American Enterprise Institute

Grand New Party

July 8, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:45 p.m.	Registration
2:00	Presenters:	Ross Douthat, The Atlantic Monthly
		Reihan Salam, The Atlantic Monthly
	Discussants:	Ruy Teixeira, Center for American Progress
	Moderator:	David Frum, AEI
3:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

David Frum:  Well, let me welcome you all to the American Enterprise Institute and our discussion of a very interesting and hopeful new book, Grand New Party.  We are here with the authors, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam and with Ruy Teixeira who will offer some comments on the book after the two authors have spoken. 

It is not news to anybody in this room that the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement are in a great deal of trouble these days.  The trouble is most intense in the age cohort under 30 where there has been a true collapse of Republican Party support.  In 1984, Ronald Reagan won voters under 30 by 20 points and won first-time voters by 21 points.  I don’t think it would surprise any of us if Barack Obama achieved a similar margin of victory in that same cohort, reversing the Reagan triumph in this coming election.  So it is a great pleasure to have two representatives of that generation, two writers under 30; one, Ross is now the author of two books, Reihan is still at work, slowpoke, on his first but the book has achieved much discussion and has provoked a lot of thought and we are very proud to welcome them to the American Enterprise Institute.  They are here, they are going to speak for eight minutes apiece and then Ruy will offer some comments.  Ruy, for those of you who do not know him, is one of the most expert crunchers of political numbers in Washington D.C.  I had the experience and the pleasure of being with him on a tour of Spain sponsored by the State Department some years ago, where I would offer my theories and then he would brutally murder each one with an ugly gang of facts.  It was really a very distressing experience.

I would like just to abuse my moderator’s position here to put in a brief caution that we are a nonpartisan institution here at AEI; not a bipartisan, a nonpartisan institution.  We are committed to free-market ideas and we are not invested in any one political party.  But many of us do have our own personal off-campus, after-hours predilection for one party over the other, and by some strange coincidence that often turns out to be the Republican Party.  And so it is an institution that, to many of us, as individuals and not institutionally, is important.

And I would like to offer one last thought.  I, like many of you in this room, see many people who have grappled with these issues.  I have grappled with these issues and I’m very glad to be here with the authors because of an observation that we used when I was with Wall Street Journal.  In the olden days, before the Journal shrank its size, there were two columns on the outer side of the paper; they were called The Leaders.  And the saying among the reporters at Wall Street Journal was that if you had one fact, you had one leader.  And if you had two facts, you had two leaders.  And so in that same spirit, with this book and with my own small contribution to literature, I would say with two books, we have a movement.

And so, gentlemen, welcome to AEI.  It’s a pleasure to receive you here and Ross, you will go first.  Eight minutes please.

Ross Douthat:  Thank you so much, David, for having us, and thank you all for coming.  I think, as always, it’s a little tricky when you have co-authors to do sort of two-headed remarks but the way we are going to try and divide it up is I’m going to speak a little bit about the past, which is dull and tedious, and if you get through that, Reihan will talk a bit about the future, which is fun and exciting and so on.

I would say that we wrote this book, in part, in argument, with two narratives of American politics over the past 40 to 60 years, both of which will, I think, be familiar to most people in this room: one right wing narrative and one left wing narrative.  And the right wing narrative, I think, I would describe as Goldwater-ite triumphalism, which is a narrative of the Republican majority that has endured for all these many decades and seems to be on the rocks, which holds that the way that majority came to be is that Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964 on a sort of purist, Libertarian, small-government conservative platform and lost because he was a poor politician and the country wasn’t ready for him yet.  And then 16 years later, Ronald Reagan ran for president on roughly the same platform and won because he was a skillful politician and the country was ready for him. 

And then, the story of conservatism and its relationship to the Republican Party ever since has been one of constant straying from the true Reagan-Goldwater faith; followed by attempts to bring the Party back towards that faith and that this idea holds that basically, Republican success correlates with how closely it hews to the sort of old-time Goldwater-Reagan religion, particularly on matters of the size of government and cutting government spending and cutting taxes.

So, in argument with that narrative and we are also writing in argument with a narrative that, I think, most familiar these days from the writings of Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas.  But it’s also familiar from liberal arguments going back 30 or 40 years and it’s familiar from, in fact, the remarks Barack Obama made, famously, at a San Francisco Fundraiser about people in rural Pennsylvania clinging to their guns and religion.  And this narrative of the Republican majority holds that the Republican Party is a wicked plutocratic machine whose principal goal is to immiserate the middle and working class in American life.  And that the story of the Republican majority over the past 30-40 years has been one of Republican’s tricking, particularly working class American voters into voting against their own economic and social self-interest, leading them astray with symbolic issues, values issues, issues like abortion and gay marriage and getting them to vote for the Republican Party even as the Republican Party pushes them ever deeper into poverty through its economic policies. 

