Red like us.(Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power)(Book review)

Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power, by Thomas B. Edsall (Basic, 320 pp., $26)

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AN old joke has one German Jew asking another why he is reading Der Sturmer. He says that he reads it to feel better. Other newspapers tell him about pogroms, dispossession, and forced migration. The Nazi press tells him that he's running the world.

Conservatives may feel similarly about reading Building Red America. Republicans were thrashed in the elections, and conservatives both in and out of office have demonstrated both before and after those elections an impressive degree of political ineptitude. In Thomas B. Edsall's pages, however, conservative Republicans form a nearly unstoppable juggernaut. They are ruthless and single-minded, and enjoy both structural and tactical advantages that allow them to prosper even in the face of short-term defeats. If only it were so.

Republicans and Democrats are roughly equal in numbers. But Edsall believes that the class structure of the two parties creates two advantages for the Republicans. The first is that they draw disproportionately from the successful and are thus "more broadly skilled in economic combat," more competitive, and more aggressive. The second is that the Democrats are divided, with affluent social liberals providing most of the party's activists and money and working-class social moderates providing its votes. Edsall writes:

 
  It is the argument of this book that unless the Democratic party finds 
  a way to defeat Republican "wedge issue" strategies; radically 
  improves its organizational foundations; resolves its internal 
  divisions on national security; formulates a compelling position on 
  the use of force; addresses the schisms generated by its stands on 
  moral, racial, and cultural issues; develops the capacity to turn 
  Republican positions on social-cultural matters into a liability; 
  devises an economic program capable of generating--and generating 
  belief in--wealth; broadens its voter base; recruits candidates who 
  sufficiently embody (or can be portrayed to embody) credible military 
  leadership and mainstream populist values; develops a strategy to hold 
  together a biracial, multiethnic coalition--or unless the population 
  of the disadvantaged swells--the odds are that the Republican party 
  will continue to maintain, over the long term, a thin but durable 
  margin of victory. 

Edsall is a justly respected political journalist. His liberalism does not create the normal political blinders: He does not project his views onto the electorate at large. He can see the sources of Republican strength. His analytical failure is different: His investment in Republican diabolism causes him to overrate or to exaggerate the distinctiveness of Republican strengths.