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India Press Store - Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
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List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $13.76
Your Save: $ 10.19 ( 43% )
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Manufacturer: Doubleday
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 324.2734
EAN: 9780385519434
ISBN: 0385519435
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2008-06-24
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: 2008-06-24
Studio: Doubleday
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Democrat Lite
Comment: This book promises a lot and fails to deliver. The authors' central insight is a good one: the GOP can renew itself and its electoral appeal by focusing its policy prescriptions on "Sam's Club Republicans," a group that is really what used to be known as Reagan Democrats, soccer moms, or just the good old fashioned working class. However, the actual policy suggestions put forth by the authors take up little more than 70 pages of this 230 page book. Almost half is given over to the authors' version of political and economic history from 1929 to now, and how the GOP has struggled to define itself to working class voters. Sorry, boys, but any history of the GOP that fails to include Abraham Lincoln, and the limited gov't GOP that was the dominant political party from 1860 - 1929 during the period of America's industrial and international rise, will never be able to grapple with the ideas that give the GOP its saliency.
The authors include all of this history to show why the working class is in trouble, and why the GOP can help. Fine. The authors' social history is OK, but too often it falls into the conventional "working class voters felt hemmed in by the excesses of the Sixties" style analysis that you can hear on basic cable. Their history of American social conditions is actually a history of American social conditions as put forth by the distorting lens of the media. When they name check the "Spur Posse" to show the decline in values, I had to roll my eyes.
After wasting all this time on a history lesson, the authors' policy prescriptions are anodyne. Mostly, it's tax breaks, and marginal changes in health, education, and immigration law. The authors have nothing to say about two of the GOP's biggest groups of supporters: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs. They also have nothing to say about national security issues, which is an especially glaring hole. National Security is one of the GOP's strengths, even after the Iraq War. It's also one of the legitimate functions of government, regardless of how expansive or limited you would like the government to be. They also skirt veterans issues, another missed opportunity. For heavens sake, veterans are obvious potential GOP supporters, and the present state of the VA is a scandal.
The biggest hole in the authors' analysis is their failure to grapple with the philosophy that has defined the GOP from its birth, and which has united the voting blocks that have been drawn to it: the philosophy of individual freedom combined with a limited national government. The authors are clearly very comfortable with using the tax code and the various arms of the government to appeal to voters. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a government that tries to do everything, will be unable to anything particularly well. This book is little more than Democrat Lite in this regard.
All told, I would say this book was very disappointing. Douthat is a thoughtful writer, but that rarely comes through in this book. if you are looking for a good book on renewing the GOP, "Comeback" by David Frum, or "How To Beat the Democrats" by David Horowitz are much more useful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No Respect
Comment: This is 2 books in one. I like the first book--a fine review of how Goldwater's Conservatives revitalized the GOP at the very moment in history that major economic and demographic changes gave a unique opportunity to build a political majority. I knew this stuff, but it's great to see it in one place.
The 2nd book by these partners from The Atlantic, well, not so much. This is a pragmatist's wish list from a blue collar focus group, ungrounded in principal or purpose beyond the next election. Products of the blog-era, these twenty-somethings seem to have no respect for the intellectual legacy of the Reagan era. At least they can write well.
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Summary: Caring about the working class
Comment: When reading this book, it was so nice to see that there are conservatives who care about the needs of the working class. I like all books that offer solutions to problems and/or better alternatives to the status quo.
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Summary: Fundamentally unserious
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and Completely Non-Bogged Down by Partisan Hackery
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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“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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