First, a big thank you to TPMCafe, and to Kerry, Dana, and Chris for participating in the discussion this week. Second, to wrap up my "mendacity tour" in these parts, I thought I'd offer a quick response to TPM user Reece, who remarks, in the course of wondering why TPMCafe invited a vile conservative and "fucking liar" like me here to chat about my book, that "Republican policies over the past 30 years haven't helped anyone."
Kerry believes that the agenda sketched out in Grand New Party,
would privilege women who opt for the life course social conservatives have set for them: heterosexual marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Because I think the culture in which we live already pushes women into various roles as caretakers and compromisers, I'd rather the state not compound pressures toward gender conformity.
I think that the economy we live in pushes parents into various roles that make caring for loved ones difficult if not utterly impracticable, and that the privileging of market labor in the tax code exacerbates this effect. I'll also note that we're very keen on gender neutrality in the book.
Ross argues that he is not trying to bribe a narrow segment of the population to vote for the GOP. I'm not sure why "bribing" is even relevant here; partisan politics is about coalition building, GNP is a book about strategy, and at some level all such strategy will entail responding to various slices of the electoral pie. It wouldn't be a very useful book if R&R didn't try to articulate what motivates various voters and suggest that the GOP comply.
At any rate, this was never my argument. I heartily agree that the policies meant to incentivize women will be "broadly targeted in execution" rather than directed toward the few. In promoting traditional family formation and stigmatizing deviance, R&R are trying to influence the major life decisions of most people. The tax code would privilege women who opt for the life course social conservatives have set for them: heterosexual marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Because I think the culture in which we live already pushes women into various roles as caretakers and compromisers, I'd rather the state not compound pressures toward gender conformity. But since Ross places "reactionary gender norms" in scare quotes, I guess he isn't so concerned.
I want to return quickly to something Kerry wrote in her first post:
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.
Let's bracket the question of whether an expanded child tax credit and benefits for parents (of either sex) who provide child care in the home really amount to the "enforcement of reactionary gender norms," as opposed to, say, "incentivizing family structures that most parents aspire to but many can't achieve." I want to address Kerry's point about mothers who are actively engaged in mothering being a relatively small part of the female population, since it dovetails with a frequent criticism of the book - namely, that we're proposing to bribe a narrow slice of the American population, working parents, to vote more consistently for the GOP.
Ross has been parrying with our interlocutors very admirably, so I'll (try to) be brief.
Kerry suggests that the program advanced in Grand New Party is nationalist, and she is right. But my sense is that analytical nationalism is a pretty pervasive failing, from the perspective of the cosmopolitan libertarian, of pretty much the entire partisan landscape. That's not to say that this is thus excusable by Kerry's lights, and yet GNP is an intervention that at least gestures in the direction of engaging the political scene as it is, not necessarily as I'd like it to be.
My fellow discussants seem to think R&R are starry-eyed dreamers blind to the realities of the party they would reform. After all, what might a Republican administration completely freed from the straitjacket of fiscal restraint look like? Perhaps it would spend tens of billions on new education programs, or hundreds of billions on a Medicare drug benefit. Maybe it would, I don't know, introduce the highest rate of federal government growth since LBJ and increase spending at three times the rate of its Democratic-controlled predecessor.
Yes, much of Bush's profligacy has been in the service of cronyism and corporatism, while Reihan and Ross want to spend on some programs that might benefit someone other than pharmaceutical lobbyists. But as Ross points out, come November this party is going to be licking its well deserved wounds and in search of new direction. Some are going to argue that the Bush administration invited defeat by abandoning any pretense of fiscal responsibility in its foreign adventures and its christening of shiny new federal bureaucracies. R&R need only suggest that the party continue to laugh at libertarians, that a return to an imagined small-government coalition is neither feasible nor desirable, and embrace continuity with the GOP's recent past in a less corrupt form.
Chris Hayes' argument - that the GOP simply can't adopt anything like the agenda we're suggesting, because the party (and the conservative movement) is "funded by and run for the benefit of the very rich," and that isn't likely to change - echoes a debate I've been having with TNR's Noam Scheiber, which you can catch up on here and here and here. To what I've already said on the subject, I would add that Chris is right: The second half of Grand New Party tries to blend policy ideas with political advice for Republicans, but it's an uneasy marriage that doesn't always work, and one thing we don't tackle directly are the structural barriers within the GOP to implementing our various ideas. Of course Chris is right that "political coalitions are constrained by the agendas of their most powerful members," and any serious effort to reshape the Republican Party needs to reckon with that reality more completely than our book does.