And against those two narratives, we propose -- it's fair to call it since it’s in the subtitle of the book, “A working class-centric narrative of recent American politics,” which holds that the Republican Party didn’t rise to the majority because America became ready for what Barry Goldwater was offering in 1964. 

It rose to a majority position because of the failures of liberal governance in the 1960’s and the 1970’s.  The failure of the liberal governing class to react to a new series of problems and the ability of conservatives within the Republican Party to propose creative solutions and reforms that addressed a very specific set of problems and those problems will be familiar with everyone here: problems of skyrocketing crime rates, problems of bureaucratic failure and a broken welfare system, problems of punitive tax rates on the middle and working class as well as the upper-middle class and wealthy, and of course, the problem of the Democratic Party’s approach to the Soviet Union in the 60’s but especially in the latter 1970’s. 

And this argument cuts against the Goldwater narrative, I would say, in the sense that it argues that conservatives have risen to power by proposing to reform and fix broken aspects of the post-New Deal consensus and the post-New Deal welfare state rather than by arguing in favor of abolishing it outright. 

And it cuts against the Thomas Frank argument, the common liberal argument, in the sense that it holds that the Republican majority was not built on tricking working class voters into voting against their self-interest.  It was built on finding issues where it, in fact, was completely in the self-interest of working class voters, the heart of the old Democratic majority to turn to the Republican Party. 

And so, out of this narrative comes our diagnosis of the Republican Party’s current predicament, which is roughly speaking, that it is -- again I think this is also a fairly uncontroversial assessment -- a victim of its own success in the sense that the great problems that the Conservative Movement set out to address in the 1970’s and 80’s have been ameliorated, turned aside and so forth, to a greater degree, I think, than many people would have thought possible, even ten or 15 years ago.  Crime rates have dropped by astonishing levels.  The welfare system has been reformed, perhaps imperfectly, but reformed in a way that has dramatically increased public support for it.  The Soviet Union obviously has ceased to exist and marginal tax rates have fallen dramatically from where they were in the 1970’s and 80’s when Ronald Reagan was coming to power. 

And so conservatism finds itself at a crossroads and it’s uncertain where to go next and in a position where in order to find its way forward, we would argue, it needs to find a way to address itself to the current concerns of this working class demographic which is increasingly, demographically speaking -- sorry to repeat the word “demographic” -- the heart of the Republican Party.  I know Ruy has no objection to the use of the word “demography” over and over again.

So that’s the position the GOP finds itself in today and I think that there are a lot of directions the Party can go in but for a discussion of that and I know I haven’t, I guess, even filled my eight minutes but if --

Male Voice:  [Indiscernible].

Ross Douthat:  All right, excellent.  Then I’ll turn it over to my partner in crime, Reihan Salam.

Reihan Salam:  Hi, everyone.  I’m very bad at keeping time so what I’m going to do is I’m literally going to time myself so that I don’t ramble on.

Hi, everyone.  So, one thing that is of great interest to me is something little known, mostly forgotten, political episode involving a guy none of you have heard of; his name is Arnold Schwarzenegger, a very large Austrian gentleman, governor of California, soon to be forgotten as a mostly, kind of, liberal retread.  But what’s interesting about him is after he won election in the California recall, which attracted a lot of attention, he tried to do something really amazing; that is he tried to beat back the power of public sector unions in the State of California. 

This was a big diverse state, a state in which in order to win election as a Republican, he had to go through this very unconventional route and he had a tremendous amount of charisma and popularity.  There was this thought that he was a kind of rodeo-style popular figure who could actually go over the heads of the Sacramento political establishment and connect directly with the public. 

So what happened?  He failed miserably.  Why did he fail miserably?  Because the public sector unions actually were able to use those public sector salaries in order to fuel an incredibly effective media machine that was able to beat him back.  He actually pursued a number of broadly nonpartisan reforms that were branded as far-right reforms, including such crazy far-right ideas as nonpartisan redistricting in the State of California. 

It was a really amazing display and it’s something that gives us a clear sense of the terrain that we are looking towards.  As the public sector workforce increases in size, as you see the changing shape of our economy, you see this also in the international scene –- look at center-right parties in Sweden, look at center-right parties in Britain and how they’ve reacted to this changed world in which the private sector economy is literally so much smaller that you’re not able to build a coalition solely on its basis.  You have to actually accommodate a lot of these broad left-wing reforms.  So I think that this is part of the economic background that we need to keep in mind.  We’re thinking about the future political scene and it’s something that’s not only affecting the United States, but also the world.

