Grandiose Old Party: two young conservatives have a plan to revitalize the GOP: embrace massive social engineering.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream - Book review

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

By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam

Doubleday, 256 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

During the week I spent reading Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party, I had half a dozen different reactions to it. First I was annoyed. Then intrigued. Then, at various times, impressed, curious, and taken aback. And finally a bit baffled. But that's a good thing, right? Better than being bored, certainly.

Let's start with "annoyed." Douthat and Salam, a pair of young conservatives who currently work at the Atlantic, believe that the Republican Party needs to grapple with the economic concerns of the working class more seriously if it's going to become a party with long-term majority prospects. To set the stage for their recommendations, though, they first offer up a short political history of the past century or so, paying special attention to the relationship of both major parties to the economic and social concerns of the working class.

Douthat and Salam are primarily concerned here with how politics intersects with the family, a subject that modern liberals are famously a bit squeamish about, and they start by reminding us that, early in the 20th century, progressives were concerned about the effects of urbanization on family life in much the same way that today's conservatives are concerned about rap lyrics and sex education. Maternalists like Jane Addams and Josephine Baker, for example, fought for the eight-hour workday and nationwide maternity clinics partly because they were alarmed at the effect of widespread industrialization on family life. Later, a similar ethos infected the New Deal, which was largely designed to ensure that men earned a "family wage"--that is, enough to support a traditional household without the need for women to work outside the home.

All good stuff. But then, out of nowhere, they interrupt their narrative to make sure we also know that the New Deal's "relentless scapegoating of business may have actually worsened the Depression." Wha ...? Where'd that come from? I'm not going to have to endure a bunch of winger rants about FDR, am I? Then, a few pages (and a couple of decades) later, we're told that, although conservatives failed to support civil fights in the 1960s, it's unfair to hold that against them. "The racist smear is one of liberalism's most wearying rhetorical tropes," they say. Yikes. Am I going to have to read this entire book through gritted teeth?

In a word, no. As it turns out, Douthat and Salam do have an occasional tendency to stud their book with...