W. JAMES ANTLE III: Attention Sam's Club Shoppers

...Moreover, growth isn’t the only thing conservatives should want to promote...

...Previously known to a narrow circle of academics for conservative agenda...

...Grand New Party is sure to start debates...

...Earthly Powers is a narrative of the major events in European history bracketed by two crucial dates: 1789 and 1914...

...J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 9 1 b o o K s I n R e v I e W The trouble with dismissing limited government as unpopular or politically impractical is that it becomes easy to forget why conservatives championed the idea in the first place...

...And so will conservatives...

...Or, as Burleigh puts it differently, his book is about “the Earthly Powers is that the Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War By Michael Burleigh (Harper perennial, 529 pages, $16.95 paper) Lost Transcendence T trilogy on the plight of Western civilization i o g s ’ h g i u l e M o e m u l o v r fi he s t appearance f in i a c ha popu B lar r le edition o n of t n h i e g s a welcome event...

...This will turn tax debates about the “richest 1 percent” upside down and expand the constituency for a tax-cutting party...

...e The ig Reagan c n onserva l tives to o c nce again m o ake tax cu e ts appealing r f y a w l a e i n “ s a a e d i h t e b i c s e d s r o h t e T ne of their better ideas is to change the T h ime a s u editorial w r riters w s o i uld agre a e ar d e de servin o g t . deal with specific problems—stagflation, marginal sweetener” to renewed entitlement reform...

...rates in the prohibitive range of the Laffer curve, If some conservatives might quibble with the middle-class bracket creep—that have largely been solved...

...Democrats, on the other hand, have been hurt by their tendency to view social conservatism as a kind of false consciousness that leads working-class voters to “cling to guns and religion” or be snookered by GOP bromides about “God, gays, and guns...

...Of all the recently published treatises on reinventing the right, theirs is the most convincing in its political analysis, detailed in its policy recommendations, and specific about the voting blocs Republicans should court...

...Put another way, this is a more balanced, more profound, and more authoritative version of the past than most of us, even the best educated, probably carry around in our heads...

...they can even question how decisive white working-class voters will be in the next partisan realignment...

...9 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 b o o K s I n R e v I e W higher standard of living than their parents’ generation, making them difficult to win over with Thomas Frank pamphlets and Hillary Clinton’s Norma Rae impressions...

...Which is perhaps not terribly surprising, as the Dayton housewife is not known for her anti-statist zeal...

...tJames antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator...

...ing risk, and, most importantly, carve out a space for family and community life while giving decisionmaking power and vast amounts of money to centralized government bureaucracies...

...Nixon was convinced: “We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class ethnics...

...Lately, they have been keeping superdelegates and Barack Obama’s campaign strategists up late at night...

...It is extremely difficult— much more difficult than the authors seem to imagine—to instill self-reliance through the welfare state, promote economic dynamism while minimizDouthat and Salam are right about the need to update the by Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, which will bring the narrative down to the present...

...Unfortunately, once the actual policymaking commences it becomes clear that this is easier said than done...

...To that end, Douthat and Salam would quintuple the child tax credit, index it to wages, and apply it to payroll taxes as well as income taxes...

...The party that squares this circle—mixing social conservatism with protections from the vicissitudes of the free markets economic conservatives champion, devising policies that are pro-growth and prostability —owns the future...

...While they wisely steer clear of the Republican-sponsored universal health coverage schemes that bedevil California and Massa chusetts, the authors endorse Brad DeLong’s plan to require “all individuals and families to set aside 15 percent of income in a Health Savings Account...

...Drawing on the work of Nobel laureate economist Edmund Phelps, Douthat and Salam call for a program of wage subsidies for the working poor that could cost up to $85 billion a year...

...Payroll taxes now take a bigger bite of many families’ paychecks than the dreaded income tax...

...In short, biggovernment conservatism usually fails not because Brownie didn’t do a heck of a job but because big government is poorly suited for conserving much beyond its own power...

...The 47-year-old Dayton housewife is now 85 and spending her retired machinist husband’s pension in Florida, but as a voter she and her children remain very much in demand...

...Douthat and Salam are right about the need to update the conservative agenda...

...The authors engage in a form of political triage, deciding which aspects of conservatism can be saved and which must be left to expire...

...They are also more likely to “belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year rather than $30,000” and to enjoy a b K i Wo...

...Their departure from the Democratic Party collapsed the New Deal coalition, while their frequent return trips prevented the Nixon-Reagan coalition from becoming an enduring Republican majority...

...It covers the same ground as many other volumes on the subject, but in far greater detail and in a very different way...

...far less benign social engineering...

...But the single biggest failing of this ambitious, often impressive book is the authors’ casual assumption that it will be easy to use liberal means for conservative ends...

...But without the “internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics,” as William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Globalization and years of sustained economic growth have made these families materially better off, but at the price of heightened risk...

...put it, our Dayton housewife will forever be disappointed...