So looking to sort of a demographic picture, Ruy has noted here that the upper middle class is growing at a healthy clip.  By 2020, this group will likely constitute as much as a third of all American families, but the bulk of this growth will come in the ranks of professionals.  So what does that mean?  Well, generally speaking, affluent folks tend to gravitate toward Republicans unless that is they’re salary professionals, in which case, lately, they’ve been trending towards Republicans; this is not necessarily a good sign.

Male Voice:  Democrats.

Reihan Salam:  I’m sorry.  Toward Democrats.  And also, when you’re looking at the demographic composition in terms of the ethnic picture, you’re seeing a situation where you have more naturalized citizens, who are Latinos and Asian Americans, who are also trending left politically. 

So a lot of the political scene that we’ve seen since the 40’s has really been centered on the cultural and economic concerns of the white working class.  This is a group that remains big and important that is still almost half of all adults but it’s definitely shrinking in size, so we’re going to probably see a very different scenario in which, for example, Black-Latino conflict is a much bigger part of the political scene.  It’s going to be very confusing in a lot of ways and it’s also going to lead to a real change in the way the white working class sees itself.

So when you’re looking at the kind of political self-conception, the white working class and particularly of conservatives, I think you see a lot of different possible trajectories.  These can co-exist but they’re also clearly in tension and I want to talk about three of them.

One possibility is that the white working class will embrace an ethno-nationalist political style, most commonly associated with minority groups; an assertion of groupness and group rights that places a subnational allegiance ahead of a broader patriotism.  The immigration debate, for example, has been mainly centered on the insistence that we not reward lawbreakers.  It is first and foremost the concern about public order.  Relatively few Americans exercised by illegal immigration have thought of the issue in terms of some kind of demographic struggle.  A small minority did however.  They managed to push the rhetoric of at least some Republicans in their direction and as a number of Republicans in the Southwest discovered, this did not work to their advantage politically.  But that doesn’t mean we won’t see more strident ethnic appeals. 

To some extent, conservatives won the multiculturalism wars of the 1990’s.  Barack Obama, for example, has very explicitly tied himself to melting pot ideology as opposed to multicultural ideology; that’s very promising.  And yet, it’s possible that something like the multiculturalism wars will come back but not a struggle over English departments and tenured faculty but a real struggle over resources.  Nationalism has always been a crucial part of Republican success but it has generally been an inclusive anti-authoritarian, non-ethnic or post-ethnic nationalism that celebrates America’s relative openness and cultural creativity.  A more classic ethnic nationalism might make it difficult to grow the Republican coalition.

Another alternative is a more robust evangelical or ecumenically Christian populism.  Much attention has been paid to the rise of the so-called Cosmopolitan Evangelicals, a putatively new breed of evangelicals concerned with environmentalism, global poverty, prison reform and other causes traditionally associated with the left, married to an inclusive, culturally-sensitive traditionalism.  But then you also have populist evangelicals, many of them white working class, who tend to be more downscale than their cosmopolitan counterparts.  Both groups have been gravitating in a more statist direction.  You know, whether it’s the logic of compassion that attracts them or kind of Huckabee politics which marries, not always coherently, social democracy, anti-elitism, social engineering, and a quasi-agrarian sensibility and emphasis on the local over the global.

There is an obvious sense in which those strands are in tension but it does suggest that the Republicans are going to have something that they haven’t had since the Rockefeller era, namely a left wing.  A left wing that has, again, a lot of very strange beliefs and a left wing that has a cultural style that’s repellant to a lot of Americans that it’s not directly addressed to.

Now that you have a small government piece, you have a lot of folks like Brink Lindsey who are imagining a “liberaltarian” coalition, the idea of making bridges toward the political left on the basis of their shared social liberalism or using new technological tools in order to build single-issue activism around spending, for example, or particular egregious abuses.  This is an interesting possibility that represents a grave danger.

Now, what we talk about in our book is a fourth alternative which is something that is actually going to try to keep the conservative coalition broadly together by talking about an alternative to regulation, by seeking greater transparency in government spending.  There is a perception that what we want to do is reconcile conservatives to government, but that’s not quite it.  The mission is actually to reconcile pro-market policies with a lot of the middle class anxieties and to do this in a way that’s actually not subtracting from, but building a more inclusive, open-ended coalition, just as the Reagan coalition was something that didn’t repel Americans but actually convinced them that a growing, flourishing market economy is something in which we all have a strong interest.  I’m not sure how I’m doing on time right now.  Here we go.

