A Republican New Deal

An ambitious attempt to reshape the Republican promise

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam, Doubleday, 2008, $23.95, 256 pg.
It is no longer morning in America. Something has gone wrong with the conservative vision, a vision now lost amongst the sands of Iraq, an economy in malaise, and a culture divided. As the frustrated Bush era ends and Democrats are enthroned in Washington, one question—“What must be done?”—has hung over the American right. Providing a provocative answer to that question are Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their new book, Grand New Party. Douthat and Salam, two young and rising conservative writers, call on Republicans to adopt a radically new agenda attuned to the working class. Proposals that fall outside the standard tax-cuts-and-culture-war “return to roots” rhetoric that often seizes the GOP in times of doubt deserve our deep attention.
An American Struggle
Grand New Party’s backbone is a unique account of American history; while the authors pay some service to the American tradition of limited government, the narrative is one of a nation unafraid to use government to address economic change, and of the failures and successes of politicians to exercise that judicious activism. The book begins by detailing the Progressive era reforms early in the last century, describing the rise of the welfare state as a natural reaction to the advance of industrial capitalism. Above all, the New Deal occupies a central place in the author’s attentions and prescriptions. We often view the New Deal as a seamless element in the long march of liberalism. But Douthat and Salam emphasize the socially conservative, “maternal” side of the New Deal; how Social Security, housing policy, unionization, and welfare all promoted the interests and mobility of working-class families, albeit in an unabashedly traditionalist and patriarchal sense.
In Douthat and Salam’s view, a resulting Golden Age of working-class stability and upward mobility lasted until the social and cultural maelstrom of the sixties. That decade, they argue, saw the beginnings of an assault on the working class via a wave of crime, family breakdown, the “hardening of meritocratic arteries,” and an increasingly polarized culture. At the same time, they write, the Democratic Party swung to the left, failing to make the sale to culturally conservative working-class voters. From that point forward, the old liberal consensus was finished, but not to Republican gain; Republicans were unable to articulate a conservative New Deal to tackle this breakdown of the working class. (The authors do make a claim to the Nixon and Reagan legacies, noting that neither actually governed as a small-government conservative.) All this while, globalization was taking its toll in what the authors clearly believe is the greatest economic challenge to the working class.
Problem and Solution
It is in the last decade that the crises of the working class and conservative difficulties have coalesced. George W. Bush’s presidency began in a way seemingly amenable to a Grand New Party agenda of family-focused institutions and policies. His “compassionate conservatism” appeared to mirror the prescriptions proposed here. But Iraq and political squabbles overtook the Bush presidency, and eight years later, illegitimacy has increased and marriage has weakened, knocking out the family support crucial for social mobility. In the author’s analysis, the upper class gets by in the global economy while immigration and the labor glut emaciate working class wages. In order for either party to win the allegiance of the working class, it must address the resulting economic inequality and anxiety. Neither party has done so.
What is the way out? The plan offered here for Republicans would be the most cohesive attempt at social transformation since the Great Society or the New Deal. The authors recommend changing the tax code to favor poorer taxpayers and families, especially traditional two-parent ones; subsidies for homemakers; investments in infrastructure to revitalize suburbia; a reinvention of government involvement in healthcare and education; wage subsidies and “green collar jobs” to encourage employment; a wave of new police officers; and a crackdown on illegal immigration. The policy recommendations reflect Grand New Party’s role as a conversation-starter rather than definitive manifesto, drawing mostly from approaches suggested by other policy thinkers. And there are a few gaping omissions from the potpourri; the drug war, for example, an effort as bipartisan as it has been disruptive, disproportionately targets the working class, especially the African-American and Hispanic segments the authors are eager to draw into the new Republican coalition. But serious reform on that issue goes unconsidered here.
Prospects for Renewal
This plan for an active, class-conscious conservatism is nothing if not bold. And it may well become the new orthodoxy, if only because the small-government bogeymen of Grand New Party, who would ignobly obstruct compassionate government, are practically impossible to find these days. Nearly all the rising star governors of the Republican Party demonstrate the reformist tendencies that are in sync with the authors’ plans, whether those governors are managerial centrists such as Mitch Daniels and Mitt Romney, populists such as Mike Huckabee, or technocratic reformers such as Bobby Jindal. If these strands of conservatism do not take over the GOP, it will not be because of the ghost of Goldwater; the sheer inertia of formulaic conservatism may be its biggest foe. There is also the possibility that these managerial schemes will fall victim to the same interest-group politics, bloat, and miscalculation seen in the Bush experiment in compassionate conservatism.
An equally possible future for this new flavor of politics, in fact, is one that is outside the conservative movement altogether. The proposals here are bound to be popular with the working classes and, partially due to their hostility to free trade, the proposals already lean Democratic. Given the new president’s penchant for preaching the virtues of parenting and his hobbyhorses of green collar jobs and economic reform, it is possible that Democrats could seize most of this new conservative thunder. After all, very little here is poison to the left; “God, guns, and gays” social conservatism is explained as legitimate part of working-class insecurity but is not an active requirement for the authors’ policies. Liberals willing to hide their cultural colors could very well ride this new reaction against the vicissitudes of capitalism and modernity.
We do not know how Grand New Party’s brave new welfare state may play out. There is no denying that there is a political harvest to be reaped, however, and as the working class continues to be buffeted by economic and social insecurity, whoever offers up a plausible set of solutions will be rewarded. Grand New Party offers a cogent case for Republicans to change course and take that road back to power. It is now up to them to decide whether they want to offer this next New Deal to the working class.