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Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $11.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 41684
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0385519435
Dewey Decimal Number: 324.2734
EAN: 9780385519434
ASIN: 0385519435
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
“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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Fundamentally unserious September 26, 2008
This book has all the depth of a junior high civics paper. The authors are brimming with schoolboy enthusiasm, yet it's clear that they have no understanding of the most elementary economics. For instance, they propose that the federal government should give wage subsidies to those hard working people in low end jobs, therefore helping them out of poverty, yet they never consider what this effect would have on prices, which would only inflate, leaving the purchasing power of these workers the same. And they even justify the plan by saying that it "follows the wise libertarian maxim that the only the only thing government can be counted on is to write checks." Apparently they didn't realize that libertarians meant that as a criticism of government. Indeed, they keep repeating that their plans would appeal to progressives and free marketeers alike: progressives because they are helping the working class and free marketeers because their plans encourage competition and personal responsibility. But government enforced competition is not what Smith or Mises had in mind, and "personal responsibility" in this case means that you do what the government says because you know that you can be fined or jailed for non-compliance--which is the same as saying I am responsible because I give a mugger my wallet instead of letting him shoot me.
This book is just as flawed for the questions it fails to address as for those it addresses and butchers. The Constitution is never once mentioned--in the entire book. It would be interesting to see what constitutional grounds the authors could conjure up for such an expansion of federal power, but they don't even try. Perhaps they realize there aren't any.
Also, the only mentions of the Iraq War are a couple of side notes about how it has tarnished the Republican name. But this is an issue that directly impacts the so-called "Sam's Club" voters, who are paying for it with their lives. And that's not to mention the effect that the trillion dollar war is playing by bringing down the economy and ruining the financial prospects of these voters. It would be hard to justify how bringing elections to Umm Qasr is a good use of the Burger King cashier with five children's tax money.
Douthat and Salam have bought--hook, line, and sinker--the progressive myth that only the federal government knows what's best for the people. They say they only want government to work well and let the people do the rest, but who can believe that when the authors note with shocked approval, that even without a federally sponsored repopulation plan, people having been moving from expensive, congested cities like Boston to places like Reno, where the cost of living is lower? You mean people can naturally understand what is in their own self-interest? Preposterous!
This book attempts to take the New Deal and make it conservative, yet that is an impossible task. Family values can't be promoted by some distant bureaucracy; they are promoted by families, acting free of state compulsion.
Thus, the one thing this book does well is to succeed as an indication of just how unconservative and intellectually bankrupt the Republican Party has become. Reviewers have lauded Douthat and Salam as two of the brightest Republican intellectuals out there. Sadly, I have to agree.
 Thoughtful and Completely Non-Bogged Down by Partisan Hackery September 18, 2008
Due to some time constraints this past summer, I only recently got to read Grand New Party. I was extremely impressed with both the quality of the writing and the quality of the ideas. We've heard populist language from conservatives before, but in this book the authors take the time to largely strip away the rhetoric and come up with many ideas for how one party might realign itself to actually stand up for the people upon which its success has always depended. Some of the ideas I thought were great, some I thought were awful, but I found virtually all of the ideas challenging and worthy of dicussion.
The historical portions of the book are written with grace and with an eye towards, if not neutrality, certainly an intellectual honesty sorely missing in most political writing. I have never been a consumer of political books and I doubt I will start being so now, but Grand New Party is full of innovative thinking and quality writing. Most political books are full of arguments (and poorly made ones), this one is full of ideas. I typically only read science and the occasional novel, but this is one of my top books of the year and I recommend without reservation.
Must Read No Matter Elephant or Donkey August 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book is a smooth read that is brainy yet down to earth at the same time. Lots of facts, plus some stats and demographics, but they don't overwhelm the reader. It is noted that working class voters comprise the "battleground" where most electoral campaigns are fought and decided, and the authors point out that GOP'ers must address the key issue of economic insecurity for this constituency that has been taken for granted by the Bushies since 9/11. Of course, addressing "economic insecurity" or the feeling the working class has "lost the future" is the challenge for both parties. The suggested approaches in the book are not terribly novel or surprising, but require a willingness of party power brokers to be open to changing the status quo. Dems, you may get more out of it than Repubs.
He had me by page 7. August 17, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Douthat argues that "'social issues' from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, aren't just red herrings distracting the working class from their economic struggles, as liberals have insisted for the better part of forty years. Rather, they're at the root of working-class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy and upwardly mobile" (p 7-8).
It's also true the working class citizen simply doesn't have the "resources and social capital to rebound from illegitimacy, broken homes and failed marriages" (p 8) the way the wealthy elite do.
What we are looking at is a generation of working class citizens who have lost the ability to climb up the social ladder because they don't marry (illegitimate children almost never crawl higher socially) and because their marriages fail (the children of divorced parents have a greatly increased chance of being abused, never graduating from high school, and getting involved with drugs, promiscuous sex, and of having enduring emotional problems).
Traditional marriage has always been key to creating successful children. Successful marriages make for safe streets. Crime is statistically more tied to neighborhoods with single parents than it is to poor neighborhoods. This is the sort of fact that always escapes the New York Times.
Economic stratification begins at home. Our culture--our television, books, magazines, and universities--has undermined traditional marriage, to the great detriment of the middle class and poor.
"On nearly every front, this 'marriage gap'...between the well educated and less educated breeds social stratification and economic inequality...Just compare the divorce rate for the parents of Ivy Leaguers, which hovers around just 10 percent, to the divorce rate for the population as a whole. The disparity isn't a coincidence" (p 13).
This book should open some eyes.
 Very readable, with some issues over the methods and citation August 7, 2008
This book is a combination of a history of the past five decades from the writers' perspectives (specifically focusing on the domestic issues), and a prescription for the Republican Party to re-win the votes of working class voters, whom the writers consider crucial to winning electoral victories and helping American. It takes the somewhat unusual tack (for conservatives) of praising Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs, which they argue were designed to promote social stability and self-reliance, and which were distorted into programs that promoted dependency by LBJ and which did not work (in the author's view). They also don't shy away from social conservatism (although they have the candor to admit the problems with the earlier periods, like racism and sexism), arguing the strong social stability (in particular, the nuclear family) actually serves to promote economic growth and better living standards for the working class.
There are two major problems with the book. The first is that they really need to cite and use quantitative evidence more; they occasionally bring up some polls, but offer no citations for them. This is crucial when they make arguments that fly in the face of decades of research in sociology, such as the argument that suburbs actually promote greater social participation and civic virtue, among other examples.
The other problem is that they occasionally make some assumptions and claims without really providing evidence for them. One example is when they criticize what they believe is the new, emerging liberal paradigm (the creation of a much broader safety net while maintaining business superiority - the Denmark example) as somewhat "un-American" and as encouraging dependency, without really arguing as to -why- this is case (especially considering that Denmark's policies are specifically designed to encourage work and competition while providing a safety net), or why what they describe as the "probably too collectivist" 1950s resulting from the New Deal is fundamentally different from the above. Another example is when they argue that the Left is pursuing a Canadian style single-payer policy, but then proceed to critique the FRENCH system, even though most single-payer advocates are advocating a version of the Canadian system.
Generally, however, the book is very, very readable and well-written. I would recommend it for educated readers of all political colors.
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