Male Voice:  [indiscernible]

Reihan Salam:  Okay, great.  I was actually very afraid that I would run out of time so --

Republicans and the future.  What’s next?  Well, one issue that we talked about a lot is this idea of wage subsidies.  Why are wage subsidies attractive to us?  I think it relates to this concept of core of the economics versus transparent economics.  When you look at the American welfare state, it’s actually pretty darn big when you factor in the tax subsidy state and that’s something that conservatives don’t pay enough attention to.  We don’t pay attention to the ways in which we are subsidizing the rich and not the poor.  So I think that actually there is a way in which a rigorous application of market-oriented principles and of transparency is something that actually is going to meet the needs of reviving and modernizing the welfare state, so this is something that can really unite all of these different strands and constituencies.  Thanks.

David Frum:  Thank you.  Thank you for your marvelous punctuality.  Both authors are very much to be commended.  And so we turn now to Ruy Teixeira to offer his comments on the presentations by our authors.

Ruy Teixeira:  Okay. [Audio glitch] to be here back at AEI.  I was just here in February for my big conference on, yes, demographics, but it’s better to be back here, talking about this fabulous book by my friends, Ross and Reihan, and I really mean it, it’s a pleasure to be at AEI.  I’m one of the few liberals I know, I guess, who really tends to like AEI--I mean, like actively like them. 

In fact, it was funny; I was walking into the building today, just when I was walking in, I ran into liberal friend of mine and he said, “Do you know that’s AEI right there?”  And I said, “Yes, I’m going in.  I’m giving a talk.”  He was a little surprised but I believe in the ecumenical exchange of ideas across the political spectrum and that’s exactly what we’re doing here today and that’s great.  I first ran into Ross and Reihan through their article on the Party Sam’s Club, The Party of Sam’s Club or whatever you call that big article in the Weekly Standard.  And it might have been a little op-ed by you beforehand in the L.A. Times. 

And I was very impressed because I just thought, this is amazing.  These guys really get it.  This is just not ideology.  They’re actually looking at the structure of their electoral coalition.  They’re taking seriously the structure of that coalition, what it takes to keep it together.  They’re looking at the numbers.  And this is what you might call reality-based conservatism.  I was very impressed.  I thought, “These guys are really on to something and who knows, maybe they’ll even write a book about it.” And they did.  And I like this book quite a bit. 

For one thing, it’s actually pretty well written which is not necessarily always the case with books about politics and political strategy.  It’s really pretty easy read so everybody’s got to go out there and get it.  They’re not hawking their book but I’ll do it.  I’m shameless.  Everybody should get a copy and I think they’ll enjoy reading it, and they should get a copy of David Frum’s book, too, because it’s also great.  In fact, these two books are probably the two -- if I was a Republican, these are the two books I would have wanted to write.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad from your perspective.

Male Voice:  Can we strike that from the record?

Ruy Teixeira:  Just strike that from the record.

Male Voice:  He really has a strange view of respect.

Ruy Teixeira:  But let me tell you some of the things I like about the book and there are a lot of things I like but here are some things that stick out.  One thing obviously is that they take the question of the white working class very, very seriously and this is something I’ve been writing and talking and arguing about for a lot of years and the numbers just couldn’t be clearer and they take very seriously the idea that the Republican Party is dependent -- which it is –- on a super majority of the white working class vote for its current coalition.  They can’t be successful without it.  In fact, really they are the Party of the white working class.  And that’s not something that Republicans necessarily ID themselves as being, but it’s really, it’s pretty central to where they are today.  So Ross and Reihan take focus on that very aggressively, very carefully and they try to think about what it means and what that says about strategy. 

Now, one thing they do talk about in the book, which I also like -- it’s very judicious, mostly correct, I think – is the discussion of what the economic problems and perhaps more importantly, anxieties of the white working class and the typical median voter, is in the United States.  I mean as some conservatives tend to wave their hands and say that this really isn’t such big deal, you look at this indicator, it’s not so bad, et cetera, et cetera, but Ross and Reihan, to their credit, take all these stuff quite seriously. 

And another thing they take seriously that I like and that a lot of liberals don’t -- and I think it’s a real problem -- is they recognize the connection between economic problems and social problems; that if we look at the question of family formation, family stability, and things like that, there’s a lot of relationship, and it’s growing now, between class and sort of being in constant stable family structure.  So you have this peculiar situation where the people who are most liberal about family values and family structure tend to be the people who benefit the most from the traditional family structure, and conversely, the people who are perhaps more conservative are in danger of having the whole thing fall apart on them.  That’s a very interesting and very important part of today’s politics and you can’t really understand, I think, the views and values of the white working class without taking that into account.

