Horizon

Douthat and Salam on the Republican Party

I've mentioned before that I'm an edge-of-my-seat spectator of the Democratic Party's post-election soul searching after its last few defeats. So it's interesting to see that the Weekly Standard picked the week of the gubernatorial elections to run "The Party of Sam's Club", which predicts dissatisfaction among Republican voters and proposes a few radical policy changes. Like most such papers, the authors begin by painting a dire picture of the current situation, peppered with insults at the party's opponents: an attempt to justify why decisionmakers should pay any attention to them while reassuring them that the authors are not actually moles:

This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. And its majority is hardly unassailable: Despite facing a lackluster Democratic presidential candidate who embodied virtually all the qualities Americans loathe--elitism, aloofness, Europhilia, vacillating weakness--George W. Bush, war president and skilled campaigner, was very nearly defeated in his bid for reelection.

This is followed by a collection of suggestions (page 2, scroll down) that sound suspiciously like it was borrowed from the other party's platform. In Salam and Douthat's case, this means a form of the welfare state with some conservative window dressing: They propose "a generous baby bonus" as well as "subsidies to those who provide child care in the home, and pension credits that reflect the economic value of years spent in household labor." They write a long section on health care that stops barely short of socialized medicine, and suggest "wage subsidies" for low-income workers.

Salam and Douthat do depart from traditional American liberal economic policies in a few places, however and they're quite puzzling. They call for tighter immigration controls. They speak favorably of a national sales tax. And that baby bonus I've mentioned above is "pro-natalist" in a way that seems alien to American politics. In fact, what they seem to be arguing is that the Republican Party should model their domestic policy not on that of the Democrats, but rather on that of France.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at November 19, 2005 08:53 AM