Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream | Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam | Must Read No Matter Elephant or Donkey

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Grand New Party: H...

	Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam Doubleday, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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?Memo to John McCain: Please, please READ THIS BOOK. It class="textlinks">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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He had me by page 7.

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.

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Must Read No Matter Elephant or Donkey

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.

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Thoughtful and Completely Non-Bogged Down by Partisan Hackery

Due to some time constraints this past summer, I only recently got to read Grand class="textlinks">New Party. I was extremely impressed with both the quality of the writing and the quality of the ideas. We've heard populist language from conservatives before, but in this book the authors take the time to largely strip away the rhetoric and come up with many ideas for how one party might realign itself to actually stand up for the people upon which its success has always depended. Some of the ideas I thought were great, some I thought were awful, but I found virtually all of the ideas challenging and worthy of dicussion.

The historical portions of the book are written with grace and with an eye towards, if not neutrality, certainly an intellectual honesty sorely missing in most political writing. I have never been a consumer of political books and I doubt I will start being so now, but Grand New Party is full of innovative thinking and quality writing. Most political books are full of arguments (and poorly made ones), this one is full of ideas. I typically only read science and the occasional novel, but this is one of my top books of the year and I recommend without reservation.

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Caring about the working class

When reading this book, it was so nice to see that there are conservatives who care about the needs of the working class. I like all books that offer solutions to problems and/or better alternatives to the status quo.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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