And the final thing I like about how they treat the white working class is that they spend some time at various points in the book talking about those with “some college.”  The median adult in this country has at least some college, 54 percent have at least some college, this including the people with a college degree.  So arguably that’s the typical American now.  They’re not just a high-school graduate, they have some college.  And these are the sort of upwardly mobile aspirational parts of the working class and the white working class.  And to their credit, they talk some about that and offer some thoughts on that, and one of these days, I’m going to get around to writing a report about those with some college, it’s because I don’t think anybody has really done it but they’re not typically broken out and looked at as closely as they should.  They’re actually the only part of the white working class that’s growing and they deserve some attention.  In fact, you can show that if the Democrats are able to shave Republican margins pretty dramatically, pretty substantially among whites with some college, I mean, it’s going to be very, very difficult for the Republicans to maintain their electoral coalition so there’s a lot at stake there going forward. 

I also very much like the solution set that they provide in their book.  They offer a lot of bold and interesting ideas that I think go some way toward integrating fundamental conservative principles with actually addressing these economic problems that they sketch in the book, that these are real big problems and maybe they need real big solutions.  But from their standpoint and rightly so, they should be solutions that are based on basic conservative principles of how to run government-run programs and how to -- the kind of lives people should lead and that gets them way beyond just arguing for cutting taxes and shrinking government and there’s the end of it, that there’s no more need to be said.  Well, there’s a lot more that needs to be said, and they say it in this book. 

And I don’t necessarily agree with all of these solutions or even most of them but at least they’re plausible to me, they’re interesting.  We could debate about this stuff.  Who knows, they might even be right about some of this stuff.  But at least it’s addressing the actual problem with an actual possible solution and really focusing in on the necessity, the necessity of having those kinds of programs because unless you can reach these kinds of voters with those kinds of solutions, the future of the Republican Party is pretty bleak, I think, arguably, at least for a while. 

And in the blurb we provided, John Judis and I provided for this book, we said, this is a great book, blah, blah, blah.  We hope no one in the Republican Party reads it because it might get them back on the right track.  And I would slightly revise that by saying, well, I think people should go ahead and read it.  I think it would be great if the Republican Party picked up on a lot of these ideas, started debating them.  I think it would be good for them.  I think it would be good for the country.  So slightly, that was more just to sell books.  The co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority saying, Republicans, we hope Republicans don’t read this book, but I actually hope you do.  So, just to clarify that.

A couple of questions, I’m running out of time here.  The future, Reihan talked about the future.  Well, here’s some sort of pesky demographic facts about the future which is –- as Reihan kind of mentioned, the white working class is shrinking.  I mean, the Republican Party is dependent on a super majority of white working class votes, let’s say they need a 20-point margin just to kind of get through the door in terms of a majority coalition but the white working class is continuing to shrink and what that means is that you need greater and greater super majorities, all else equal, of this group to keep their coalition together.  So right now, it may be 20 points.  By the year 2020, sometime in the 2020’s, maybe it’ll be like 40 points, maybe you’ll need 70 percent of the white working class vote; that’s pretty tough.  So I don’t know if they quite addressed that as much as they might’ve in their book.

And of course, the second problem, and this was raised by Mark Schmitt in his review or sort of review essay about his book, Problems in the Republican Party, is how is this going to happen?  Who are the Republicans going to pick up on this?  At least right now, looking at, to adapt the phrase I used in graduate school, we used to talk about socialism then there was actually existing socialism, like those pesky socialist countries that really weren’t so great, even if we were for socialism.  So what about the actually existing Republican Party?  How is the actually existing Republican Party going to pick up and really start moving these ideas forward?  It’s a little hard to see how that works at this point.  The McCain campaign is, I would say, not terribly encouraging on this score, but perhaps they have a few things up their sleeve they can enlighten us about.

So I say, let the debate begin about how to reach the working class, and in particular, how to reach the white working class.  This is a fabulous contribution.  I think it’s the right debate to have.  It’s the right debate to have for the Republican Party.  Heck, it’s the right debate to have for the Democratic Party too because they need, let’s say, 45 percent of the ten-point deficit.  Its fine for the Democratic Party but they have to figure out how to get that and keep that, so it’s a debate they need to have and it’s a debate that whole country need to have because the fate of the white working class and voters like that is intimately bound up with what kind of a country we’re going to have in the next ten or 20 years.  And arguably, the party that solves that problem is going to be the party that will actually be able to achieve, something like long-term dominance.  So let’s hope this book does kick off that debate.  Again, I salute them for their tremendous contribution and back to David.

