Get Started On Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win The Working Class And Save The American Dream Devised By Ross Douthat Offered As Leaflet

history of American political two party system, Timely reading asprimaries 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, I wanted to read this in preparation for Douthat's new decadence book, which looks more promising, amp I'm glad I did, for it's nice to readconservatives 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of how conservatives use race as a partial wedge against class, but it's an absurd policy package from an interesting historical document of a road halftaken by the GOP in their antiObama then Trump yrs.
Douthat amp Salam correctly identify many of the problems bedeviling the US working amp professional classes in thes: stagnant wages, economic insecurity, challenges to form stable families, ecologicaldriven economic transition, costly health care, ampc.
, but, of course, they can never bring themselves to mention unions, livingwage job creation, or public services as solutions, instead they remain mired in neoliberal awfulness: calling for police in advance of any crime increase amp immigration crackdowns, everincreasing suburban sprawl, piddling tax code tweaks, privatizing Kcollege education, coercive health care savings accounts, targeted subsidies to greening in wholly insufficient ways, amp celebrating vast increases in spending in states like Wisconsin amp Michigan to complicate amp deter people from receiving public assistance.
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 Interesting reading this book now in the postTrump 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It being a book written init's obviously outdated a bit, but some of the ideas are still good even if they will never get purchase in an increasingly polarized time.
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.
  That said, I do not spring from monied wealth but rather from a family of modest workingclass 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 thanpages 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 inas well as Trump in the general campaign in.
  The author begins with a look at political history in the first part, showing an unfinished realignment after the collapse of the FDR coalition inI, beginning with a look at the old consensus in the's, the crackup in the face of antiwar and racial demonstrations, the search of the new majority by Republicans and Democrats alike, the conservative's in their combination of Republican congresses and Clinton's turn to the right in the aftermath of, and the age of Bush.
  By and large the author shows himself to be a moderate here, conservative in selfestimation 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, how to put families first, what comes when you go up from compassion, and what things look like in a contemporary frontier society.


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 asit 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 inallowed 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 selfserving given their own political agendas.


See, for example:

sitelink blog/

sitelink blog/

sitelink blog/

sitelink blog/

sitelink blog/

sitelink blog/ 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 thanpages of thispage book.
Almost half is given over to the authors' version of political and economic history fromto 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 fromduring 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.


. not bad but not enough to prevent thebloodbath, 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, Thisbook from Reformicon duo Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam proved mightily forwardlooking, If I had to sum up this work, it would be a quote from page: "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 centerleft and socially centerright voters, This is part of why Hillary Clinton lost in! Douthat and Salam inunderstood this group far better than most in the interveningyears 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", Through economic change, a robust culture must provide "a sense of solidarity and moral guardrails", 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 wellarticulated points, they've also lost their support among workingclass voters.
epitomized this. So, "Grand New Party" turned out to be one of the most prescient books I've read from thes.
As today we stare at "a slow and steady degradation of everyday workingclass life", we can look back and see exactly where populism came along, which the authors predict throughout the book, including trenchantly on page.
Oh, and they also kinda foresaw the libowning GOP, describing Nixon as building a personal majority on "deepseated workingclass resentments".
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".
This was very popular around the country, even becoming accepted by the Republican mainstream, But through thes, rapid change dismantled the New Deal coalition, Democrats failed to respond to the challenges to public order, family stability, economic growth, and cultural solidarity, 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 workingclass 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 sitelinkThe Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of BlueCollar Conservatism.
The present authors also remark that Bill Clinton's second term represented a number of "conservative triumphs"while rightfully quipping that neoliberalism is a "halfconservative, halflibertine ideology".
Douthat and Salam also criticize inconsistently committed GOP policymakers like Nixon and Bush and even sortof Reagan they spare him too much for my taste, who they refer to as possessing a "record of temporary successes, halfgrasped achievements, and squandered opportunities".
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 sitelinkRemaking 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 rightleaning thinkers realize.
This is another place where the book has value for both left and right, If the left wants to forestall the workingclass 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 Bordersvery much improves the argument.
In many ways, this diagnosis of America's maladies echoes the conclusions Trumpaligned 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 postTrump 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 evenhanded and wellresearched.
Nonetheless, it detracts from the scholarly value of the book, Other solutions I have gripes with include their rosilyworded proposal that more Americans telecommute Zoom has shown that to be miserable when done consistently.


Nonetheless, there are good ideas toowage subsidies, hiring more police officers, reforming farm subsidies to better promote rural development, creating more flexible union structures, and a DARPAstyle 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 nonextremist 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 sitelinkThe 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 "longrange vision, . . that will prepare America's families for the unfamiliar world to come", .