Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class
and Save the American Dream
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
(Doubleday, 256 pages, $23.95)
In 1970, Pat Buchanan wrote President Richard M. Nixon a
memo about The Real Majority, a book by Richard Scammon
and Ben Wattenberg. Scammon and Wattenberg intended to guide the
Democrats to victory by emphasizing economics over social issues,
but Buchanan recognized the obvious Republican counterstrategy of
appealing to the working class’s patriotism and moral
traditionalism. Nixon was convinced: “We should aim our strategy
primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and
at working-class ethnics. We should set out to capture the vote
of the 47-year-old Dayton housewife.”
The 47-year-old Dayton housewife is now 85 and spending her
retired machinist husband’s pension in Florida, but as a voter
she and her children remain very much in demand. Their departure
from the Democratic Party collapsed the New Deal coalition, while
their frequent return trips prevented the Nixon-Reagan coalition
from becoming an enduring Republican majority. Lately, they have
been keeping superdelegates and Barack Obama’s campaign
strategists up late at night. These white working-class voters
still prefer the Democrats on economics, Republicans on God and
country. In Grand New Party, Ross Douthat and Reihan
Salam, both editors at the Atlantic Monthly and popular
bloggers, argue that such voters hold the keys to a Republican
revival — if the GOP can promote their economic interests as
well as their cultural values.
Grand New Party has brought its
authors a great deal of attention from journalists interested in
the state of conservatism, and deservedly so. Of all the recently
published treatises on reinventing the right, theirs is the most
convincing in its political analysis, detailed in its policy
recommendations, and specific about the voting blocs Republicans
should court. Yet the book is not immune to the flaws endemic in
this genre. The authors engage in a form of political triage,
deciding which aspects of conservatism can be saved and which
must be left to expire. Limited government is always beyond
help.
Which is perhaps not terribly surprising, as the Dayton
housewife is not known for her anti-statist zeal. Who are these
people who have, according to Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty,
transformed the GOP from the “party of the country club” to the
“party of Sam’s Club”? In Douthat and Salam’s telling, they are
the working, non-college educated voters who make up nearly half
of the American electorate. They were Nixon’s Silent Majority,
Ronald Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, Newt Gingrich’s angry white
males, and crucial red-state constituents under George W. Bush,
only to swing back to the Democrats with Jimmy Carter, Bill
Clinton, and the 2006 midterm elections.
This is not your grandfather’s working class, however,
which makes the Sam’s Club voters unreliable Democrats too.
Douthat and Salam describe them as “far more likely to be working
in education or health care, office administration or business
services than on a farm or an assembly line.” They are also more
likely to “belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year rather
than $30,000” and to enjoy a higher standard of living than their
parents’ generation, making them difficult to win over with
Thomas Frank pamphlets and Hillary Clinton’s Norma Rae
impressions.
Globalization and years of sustained economic growth have
made these families materially better off, but at the price of
heightened risk. Prosperity hasn’t translated into security,
which has hurt Republicans because they have better answers for
generating the former than the latter. Democrats, on the other
hand, have been hurt by their tendency to view social
conservatism as a kind of false consciousness that leads
working-class voters to “cling to guns and religion” or be
snookered by GOP bromides about “God, gays, and guns.” But for
the Sam’s Club voter, traditional values are a matter of
substance, not symbolism: safe neighborhoods and strong families
provide benefits as tangible as low Wal-Mart prices.
The party that squares this circle — mixing social
conservatism with protections from the vicissitudes of the free
markets economic conservatives champion, devising policies that
are pro-growth and pro-stability — owns the future.
Unfortunately, once the actual policymaking commences it becomes
clear that this is easier said than done. Douthat and Salam
suggest a mix of cautiously incremental market-based reforms and
newly competent big-government conservatism as a solution to
these problems, with mixed results.
ONE OF THEIR BETTER IDEAS is to change the way Republicans
cut taxes. The Reagan across-the-board tax cuts were designed to
deal with specific problems — stagflation, marginal rates in the
prohibitive range of the Laffer curve, middle-class bracket creep
— that have largely been solved. Payroll taxes now take a bigger
bite of many families’ paychecks than the dreaded income tax.
Moreover, growth isn’t the only thing conservatives should want
to promote. What the journalist Steve Sailer calls “affordable
family formation” should be a priority too.
To that end, Douthat and Salam would quintuple the child
tax credit, index it to wages, and apply it to payroll taxes as
well as income taxes. They would do so in the context of a larger
tax reform that would also simplify the Internal Revenue Code and
reduce taxes on investment. Orthodox supply-siders are likely to
object that a bigger child tax credit won’t lower marginal tax
rates. Other conservatives will complain about using the tax code
for social engineering.
But the Douthat-Salam proposal, borrowed from economist
Robert Stein and National Review’s Ramesh
Ponnuru, would alleviate an implicit tax against childrearing and
increase the popularity of politicians likely to favor purer
supply-side policies. If Republicans don’t shore up their base of
married parents with children, at least as promising a
constituency as the investor class supply-siders want to
cultivate, liberals will have an opportunity for far less benign
social engineering.
Douthat and Salam suggest reducing the payroll taxes of
low- and middle-income families and making up the lost revenue by
means-testing Social Security benefits for the rich. This will
turn tax debates about the “richest 1 percent” upside down and
expand the constituency for a tax-cutting party. It would also
offer tax relief to people even New York Times editorial
writers would agree are deserving. The authors describe this idea
as “an ideal way for conservatives to once again make tax cuts
appealing in Middle America” and also “provide a populist
sweetener” to renewed entitlement reform.
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.