...The central argument of collapse of the ancien régime in France from 1789 to 1793 constituted a kind of cultural earthquake in which men and women abandoned their traditional religious practices but not their need for transcendence...

...In Douthat and Salam’s telling, they are the working, non-college educated voters who make up nearly half of the American electorate...

...But for the Sam’s Club voter, traditional values are a matter of substance, not symbolism: safe neighborhoods and strong families provide benefits as tangible as low Wal-Mart prices...

...Prosperity hasn’t translated into security, which has hurt Republicans because they have better answers for generating the former than the latter...

...This is not your grandfather’s working class, however, which makes the Sam’s Club voters unreliable Democrats too...

...What the journalist Steve Sailer calls “affordable family formation” should be a priority too...

...It would also offer tax relief to people even New York above proposals, Grand New Party contains several more that will send them into open revolt...

...But without his works on German history, in these books Burleigh emerges as a major public intellectual in his own country, the United Kingdom, as well as in the United States, where he has taught, and perhaps even in Spain, Italy, and Latin America, where this book has already appeared in vernacular editions...

...Douthat and Salam suggest reducing the payroll taxes of low- and middle-income families and making up the lost revenue by means-testing Social Security benefits for the rich...

...But the Douthat-Salam proposal, borrowed from economist Robert Stein and National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, would alleviate an implicit tax against childrearing and increase the popularity of politicians likely to favor purer supply-side policies...

...A careful reading of this book, in fact, brings home how much what many of us think we know is (unfortunately) due to tedious left-liberal historians like Simon Schama or sinister Marxist ones like Eric Hobsbawm...

...In Grand New Party, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both editors at the Atlantic Monthly and popular bloggers, argue that such voters hold the keys to a Republican revival—if the GOP can promote their economic interests as well as their Grand New Party has brought its authors a great deal of attention from journalists interested in the state of conservatism, and deservedly so...

...Attention Sam’s Club Shoppers Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam (DoubleDay, 256 pages, $23.95) Reviewed by W. James antle III cultural values...

...These white working-class voters still prefer the Democrats on economics, Republicans on God and country...

...Douthat and Salam describe them as “far more likely to be working in education or health care, office administration or business services than on a farm or an assembly line...

...Scammon and Wattenberg intended to guide the Democrats to victory by emphasizing economics over social issues, but Buchanan recognized the obvious Republican counterstrategy of appealing tionalism...

...We should set out to capture the vote of the 47-yearold Dayton housewife...

...Other conservatives will complain about using the tax code for social engineering...

...Douthat and Salam suggest a mix of cautiously incremental marketbased reforms and newly competent big-government conservatism as a solution to these problems, with mixed results...

...If Republicans don’t shore up their base of married If Republicans don’t shore up their base of married parents with children, at least as promising a constituency as the investor class supply-siders want to cultivate, liberals will have an opportunity for O s i l u p o p a d i v o r p “ ls a d n a ” a i r e m A e d d i M i o t d e n s e d r e w s t c x t d r a o b - e t - o r a w c ay ss Re h publicans a cut u taxes...

...Limited government is always beyond help...

...They would do so in the context of a larger tax reform that would also simplify the Internal Revenue Code and reduce taxes on investment...

...In spite of its finely filigreed detail, it is also compellingly readable...

...b o o K s I n R e v I e W to the working class’s patriotism and moral tradi- In 1970, pat buchanan wrote President Richard M. Nixon a memo about The Real Majority, a book by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg...

...Ortho dox supply-siders are likely to object that a bigger child tax credit won’t lower marginal tax rates...

...parents with children, at least as promising a constituency as the investor class supply-siders want to cultivate, liberals will have an opportunity for far less benign social engineering...

...Readers can embrace or discard the various bits of policy wonkery...

...Yet the book is not immune to the flaws endemic in this genre...

...The search was on, not just in France, but eventually in other European countries as well, for a substitute, which they found—or rather, thought they found—in worship of the state, and later, of the nation...

...They were Nixon’s Silent Majority, Ronald Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, Newt Gingrich’s angry white males, and crucial red-state constituents under George W. Bush, only to swing back to the Democrats with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and the 2006 midterm elections...

...Their first chapter should tell them otherwise: the New Deal was designed to promote the traditional family, but years later its programs undermined the black family in ways that cried out for welfare reform and imposed the tax on childrearing the authors now want to relieve...

...It wasn’t out of cheapness, cruelty, or obsession with some abstract anti-government ideology...

...Maybe these are terrific ideas, but wouldn’t a conservative want to read more than a few paragraphs about them before accepting such large expansions of government...

...put it, conservatives will forever be disappointed...

...It follows on the heels of the recent publication of the second volume, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror, to be followed in due course Reviewed by Mark Falcoff the “internal composure that comes of knowing there are rational limits to politics,” as William F. Buckley Jr...

...Who are these people who have, according to Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, transformed the GOP from the “party of the country club” to the “party of Sam’s Club...

...9 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington...