Republicans have been in a bit of a funk lately. Voters (especially the young ones) are increasingly identifying themselves as Democrats, and current projections give Obama the edge on Nov. 4 with the GOP losing seats in both the House and the Senate. Come Nov. 5, Republicans may be doing a lot of soul-searching.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam -- a pair of ambitious young editors at the Atlantic -- have a plan for them: If you want to build that elusive lasting majority you've been talking about for decades, you need a domestic policy program that deals with working-class anxieties. Really help the working class, they say, and you will win elections from here till eternity.
Part revisionist history, part wonky policy program, "Grand New Party" is brimming with ideas -- but of variable quality.
The book's best argument is that social issues "aren't just red herrings distracting the working class from economic struggles. . . . Rather they're at the root of working-class insecurity." Coastal elites can mock values voters all they want, the book argues, but for those who live in a world where drugs, divorce and out-of-wedlock births wreak havoc, the traditional family is not some antiquated hang-up, it's the crucible of economic stability.
But things get fuzzier when the two start arguing their working-class-as-linchpin-of-electoral-success story. Up through the mid-1960s, they contend, these voters were solid New Deal Democrats. But by the 1960s, rising crime, declining social mores and a drifting Democratic Party left them anxious and alienated.
Into this void stepped clever Richard Nixon, "the architect of a working-class conservatism that would shape American politics for the next quarter century." Douthat and Salam see Nixon as sincere in wanting to help the working class (he even proposed a guaranteed annual income) but thwarted by ideologues on both sides.
They also want to reclaim Reagan as a working-class ally, noting that his famous remark that "government is the problem" has been taken out of context -- Reagan actually qualified it with "in the present crisis." "It was conservatism that promised to fix the welfare state," Douthat and Salam write of Reagan, "rather than to abolish it."
Heck, they even give George W. Bush credit for "making the Republican Party responsive to the working class," because he pushed education initiatives and funding for job training and business start-ups.