David Frum:  Thank you.  Thank you, Ruy.  I would like to thank the panelists for complying with the brutal edicts on time and the purpose of those edicts was to free the maximum amount of time for our audience to pose questions and I see we have a very distinguished audience.  I’m going to invite the first question to be from, I think the member of the audience who probably has come the farthest in order to be here and that is my friend, Matt Miller, who is associated with the Center for American Progress and is the author of a book called The Two Percent Solution and working now on a new book on many of these same issues.  Matt, is there something you’d like to contribute?

Matthew Miller:  Thanks, David, and congratulations guys.  I thought it was a great book.  I read it on my Kindle which I also would put a plug in for because these Kindles are great.

Here’s my -- I guess the thing I’m confused about -- and I should say hi to Ruy by the way, I thought I was the only liberal who actually frequented AEI from time to time.

Ruy Teixeira:  No, there’re two of us, maybe more.

Matthew Miller:  I guess my confusion is where the ideological debate is or why you think of yourselves as conservatives?  Because as someone who identifies -- I consider myself an economically rational Democrat and I am for your $100-billion-a-year wage subsidies.  I’m for your universal health coverage delivered through private plans in some reformed market.  I’m for raising the amount of per pupil dollars targeted toward poor kids and love the weighted average funding idea that you have.  And so, what’s so encouraging to me, I guess and this is in Ruy’s spirit is that this is the first attempt apart from David Frum’s own fine book –- to put an advertisement on that -- but I guess I see you all trying to grapple with problems and ways that put resources against them in ways that are equal to the need and it would tie market-friendly policies toward a kind of common sense set of goals for ordinary Americans, and I’m just curious why it’s -- I'm curious how you think of your own ideology in that regard or why isn’t this something that we can all agree on?

Reihan Salam:  Well, it’s a good question and I think that when you’re looking at the coalitions that make up the Democratic Party right now and when you look at our social conservatism, I think there are a lot of tensions. 

For example, one of the parts of the book, that I think is a pretty important one, is when we talk about working women and the struggles they face, but also the struggles faced by parents who choose to stay at home.  I think that there is an ideological belief that there is one right way to be an adult and in particular to be woman, there is a very fraught debate around that.  And, as you see, a Democratic Party that relies very heavily on, for example, unmarried women and their votes and their dollars, I think that it’s very reluctant to acknowledge the contributions made by stay-at-home mothers, because again, there is this struggle over kind of totems and symbols and what we consider to be valuable and worthwhile.  And so we have this kind of status quo where we really do value tools that actually are transitioning folks into the workplace as quickly as possible or keeping them there continuously so when we subsidize childcare, we’re subsidizing childcare for those who are working outside the home but we’re not actually providing any assistance for, for example, mothers who are staying home with young children. 

So I think that’s one way in which you have the orientation of social conservatives that is going to be in tension with ideological liberalism.  And there are a lot of other examples like that.  When you’re talking about the Weighted Student Formula -- I grew up in New York City and went to public schools my whole life -- there has been a massive upsurge of hostility particularly within the schools and among teacher unions against that proposal and I think that it’s something that conservatives are going to be more comfortable with more broadly.  These are very, kind of, small-bore ways in which that’s true but perhaps, Ross, if you want to give a broader gloss on that?

Ross Douthat:  Well, I mean, I don’t think that there’s any question that there are –- I think that Reihan and I both see ourselves to a certain extent in -- and this goes back to my earlier point about, sort of, the Goldwater tradition versus what you might call the neoconservative tradition in American politics and I think that both of us see ourselves self-consciously more in the neoconservative tradition which, almost by definition, is going to have more in common with neoliberals like yourself, Matt.  I don’t know if you’d call yourself a neoliberal these days but you know, for the sake of argument, we’ll use the term.  There are going to be overlaps between ideas that people on the center-left have and I think that that’s not a bad thing for American politics.  And I think if you look back at what conservatives considered their greatest reformist achievement in domestic politics was, the welfare reform of the early 1990’s, it was something that happened in partnership with neoliberalism and I think that there are a bunch of areas where that is a plausible thing that one can imagine happening again. 

But I also think -- I mean, I would agree with Reihan, I think that if you take the issue of education for instance, if you look at the Democratic Party, I think many, many kinds of efforts at school reforms including school vouchers and including the kinds of, sort of, trying to create a free market within the existing bureaucracy; those ideas are just because of coalition politics and for ideological reasons, a better fit for the Republican Party than for the Democratic Party.

