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Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $14.24
You Save: $9.71 (41%)
New (32) Used (7) from $14.24
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 6970
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0385519435
Dewey Decimal Number: 324.2734
EAN: 9780385519434
ASIN: 0385519435
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
“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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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Must Read No Matter Elephant or Donkey August 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book is a smooth read that is brainy yet down to earth at the same time. Lots of facts, plus some stats and demographics, but they don't overwhelm the reader. It is noted that working class voters comprise the "battleground" where most electoral campaigns are fought and decided, and the authors point out that GOP'ers must address the key issue of economic insecurity for this constituency that has been taken for granted by the Bushies since 9/11. Of course, addressing "economic insecurity" or the feeling the working class has "lost the future" is the challenge for both parties. The suggested approaches in the book are not terribly novel or surprising, but require a willingness of party power brokers to be open to changing the status quo. Dems, you may get more out of it than Repubs.
He had me by page 7. August 17, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Douthat argues that "'social issues' from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, aren't just red herrings distracting the working class from their economic struggles, as liberals have insisted for the better part of forty years. Rather, they're at the root of working-class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy and upwardly mobile" (p 7-8).
It's also true the working class citizen simply doesn't have the "resources and social capital to rebound from illegitimacy, broken homes and failed marriages" (p 8) the way the wealthy elite do.
What we are looking at is a generation of working class citizens who have lost the ability to climb up the social ladder because they don't marry (illegitimate children almost never crawl higher socially) and because their marriages fail (the children of divorced parents have a greatly increased chance of being abused, never graduating from high school, and getting involved with drugs, promiscuous sex, and of having enduring emotional problems).
Traditional marriage has always been key to creating successful children. Successful marriages make for safe streets. Crime is statistically more tied to neighborhoods with single parents than it is to poor neighborhoods. This is the sort of fact that always escapes the New York Times.
Economic stratification begins at home. Our culture--our television, books, magazines, and universities--has undermined traditional marriage, to the great detriment of the middle class and poor.
"On nearly every front, this 'marriage gap'...between the well educated and less educated breeds social stratification and economic inequality...Just compare the divorce rate for the parents of Ivy Leaguers, which hovers around just 10 percent, to the divorce rate for the population as a whole. The disparity isn't a coincidence" (p 13).
This book should open some eyes.
 Very readable, with some issues over the methods and citation August 7, 2008
This book is a combination of a history of the past five decades from the writers' perspectives (specifically focusing on the domestic issues), and a prescription for the Republican Party to re-win the votes of working class voters, whom the writers consider crucial to winning electoral victories and helping American. It takes the somewhat unusual tack (for conservatives) of praising Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs, which they argue were designed to promote social stability and self-reliance, and which were distorted into programs that promoted dependency by LBJ and which did not work (in the author's view). They also don't shy away from social conservatism (although they have the candor to admit the problems with the earlier periods, like racism and sexism), arguing the strong social stability (in particular, the nuclear family) actually serves to promote economic growth and better living standards for the working class.
There are two major problems with the book. The first is that they really need to cite and use quantitative evidence more; they occasionally bring up some polls, but offer no citations for them. This is crucial when they make arguments that fly in the face of decades of research in sociology, such as the argument that suburbs actually promote greater social participation and civic virtue, among other examples.
The other problem is that they occasionally make some assumptions and claims without really providing evidence for them. One example is when they criticize what they believe is the new, emerging liberal paradigm (the creation of a much broader safety net while maintaining business superiority - the Denmark example) as somewhat "un-American" and as encouraging dependency, without really arguing as to -why- this is case (especially considering that Denmark's policies are specifically designed to encourage work and competition while providing a safety net), or why what they describe as the "probably too collectivist" 1950s resulting from the New Deal is fundamentally different from the above. Another example is when they argue that the Left is pursuing a Canadian style single-payer policy, but then proceed to critique the FRENCH system, even though most single-payer advocates are advocating a version of the Canadian system.
Generally, however, the book is very, very readable and well-written. I would recommend it for educated readers of all political colors.
bordering on fraudulent August 5, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
well, not this book actually, but a related book by Salam's colleague Parag Khanna titled The Second World.
