One-Nation Conservatism.(Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream)(Book review)

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam (Doubleday, 244 pp., $23.95)

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BACK in the early 1990s, when globalization was promising widespread gains and crime and welfare were hot issues, working-class voters were socially judgmental and economically tolerant; this created a playing field favorable to Republicans. When white working-class voters who had backed Perot in the 1992 presidential election swung to the GOP in 1994, Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years. But today, as doubts about globalization grow, and crime and welfare are coming to be viewed as merely local problems, those same working-class voters have become far more economically judgmental and socially tolerant. In 2006, they swung toward the Democrats, who recaptured the House of Representatives.

The timely thesis of Grand New Party is that the party that captures "the non-college-educated voters who make up roughly half of the electorate" will dominate politics for the foreseeable future, as has been the case ever since the New Deal. The book's thesis, which was in effect the rationale for both the Huckabee campaign and the latter stages of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is likely to be given another test in the general election-in which middleclass swing voters, who've deserted the GOP but have doubts about Barack Obama, hold the winning cards.

Authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who both work for The Atlantic, are among the brightest lights in the younger generation of political thinkers. (Douthat is also film critic for NATIONAL REVIEW.) They show quite convincingly that neither party is able to speak effectively to these voters. Democrats respond to their economic anxieties, but mistakenly dismiss their cultural concerns as merely a Republican contrivance, and offer to assuage their concerns by making them clients of an ever-expanding state. Douthat and Salam demonstrate further that "the so-called social issues," from abortion, marriage, and religion to the death penalty and immigration, "aren't just red herrings," as liberals insist. Rather, they speak to the realities of working-class life, in which a failed marriage or crime or low-wage competition can put a family on the skids: "Working-class social conservatism ... wasn't just the residue of ancestral prejudices, it was and is a rational response to lives absent the security provided by wealth and degrees."

Church and family as conventionally understood--and not government--are the bulwarks of the social solidarity essential for a stable and successful lower-middle-class life. But if liberal Democrats, some occasional rhetoric aside, are allergic to the social issues, business Republicans seem insensible to the perils produced by a global glut of low-wage labor that includes illegal immigration here at home. If Republicans refuse to recognize "that the white working class wants, and needs, more from public policy than simply to be left alone," they will, the authors insist, be cast into the political wilderness.

Douthat and Salam insist, quite rightly, that the danger ahead for the country at large is an increasingly stratified society in which a mass upper middle class can, in good conscience, achieve social dominance on meritocratic grounds. The breakdown of the old New Deal order in the 1960s led to greater economic and cultural freedoms, which have combined to help produce this far less egalitarian society. The combination of intermarriage among professionals and a higher divorce rate among the less educated has helped midwife a Europe-like class structure, in which the upper ...