And I think we also, frankly, we have some fairly right-wing views in the book as well.  I think that both Reihan and I are deeply, deeply skeptical of the conventional liberal consensus on climate change and global warming legislation.  And I think that a large portion of our agenda which we haven’t really talked about here but it involves a sense of defending the suburban way of life specifically against I think trends in the Democratic Party that are effectively hostile to it.  So it is something of an ideological mixed bag at times, but I think the broad orientation of our politics is more conservative, more center-right than center-left.

I would also add, too, and I started out by talking about Thomas Frank and the What’s the Matter with Kansas argument, I think if you look at where the Democratic Party is today and where a lot of the energy is in the Democratic Party, it isn’t in the incremental meliorist-neoliberal tradition.  It’s in people who think -- and Ruy mentioned in our book that it’s in people who think that America and specifically the American working class is really in a terrible way.  And Ruy praised us for acknowledging the economic struggles of the American working class more than many conservatives do and I accept the praise but I would also say that we spend a lot of time in the book pushing back against what I think is a very dominant idea in liberal circles that the working class has been forced into poverty, it’s been immiserated.  And you know, if you listen to Barack Obama’s rhetoric and -- less so now that we’ve entered the general election season, but there is an underlying sense of doom to liberal rhetoric on the economy and on the working class that I think is largely absent from our proposals.

David Frum:  Thank you both.  No one is asking you why you’re not a conservative so I’ll take more questions -- here's what I would like to do to maximize our opportunities.  I’m going to take now questions in groups of three’s and we’ll collect them all and then shoot down the panel and allow each of you to pick and choose which portions, if any, of those questions you would like to answer.  So let me call for a show of hands.  Sir, in the green shirt in the back of the room and you sir, and if you would briefly identify yourself, give the institutional affiliation if that seems relevant.

Matthew Fernholz:  I’m Matt Fernholz with Marquette University Law School.  I was just curious with the authors if you think there’s any way for the Republican Party to make inroads or hold on to the gains they’ve made in the Hispanic community short of adopting McCain Comprehensive Immigration Reform, if there’s any other way to maintain the gains that George Bush had in 2004 or if McCain’s proposal really is the only thing the Republicans have right now?

Ken Wasch:  My name is Ken Wasch.  I’m with the Software & Information Industry Association.  I wanted to get a -- obviously we haven’t had an opportunity to read the book yet, but I would like you to focus for a moment on religious conservatism and sort of the Mike Huckabee –- you touched on it briefly -- the Huckabee effect and the evangelical Christians and the importance of being correct on abortions, still, here in the 21st century to the exclusion of consideration of economic conservative issues.

Gary Mitchell:  Thanks.  I’m Gary Mitchell from the Metro Report.  I haven’t read the book.  All I know about it is what I’ve heard this afternoon and David Brooks talked about it a short while ago.  My question is do you deal with foreign policy and national security issues, because it strikes me that that’s where the Republican Party is in its deepest pall today for pretty obvious reasons.  So I’m interested to know (a) whether you deal with it and what it is you think you have to say that  -- sorry it’s a new path there --

David Frum:  Okay.  Gentlemen, go down the line.

Ross Douthat:  Should I start with immigration Reihan?

Reihan Salam:  Actually, do you want to start with the religious conservative thing?

Ross Douthat:  Sure.  I’ll take the question about religious conservatives.  I mean, I think that it should come as no surprise given the arguments in our book that we –- or at least I, maybe more so than Reihan, looked somewhat favorably, initially, on Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign.  I think that he struck some interesting notes that are potentially valuable for the Republican Party. 

Overall though, I think what the Huckabee campaign shows -- the Huckabee campaign was a campaign that struck some notes but had no ideas.  Mike Huckabee wanted to talk about the economic struggles of the working class, but he wanted to talk about them in the context of the fair tax and that was about it.  And at the same time, I think what Huckabee represented was a sort of overly sectarian -- and you saw this obviously in the back-and-forths with Mitt Romney but I think more broadly and this goes to Reihan’s point about the various perils facing the Republican Party that there is a sense in which -- the Republican Party has to remain and should remain a socially conservative party and it has to remain and should remain a party that is the home of religious conservatives.  It cannot be perceived as a party of sort of Southern Protestant religiosity and nothing else.  And I actually think George W. Bush, in spite of being identified, especially in the more liberal precincts of the press, as a sort of evangelical hate figure and so on, broadly speaking did a good job of sort of broadening, having a sort of ecumenical religiosity rather than a sectarian religiosity at the heart of a lot of his messages.  Mike Huckabee I think had a more sectarian approach. 

