My friends Reihan and Ross have written an extremely savvy book about how to reinvigorate the GOP with a new narrative and a new coalition. Because I like the Republican party flaccid and moribund (all parties, actually), I hope their book is celebrated, widely reviewed, and ultimately ignored. And because I find most of their social policy troubling, I hope that even those dipping into the book for some new ideas take time to question the assumptions within it.

I don't think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

This position is not wholly without statistical motivation. Children do better on average, along a variety of dimensions and across all income groups, when raised by both of their biological parents. Poor children are more likely to be born out of wedlock, and those that are born to married parents are more likely to see their parents divorce later. But as women have spent some time trying to establish, they are in fact distinct from children. The class of women is also conceptually distinct from the class of mothers; while most, but not all, women will become mothers within their lifetimes, the years spent actively caring for small children will comprise only a small percentage of her total lifespan. Even if it were possible to improve the lives of children by enforcing reactionary gender norms, it would be wrong.

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women's options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that "we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting." (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

No smart political guidebook would be complete without a slightly self-serving political history, and Grand New Party is no exception. The history is a quick and dirty, polemical and highly selective. As one might expect, the "maternalists" of the early 20th century--elite women who lauded subordination, motherhood, and the privilege of their male breadwinners--are principal players here. They happily crusade against "wage slavery" in their enthusiastic support for New Deal programs that restricted women's employment and opposed universal benefit programs that would offer aid to anyone not in a male-dominated household. (Black maternalists were more accepting of working women, but they go without mention.) In Grand New Party, the maternalists "condemn big business" "push for reform," and "devise ideologies" in their attempts to essentialize gender differences and thus to secure for women social benefits intended for the weak and the defenseless. The maternalists are busy, active, actualized. Decades (or a few pages) later, when some women find themselves unhappy in their domestic confinement, they suddenly lose their spunk.

"The growing commercialism of 1950s America," write R&R, "made the maternalist ideal of home economics...seem increasingly outdated." The "dignity of domestic labor....became a caricature." Where are the crusading feminists, the glass-ceiling-smashers, the brave bluestockings? Suddenly, in the nascent stages of a feminist awakening, the culture is the active agent imposing itself on women, passive victims. No doubt some women did feel put upon by a culture that expected them to do more than clean house, but that's just the point: Different women have different preferences regarding family formation and, indeed, whether they'd like a family at all. Make deviance from gender norms more difficult to attain, and you limit the lived freedom of everyone who doesn't already conform to your vision.

Women are not just some niche demographic, reasonably to be expected to play their socially necessary role. Most people are women. The desire of a minority of the majority to be free from traditional social expectations cannot be treated as a peculiarity or some kind of misguided minority enthusiasm that reasonable policy can just ignore or override. That would be to fail to treat these women as if their ideas about their lives are in the way of something more important than their mere lives. That would be to deny them the respect they have coming to them in virtue of being people. The Sam's Club program threatens to deny some individuals the minimum portion of respect required by even the most austere and undemanding conception of liberal equality. I consider that a problem.