast expansion of government and redistribution, it was a vast expansion of government and redistribution BASED ON TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES. This is definitely true and worth thinking about. Obviously the GOP is the party of limited government, but Douthat and Salam make a case that it can still be so while reforming the welfare state and using it to help families. Helping families will increase the strength and independence of the American population.
At its heart Douthat's and Salam's vision is practical. Though conservatives are upset about the vast expansion of the welfare state in the 20th century it is reality. They say that we should remember our context and govern in the now, making incremental changes that make America less dependent on government and solidify a Republican majority. These are solid and important ideas that deserve a debate. The GOP needs more thinking and especially debate like this, about actual governing rather than philosophical points.
Two ideas from the book that most interested me were:
1) Much of the problems facing the American working class are the result of the breakdown of working class families. I fully and wholeheartedly agree with this and think that the Republican Party (which I am a member of) could benefit a lot from focusing on strengthening families and seeing families as the core of society. I think that the GOP is often too individualistic which is unfortunate. This idea is very welcome and very neatly and strongly presented. Essentially, the educated get good jobs and make money, and those with stable families are much more likely to get a good education (there is more nuance than that, but that's it in a nutshell).
2) The GOP needs a new New Deal. This is the idea that is definitely the most controversial in GOP circles and I'm not sure how much I buy into. Douthat and Salam explain that though the New Deal was a vast expansion of government and redistribution, it was a vast expansion of government and redistribution BASED ON TRADITIONAL FAMILY VALUES. This is definitely true and worth thinking about. Obviously the GOP is the party of limited government, but Douthat and Salam make a case that it can still be so while reforming the welfare state and using it to help families. Helping families will increase the strength and independence of the American population.
At its heart Douthat's and Salam's vision is practical. Though conservatives are upset about the vast expansion of the welfare state in the 20th century it is reality. They say that we should remember our context and govern in the now, making incremental changes that make America less dependent on government and solidify a Republican majority. These are solid and important ideas that deserve a debate. The GOP needs more thinking and especially debate like this, about actual governing rather than philosophical points.
October 21, 2012
Douthat and Salam have put together the most serious attempt to date of diagnosing the party's woes and prescribing a plan for its restoration. Their critique of Republican politics frankly acknowledges its descent into anti-intellectualism and big spending, yet the strength of these admissions is diminished by weak attempts to justify them to the reader.
The project upon which Douthat and Salam have embarked upon is to describe "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream". How seriously can the reader take such a mission when the authors fail to acknowledge that the main reason for working class misery is that the Republican Party has become the marketing arm of the wealthiest 1% of Americans? The authors conspicuously avoid this topic, as it reveals the folly of their endeavor. This is tantamount to penning a treatise on how using a particular brand of sail will enable one to win a boat race, without mentioning that the sail-maker in question previously earned his living by boring holes into the hulls of sailboats.
For all its many shortcomings, "Grand New Party" is the most promising effort to date of what a renewed GOP could look like. Published in 2008, "Grand New Party" does not include the Republican party's more recent slide into madness-- the rise of the Tea Party, the war on women, the Night of the Long Knives against moderate Republicans like short-lived presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, the utter captivity to Wall Street marked by the ascension of Mitt Romney, or of the growing popularity of libertarianism as the panacea to conservative troubles.
The Republican party will need to suffer ruin and defeat in at least two more election cycles before it is ready to give serious consideration to the ideas outlined in "Grand New Party". That day cannot come soon enough.
The project upon which Douthat and Salam have embarked upon is to describe "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream". How seriously can the reader take such a mission when the authors fail to acknowledge that the main reason for working class misery is that the Republican Party has become the marketing arm of the wealthiest 1% of Americans? The authors conspicuously avoid this topic, as it reveals the folly of their endeavor. This is tantamount to penning a treatise on how using a particular brand of sail will enable one to win a boat race, without mentioning that the sail-maker in question previously earned his living by boring holes into the hulls of sailboats.
For all its many shortcomings, "Grand New Party" is the most promising effort to date of what a renewed GOP could look like. Published in 2008, "Grand New Party" does not include the Republican party's more recent slide into madness-- the rise of the Tea Party, the war on women, the Night of the Long Knives against moderate Republicans like short-lived presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, the utter captivity to Wall Street marked by the ascension of Mitt Romney, or of the growing popularity of libertarianism as the panacea to conservative troubles.