Thanks to Dana and to Kerry for their thoughtful criticisms. I think Kerry's right - we are a bit breezy in the book about the costs that would be associated with the sort of pro-family tax-and-subsidy system we have in mind, so let me take the bull by the horns and say that she's correct, up to a point: The kind of conservative agenda we have in mind would almost certainly raise the costs of being a single woman (or a single man) in America, by default if not by design. If you cut taxes on families, two-parent or otherwise, you'll end up raising taxes on the unmarried over the long run, and any sort of assistance for parents who take time off to raise their kids (one policy proposal we float in the book) would end up being paid for by people who aren't raising kids. This isn't necessarily true of all the proposals we put forward, I should note: We frame issues like health care and infrastructure policy as "pro-family" because we think families tend to be disproportionately affected by the problems in the current system, but shorter commuting times, say, or portable health insurance would be achievements that singletons and seniors as well as mothers and fathers could take advantage of. But it's true of enough of our suggestions to make Kerry's critique an appropriate one to level.
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.
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.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's new book, Grand New Party, is a thoughtful and challenging call to arms for the Republican Party to alleviate the struggles facing working class Americans. As a liberal feminist, I found myself nodding in agreement with Ross and Reihan surprisingly often, whether they were arguing for making workers less reliant on cost-cutting insurers for basic health care, or for changing employment norms to encourage flextime and telecommuting. Such pro-labor and pro-parenting policies have long been integral to progressive politics. That raises the question of why exactly Ross and Reihan believe the GOP is the party best suited to representing the interests of "Sam's Club" voters, as they term working and lower-middle class whites.
But what I'd like to focus on here is a trend central to Ross and Reihan's diagnosis of what ails working class America, but that I think they unfairly malign: changing gender roles over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, and, in particular, the rise of single parent households.
Grand New Party, which I'm honored to be discussing at TPMCafe this week, is a book that spends a great deal of time arguing against two powerful narratives of recent American political history - one left-wing, and one right-wing. The left-wing narrative is most famously associated with Thomas Frank's bestselling What's The Matter With Kansas?, but it's been woven into liberal arguments about conservative succcess going back decades: In a nutshell, it holds that the migration of working-class voters - defined for our purposes as Americans without college degrees - from the Roosevelt majority into the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush coalition has been driven by the GOP's ability to essentially trick these voters into casting their ballots based on symbolic culture-war issues, rather than on their economic concerns, and that the Republican Party has used this bait-and-switch to enrich the already-rich and deliver the American working class to economic ruin. The right-wing narrative, meanwhile, holds that the rise of the modern Republican majority represented a triumph of Barry Goldwater's purist small-government message, which failed in 1964 because the country wasn't ready for it, succeeded in 1980 when the country was ready for it, and could provide the basis for an enduring GOP today if Republicans are bold enough to stand, and run, on rock-ribbed Reaganite principle.
Today at Cafe's Book Club Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are joining us for a week long discussion on their new book: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The title speaks for itself. We've got a great group of young blogger-reporters (Chris Hayes of The Nation, Kerry Howley of Reason Magazine and Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect) to discuss the future of American politics, and the politics of discourse. Buckle your seat belts.
First posts up this afternoon.
For my next post, I want to cover two challenges to populism, and why current conditions make careful populism necessary nonetheless. Even though I don't like the word very much, I use the term "elites" here; it has use.
1) "Gladiator's" challenge to populism: The traditional challenge with using popular support as the true north for a political movement is the elitist critique that "the mob might be wrong." (Mob here used differently than Sirota uses in the description of the Montana House majority). As the Roman Senator Gracchus in Gladiator offers, "I don't pretend to be a man of the people. But I do try to be a man for the people." The mob was heck bent on games-to-the-death and laziness (and probably Xbox and USWeekly if those had existed), and certain "elites" were concerned that Rome was losing both its virtue and its competitive edge. Woodrow Wilson was like Gracchus (so was Teddy Roosevelt, but he inspired like Russell Crow's Maximus; I think his first inaugural included the line"on my signal, unleash hell"). Gracchus offers a defense of elitism in the contecxt of a misled mob.
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