Some of the various, and numerous, factual errors that riddle the book are relatively trivial, but suggest serious sloppiness and disregard for getting facts right. For example, Yugoslavia was not part of Warsaw pact, as Khanna states. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov was appointed to office in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, and not by Vladimir Putin. Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania are not all smaller by population than Manhattan, and the death toll from the civil wars in former Yugoslavia was not greater than half a million. Other obviously wrong assertions seem to be made up simply to provide lurid background color to Khanna's travelogue: the former KGB headquarters in Moscow has not been turned into "a high-class disco," expensive Moscow malls do not charge entrance fees, and police road checkpoints in Uzbekistan do not stop and check all vehicles. And other gross misstatements of fact display a simple complete lack of understanding the history and culture of the countries of which he writes: the (Orthodox) Uspenky cave monastery in Crimea is not representative of Ukraine's "proud Catholic heritage," Zoran Djindjic was not the first democratically elected leader since World War II in former Yugoslavia , and in the 1980s Yugoslav republics like Bosnia and Macedonia were not richer than Spain. Many of Khanna's wildly wrong claims sound like local myths that he has taken at face value. I can easily imagine some misguided elderly Belgrade resident waxing nostalgically for the days "when every one of our republics was richer than Spain!"
Yet more of Khanna's assertions are not merely factually wrong, but far exceed the ludicrous. In the fast paced and dangerous Russian business world, "one is safe only in the sauna, where everyone is naked and no weapons are allowed." It was news to me to learn from Khanna that every winter "waves" of Russians and "thousands of Ukrainians" freeze to death in "crumbling heatless apartment blocks." And he employs gross mischaracterizations of fact to buttress his claims. For example, according to Khanna, in 2006 Greek GDP increased 25% when the government started to account for prostitution and cigarette smuggling in its figures. In fact, the government said it would include all unreported economic activity, mostly in construction and trade, but including a "small" amount for illegal activities such as smuggling. And this is merely a sampling of patently ridiculous claims.
And for a "foreign policy whiz-kid," Khanna makes numerous and serious analytical mistakes, showing a clear misunderstanding of economics, international institutions, and international relations. The unhedged statement, "Russia's diplomatic position is purely residual," will surely surprise diplomats from Brussels to Tokyo. Noting that Gazprom's market capitalization is $300 billion leads Khanna to the conclusion that Gazprom is one third of the Russian economy, confusing market capitalization with GDP. And his bald assertion that "[n]one of Central Asian legal systems have evolved beyond Kakfaaesque" is belied by the numerous successful legislative accomplishments of Kazakhstan and its quite sophisticated legal code, for example.
But the worst moments of Khanna's book are when he quotes conversations that seem of such dubious authenticity as to make me believe they may be fabricated, or at best the result of very selective reporting, only relating those comments that fit within his pre-existing views. "'Our pride has suffered'" explains a "Moscow intellectual over a narrow glass of [of course] ice-chilled vodka, `but this only drives our nationalism further.'" In Kiev, the locals "give lifts to strangers for a token fare." Why? "We suffered enough together, so we still trust each other." There are just too many such (anonymous) quotations that fail to ring true to trust in the author's integrity. And he also reports statements by national leaders as if they were heard in personal conversation, yet in a curiously indirect fashion that suggests otherwise.
 Neoconservatism Has Failed July 15, 2008
2 out of 12 found this review helpful
So the solution is become more like Democrats? Again, and even more so in the future?
We've already had 8 years of neoconservatism and it has been a miserable failure, thanks very much. It's given true conservatism a bad name, and it will take years to recover from the neocons' many fiascoes and the guilt by association that conservatism is suffering from.
I suggest the neocons go back from whence they came -- to the Democrat Party. The GOP has a coalition to rebuild and a Republic to save, and they cannot do it with the neocon parasites continuing to pull the party to the left, ignoring the Constitution, waging never-ending preemptive wars on a tactic, and bankrupting this country.
Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
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