The Republican party will need to suffer ruin and defeat in at least two more election cycles before it is ready to give serious consideration to the ideas outlined in "Grand New Party". That day cannot come soon enough.
October 24, 2008
Douthat and Salam strive for a lofty goal in Grand New Party: to create a humane, secular, race- and gender-neutral conservative plan to preserve the middle class. And, for the most part, they achieve that goal - they show how strong families combine with what would be "liberal" labor protections to create the conservative ideal of an "ownership society" without government social services husbanding the individual from cradle to grave. Libertarians will not be on board; the New Deal is not Douthat and Salam's bete noir. Everyone else, though, may find themselves nodding in agreement.
October 2, 2010
It is a good conversation starter. I don't agree with all of the solutions, especially the author's approach to Social Security and Medicare. But, the authors emphasize a new way forward on social issues. As with David Frum's "Comeback," the authors rightly note that Republicans and conservatives need to expand their social causes beyond just homosexuality and abortion: An emphasis on strengthening the family should begin to take precedence. It is a good book.; but, like I said, it is really just a great conversation starter.
May 26, 2013
I appreciate the work Douthat and Salam are trying to do in this book. Because it is a policy book and because it was published in 2008, some of the ideas are dated. Having said that, both men's ideas would take conservatism in a badly needed new direction. I would recommend the book because the history and data presented simply must be addressed if conservatism is going to remain a valuable force for the country's good.
May 12, 2015
This book does not sit well in my mental digestive system. What?
I honestly fought my way through tolerating this the past few weeks, so hard that when I had this book, I read or contemplated over it rather than write about what I thought.
It just doesn't compute.
Maybe I've just been playing the foreigner card for too long, and I just altogether do not understand this person.
Oh well, I think it's probably not worth worrying over any more.
I honestly fought my way through tolerating this the past few weeks, so hard that when I had this book, I read or contemplated over it rather than write about what I thought.
It just doesn't compute.
Maybe I've just been playing the foreigner card for too long, and I just altogether do not understand this person.
Oh well, I think it's probably not worth worrying over any more.
April 24, 2015
Douthat and Salam are very good storytellers, and they have some genuinely creative ideas in this book, even if I disagree with them philosophically. I do think that they are a little too in-hoc to their own stereotypes of the liberal media and the harms of living in a city, but these tropes are common on the right, and I'm willing to cut them a little slack. Overall, this was an enjoyable book.
January 25, 2009
This book reads very quickly, but I'm not sure how much I got out of it b/c it's discussion of issues is pretty superficial. Nevertheless, the first half was a really interesting chronology of 20th century politics that I found helpful.
August 8, 2009
Interesting book that chronicles the conservative movement over the past 60 years or so and proposes action for the future. As far as political books go, I found this to be interesting, optimistic and very tolerable.
Read
November 1, 2008A lot of debatable ideas within this novel. I liked as a mini-history for myself, even if its slanted to the thirtieth degree. A nice book for those willing to experiment with some other points of view.
January 30, 2009
Two young party-loyalists argue that Republicans could win the 2008 election by marketing themselves as populists without changing values. Well-thought theories but communicated awkwardly in the author's first book. I believe the strategies laid out would have decisively succeeded.
January 30, 2009
contains interesting political history from a conservative point of view and some very interesting policy ideas. the authors advocate a more pro-government form of conservatism that would probably appeal more to liberals than the standard fare.
February 6, 2011
An interesting perspective on how the Republicans can extend reach to the working class including healthcare, education, with specific emphasis on marriage and the family. Not all ideas are good ones, but at least they are new ideas, which is a welcome change.
August 13, 2014
I like Douthat, but this book just seems like repackaging old ideas in new wrapping paper. In some ways, it's politically smart to use liberal language to defend conservative proposals, but you can't very well call it a new product. It's a somewhat disingenuous move.
March 10, 2016
Good history of American political two party system. Timely reading as 2016 primaries are happening. While written a few years back it is apparent the Republican Party still has not figured out that the working class is still disenfranchised. Donald Trump here you come.
September 5, 2015
Quick, easy, substantive read in reform conservatism, and most interesting in its telling of the political story after FDR and in its diagnosis of the working class's problems (that, is, as needing policy redress). Recommended for those interested in the authors, issues, or ideas in view.
October 9, 2008
Interesting but too brief to be of any real use to the Republican party. Needs to develop its ideas on Health Care, Education et. al.
Currently Reading
January 9, 2010Some compelling ideas in here by young, iconoclastic conservative thinkers that Democrats would try to coopt if they were smart.
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