Political Parties

What a long, strange week in Washington.

Early on, you could tell things were not proceeding along their usual track. At the Senate Banking and Finance Committee, right-wing Republican Jim Bunning laid into the bailout plan as "socialism" that was "un-American," and was met by cheers and acclamations from ACORN and Code Pink members in attendance. (So much, in fact, that Bunning crankily told them to pipe down. "I've been doing this long enough," he said. "I don't need any help.") The next day at the joint… more

"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and extreme supporters..." LINK

Ross Douthat, Senior Editor at the Atlantic and Reihan Salam, Associate Editor at the Atlantic and a Fellow at the New America Foundation, discuss their widely acclaimed book Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with David Inge. LINK to audio

The Republican Party has lost touch with its roots, say authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. They're hoping to fix that in their new book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Salam says George W. Bush won the presidency by winning over "soccer moms" and then threw himself into a series of policy initiatives that his newfound base found largely irrelevant to their lives.

Salam says the American middle class is currently concerned about downward mobility and problems with the… more

...Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, young Atlantic editors (Mr. Douthat made his bones as an intern at National Review), are concerned with shoring up that base and adding to it. The thesis is that members of "the working class," defined as "the non-college educated voters who make up roughly half the American electorate" and elected FDR, Nixon, Reagan and Bush have "transformed the Republican Party from the 'party of the country club' to the 'party of Sam's Club,'" as Minnesota… more

...The Bush-Rove Republicans have already shifted from the broader Reagan coalition of libertarians, anticommunists, moral traditionalists and tax cutters to one that is rooted in the South and skewed towards the rural heartland. They are losing the educated elites at a fast clip, accelerated by Barack Obama’s class appeal. What some younger conservatives now want is to capitalise on this and take it one step further.

That’s the central thrust of a book just out, Grand New Party, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The title is a… more

Having devoted his career to shocking and outraging American liberals, the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms continues to provoke them from his grave. Progressive journals and blogs are full of Helms horror stories. How he tried to make Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun cry by singing "Dixie" in the Senate elevator. How he won reelection against a black opponent by means of an ad showing the hands of a white man who had allegedly lost a job because of… more

...In their thoughtful and important new book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, young conservative journalists Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam point out that while Democrats are clueless about why cultural values can produce material suffering, Republicans fail to grasp how economics can affect cultural decline.

Liberals correctly call out conservatives, they write, for "diagnosing the working class' cultural problems and then pretending that those problems are the only ones there are."

"In reality, you can't disentangle… more

...Experts expect the GOP to lose between four and seven seats in the Senate and 10 and 20 seats in the House--giving the Democrats their largest majorities in a generation. And John McCain hasn't led Barack Obama in a single poll since May 3.

Enter Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Named by David Brooks of the New York Times as "two of the most promising" of "an emerging "group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers," they're editors at the Atlantic Monthly… more

Young conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are the toast of Republican thought circles right now. But their call to Republican revival is also a broadside.

Bush-era crony capitalism and government neglect, they charge, have pushed the USA toward a Latin American model of rich and poor and nothing in between. If the Grand Old Party wants a comeback, they argue, it's going to have to do something serious for American workers. But something conservative. This hour,… more