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Attention Sam’s Club Shoppers
The bible of spread-the-wealth conservatism.
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If some conservatives might quibble with the above proposals, Grand New Party contains several more that will send them into open revolt. Drawing on the work of Nobel laureate economist Edmund Phelps, Douthat and Salam call for a program of wage subsidies for the working poor that could cost up to $85 billion a year. While they wisely steer clear of the Republican-sponsored universal health coverage schemes that bedevil California and Massachusetts, the authors endorse Brad DeLong’s plan to require “all individuals and families to set aside 15 percent of income in a Health Savings Account.” Maybe these are terrific ideas, but wouldn’t a conservative want to read more than a few paragraphs about them before accepting such large expansions of government?
The trouble with dismissing limited government as unpopular or politically impractical is that it becomes easy to forget why conservatives championed the idea in the first place. It wasn’t out of cheapness, cruelty, or obsession with some abstract anti-government ideology. It is extremely difficult — much more difficult than the authors seem to imagine — to instill self-reliance through the welfare state, promote economic dynamism while minimizing risk, and, most importantly, carve out a space for family and community life while giving decision-making power and vast amounts of money to centralized government bureaucracies. In short, big-government conservatism usually fails not because Brownie didn’t do a heck of a job but because big government is poorly suited for conserving much beyond its own power.
Grand New Party is sure to start debates. Readers can embrace or discard the various bits of policy wonkery; they can even question how decisive white working-class voters will be in the next partisan realignment. But the single biggest failing of this ambitious, often impressive book is the authors’ casual assumption that it will be easy to use liberal means for conservative ends.
Their first chapter should tell them otherwise: the New Deal was designed to promote the traditional family, but years later its programs undermined the black family in ways that cried out for welfare reform and imposed the tax on childrearing the authors now want to relieve. Douthat and Salam are right about the need to update the conservative agenda. But without the “internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics,” as William F. Buckley Jr. put it, our Dayton housewife will forever be disappointed. And so will conservatives.
This review appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.
About the Author
W. James Antle, III, author of the new book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?, is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a senior editor of The American Spectator. You can follow him on Twitter @jimantle.
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Appleby| 10.22.08 @ 9:49AM
I hear this from my so-called Libertarian friend in New Zealand constantly -- who wants to have freedom for himself and his friends except for the pet programs he thinks everyone ought to be forced to pay for regardless of what the other fellow thinks ... I live in Canada where It's All About My Goodies and am watching the Gravy Train screech to a halt as more people are piling on than are pulling, and wondering how long it will be until the country is a shambles and everyone wonders why.
J David| 10.22.08 @ 10:28AM
This GNParty perversion would be laughable if it weren't running its first titular candidate in Juan Amnesty McVain, the Soros-owned, commie-lib Dem socialist ally. This is EXACTLY why Juan should lose, and cause these imitation *conservatives* to be swept right off of the table. There is no substitute for traditional Reagan conservatism; everything else is just a hideous, twisted bastardization of something NOT conservative. Unless these faux *conservatives* are immediately and loudly repudiated RINO faux "leadership"("bi-partisan" surrender monkeys) is going to continue down their path to DESTRUCTION!
Jeremy Jester| 10.22.08 @ 11:28AM
Why are so many GOPer's and conservatives espousing and embracing failed socialist programs? We have witnessed the myriad of unintended consequences resulting from the New Deal and Great Society entitlements. At the foundation of it all, those entitlements played to society's weaknesses and character failings.
I still do not need Obama's change and I still do not need Grand New Party's prescribed change.
Pat Bruen| 10.22.08 @ 12:06PM
The problem is that the media paints Republicans like Bush and McCain as conservatives when they are considerably more to the left than even Clinton was.
So when their big-government policies fail, they are presented as a failure of conservatism.
And poor John is left scratching his head and wondering why the press doesn't like him any more.
Richard Williams| 10.22.08 @ 1:12PM
Face it. We're doomed.
Fred Astair | 10.22.08 @ 5:10PM
Is Bush a big government guy? I would love to know what happened? Were we conservatives duped when we voted for him? Or were his leaders Frist, DeLay and Hastert competely inept? The Bush administration has destroyed the Conservative movement. Why? We know DeLay was more interested in gerrymandering and getting payoffs than reducing the debt. Was he the problem? I would read a book by a good author on what happened during the Bush years.
If Barack wins Bush's legacy may be that he elected the first Socialist in America.
www.baracktruth.com
Katelyn| 10.22.08 @ 10:09PM
Why should hard-working singles give ANOTHER subsidy to people who CHOOSE to have kids? Shouldn't they consider the cost of child-rearing before deciding that they want children?