First, like my fellow discussants, I, too think GNP is excellent, provocative and (hopefully) destined to be widely discussed and never implemented. That said, while I find much to disagree with in Ross and Reihan's book, I feel strongly that the country and world would be a better place if they were running the GOP. But of course, they're not running the Republican Party. And they never will. And that brings me to my main point.

In his opening post, Ross discusses two stories about post-war American political history that he and Reihan believe are misguided. The first, prominent on the left, (and one to which I in large part subscribe) is the story that Tom Frank tells in What's The Matter with Kansas. This is a story about how America's ruling corporate interests have cynically manipulated cultural populism to sucker working class voters into voting against their own economic interests.

R&R persuasively highlight the deficiencies of this argument (or at least the argument in its most simple form). As they point out, in many cases so-called social issues (say, divorce rates) actually do connect to pocketbook issues (income volatility) and I agree that in giving these kinds of connections short-shrift Frank does miss something deep and important about the nature of America's increasingly class-stratified society.

But.

Frank's point in What's The Matter With Kansas is half about the false consciousness of white working class Republicans, and half about the nature and essence of the conservative coalition and the Republican party, which is to advance the interests of America's corporate class. That is, whatever Republican politicians say, whatever ideas are floated in the National Review or Weekly Standard, what's going on beneath the surface is a decades long project to gut, wreck or subvert the welfare state and redistribute income upwards.

Now, the center-right coalition is heterogenous and diverse (well, ideologically diverse) and it's true that there are lots of Republican voters who just don't have a lot of enthusiasm for the Goldwater-Reagan-Norquist hard right libertarian economic rhetoric. (Never mind the policies themselves) Ross and Reihan are keenly aware of this fact: They see a Republican party that doesn't consistently speak to or craft policies aimed at the working class voters that are supporting them. What gives? Because R & R are intellectuals, ones who engage in politics in good faith, they view this as an intellectual deficiency: that the wrong factions have won the debates in conservative circles.

But I think Frank is fundamentally right that this isn't an intellectual deficiency, but a structural deficiency of a movement funded by and run for the benefit of the very rich. What gives in other words is that the Republican party is run by very, very wealthy people and interests that aren't particularly interested in the plight of the working class. Is the American Gas Association going to fund a think tank to churn out reports on wage subsidies? I don't think so.

Now, I imagine R & R don't think this is accurate, but the point is that while they grapple at length with the ideas and rhetoric of the conservative movement, they spend essentially no time grappling with its financial and institutional structure: the bundlers and billionaire libertarian cranks who write most of the checks.

Conservatives point out all the time the ways in which the "interest groups" within the center-left coalition - teachers' unions, to name just one example that elicits compulsive attention - constrain the range of policy options the Democratic party can pursue. And while it can be overstated, it's true: political coalitions are constrained by the agendas of their most powerful members. But that basic truth seems largely absent from GNP.

R & R's chief virtue is their shared and genuine sense of empathy. But they are part of a political coalition structurally constituted in such a fashion that by and large rejects this inclination. They are writers who never fail to engage in debate in good faith, and they're attempting to reform a political coalition whose M.O. is bad faith.

It's gonna be a long, hard slog.