Books

Sometime in the next four years, the health care delivery system in the United States is going to change. That's a given because the current patchwork--costly and unreliable private health insurance, overcrowded and underfunded hospital emergency rooms, technophilic and procedure-incentivized physicians--is coming apart at the seams. Whatever solution the 44th president and the 111th Congress enact may or may not prove adequate. But rest assured they'll change something.

On August 13, Ted Widmer, director of Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, discussed his new book, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, and entertained questions from an audience at the New America Foundation. After a brief introduction by Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program, Dr.

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

One of the big issues, if not the biggest issue, in this year’s presidential campaign is described in “The Great Risk Shift,” a book by Yale political science professor Jacob S. Hacker.

Hacker’s theme can be summarized in a single sentence: “Over the last generation … we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.”

Human beings are clever, bigheaded animals that have proved very formidable against predators like the now-extinct woolly mammoth and the near-extinct Bengal tiger. But we humans, particularly we modern humans, are also strangely vulnerable: fleshy, pudgy, and almost entirely bereft of natural defenses, such as thick outer shells, tusks, or sharp claws. Moreover, our gangly, awkward, injury-prone bodies are not particularly good at getting from place to place. Chimpanzees can at least swing from tree to tree — when was the last time you saw a human do that?

In their smart and fun new book, Grand New Party, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam urge Republicans to spend trillions of dollars on policies to shore up working-class families. Several critics have pointed out that the Republican Party will likely remain much more interested in spending trillions of dollars on tax breaks for rich people. What's been less noticed is that Democrats could easily adopt much of the family agenda Douthat and Salam propose--and that, more than his opponent, Barack Obama already has...

...Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, a pair of conservative authors decades younger than Gingrich and Norquist, argue in their new, much-hyped book Grand New Party that the time has come to "move beyond the Reagan legacy and the mindset of the current Republican power structure." They suggest plenty of proposals that many progressives would support, including a fairly ambitious and expensive national health-care plan, subsidies for entry-level jobs and more investment in infrastructure.

Bill Clinton desperately wanted a pithy slogan to encapsulate his foreign policy. But nothing worked. “Post cold-war era” was uninspiring. “Democratic enlargement” sounded like an unwelcome medical condition. “Age of hope” was too like the title of a New Age album. “We can litanize and analyze all we want, but until people can say it in a phrase, we’re sunk,” he snapped at his advisers in the fall of 1994.

This event has been postponed until further notice.

On Thursday, July 31, 2008, the New America Foundation hosted Sidney Blumenthal, Senior Adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton and Senior Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, to discuss his new book, The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party. He was joined by New America’s Steve Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program, and Michael Lind, Senior Whitehead Fellow. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below, while video is available at right.