Grand New Party
How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 256 pp., $23.95

A few months back, Barack Obama explained why he had not won more support from voters in Appalachia.

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.

The onetime lecturer in law was addressing a phenomenon that has puzzled liberals for years: Since it is self-evident to them that liberal economic policies benefit working-class voters (defined, for our purposes, as voters without college degrees), why does the working class so often support conservatives? The liberal answer, with which Obama appears to agree, is that the working-class voter is either fooled or scared--never persuaded--into voting on cultural, not economic, grounds.

The conservative authors of Grand New Party largely agree with this analysis. The difference is that Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue it is entirely rational for working-class voters to cast ballots on social and cultural concerns. That's because issues "from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration" are "at the root of working-class insecurity." They reverse the left's chain of causation. Whereas the left says social pathologies result from economic immiseration, Douthat and Salam say that economic anxiety increases in direct proportion to social instability.

(Full disclosure: The article that served as the basis of Grand New Party first appeared in these pages--"The Party of Sam's Club," November 14, 2005--and the authors are my friends.)

It's hard to disagree with them. The social disruptions of the last 40 years--rising levels of divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime--have hit voters without college degrees the hardest. Those disruptions prevent the formation of stable families. And without stable families, people lack both a refuge from and a mechanism by which to cope with larger structural changes in the global economy.

No family, less stability, less of a chance to improve one's condition.

This is bad for the working class, for America, and for the GOP. Republicans all too often come into power backed by working-class majorities, only to alienate those majorities and get tossed out of office. Douthat and Salam want to break the cycle. They think a conservative politics offers the best chance for a strong and prosperous America, and write that it is therefore necessary for conservatives to reform the "welfare state so that it serves the interests of the working class, rather than the affluent."

In so doing, the Republican party may forge a "conservative class consciousness among working-class voters." And this, in turn, would create a "unity of political allegiance and socioeconomic identity that, in its liberal form, made the Roosevelt coalition so potent and enduring." Voilà--there's your lasting Republican majority. Clearly the left has not cornered the market on audacity. Grand New Party is an unusual book: part history, part political analysis, part policy brief. It challenges the widely held idea on the right that the GOP isn't small-government enough. And at a time when the word "neocon" is a slur, Douthat and Salam argue that the GOP is most successful when it governs according to the principles of "applied neoconservatism." By this they mean "a conservatism that promised to fix the welfare state, rather than abolish it; to reform the Great Society, but leave the New Deal more or less intact."