I would also say that one of, I think, the lessons of the Bush administration and I think you can see it in the language of, specifically of compassionate conservatism is the perils of what you might call the sort of new model evangelical approach to poverty where you start out and you say, “Look, we’re evangelicals but we want to broaden our ambit beyond abortion and gay marriage to include economic issues.”  And obviously I think that that’s a good thing and an important thing for the GOP.  But I think what tends to happen is, and what you saw happen in the Bush administration is sort of a rush straight to the language of compassion, straight to the language of uplifting the poor.  And I think that, in fact, the role of a conservative Party in a welfare state society is and has to be as the champion of what you might call respect conservatism rather than compassionate conservatism, a conservatism that emphasizes playing by the rules, that emphasizes the interest of the middle class taxpayer, the working class taxpayer and so on.  And that for the Republican Party under the influence of religiosity and general evangelical religiosity, specifically to become a party that’s primarily concerned with the combination of fighting abortion and AIDS in Africa, and, I should say, I supported the President’s AIDS in Africa initiative, but that’s not the basis for an enduring conservative politics in America.

Reihan Salam:  To the question about Latinos and immigration reform, I think it’s a very, very interesting and thorny question because I actually think it’s a much bigger question about the future shape of Latinos in this country and how they’re going to fit into our politics because this is a truly large group and it’s interesting to see whether or not it’s going to take the direction of a kind of a racialized group that’s living on the margins of a culture where you have this survival of -- the idea of a kind of ethno-linguistic community that’s very distinct or if you’re going to have assimilation and intermarriage that’s going to change the shape of this community.  When you look at the Latino community, you have a large number who identify as another group, as another race and who actually are very persistent to the fact that the census doesn’t categorize them as such.  You have kind of core of that maybe a tenth of the group; Ruy would actually know a lot more about this.  And then you have others who, for example, are not necessarily in areas that are densely concentrated, who have, oftentimes, very different political picture.  Or if you look at Bush’s re-election efforts in 2004, one of the groups that he really targeted, Hispanic evangelicals; about 15 percent of the Latino population were at large and a group that’s actually growing pretty quickly.  And when you look at Latino evangelicals and about how they’ve assimilated and also their tendency toward small-scale entrepreneurship, et cetera, it does appear to be a group with a lot of distinctive qualities. 

So it’ll be interesting to see if that group continues to grow.  I do think that the issue of whether or not Republicans are going to win over Latinos has a lot to do with immigration; sure, but it’s a much, much bigger issue than that because I think that, for example, is the open borders issue really about this demographic struggle of one group contending with another group?  Or, is it really about a law enforcement issue, in the sense that just as with welfare reform, a lot of people in the left believe that welfare reform was animated by real racial animus toward a particular group. 

I don’t think that was true at all and I think that conservatives generally don’t believe that to be true for the good reason that it really was about a kind of egalitarianism.  It was this idea that if people who are working class, people who are in middle class are working hard, playing by the rules, et cetera, you expect the government to -- as in the respect conservatism framework, to actually help you along in that process, to not retard your process, to not be overly burdensome. 

Similarly, when you’re looking at the immigration picture, I mean, the idea that there are some people who are being rewarded for lawbreaking is a very powerful and distasteful idea.  The trouble is that in our politics, immigration has come to be identified for Latinos as kind of the primary issue in which they engage politically.  And certainly that’s been the case of a lot of folks within the official Latino leadership.  But I think that there is a way to kind of to sort of thread the needle, so to speak, so that you’re talking about sort of reducing lawbreaking, you’re talking about border enforcement in a way that recognizes that Mexico has made tremendous contributions, that many Americans have their heritage in that country and that country is absolutely not our enemy and that there’s a way to deepen our partnership with that country in a way that’s going to meet a lot of the expectations of conservatives in terms of reducing immigration levels.  I think that that’s the kind of language that’s more constructive, that’s more pragmatic that’s going to help defang that. 

But then, the real question is, are we going to see a white working class that merges with the Latino working class and that is just more susceptible to a lot of conservative political appeals, I think that’s a distinct possibility.  But on the other hand, I know there are a lot of people in the Obama campaign are optimistic about that possibility too, namely that Latinos are actually, primarily, sort of, concerned about their economic picture which means that actually a lot of the Latino distaste or distrust to Barack Obama during the primaries will melt away in the general election.  So again, this presents a real opportunity for either Democrats or Republicans and I would insist that it’s not exclusively about immigration.

David Frum:  Ruy, do you want to add something?

Ruy Teixeira:  Well, sure.  And in fact, a lot of that apparent or hypothesized distrust of Barack Obama in the part of Latinos from the primary process already seems to have melted away.  The latest polling data shows Obama running way, way ahead of John McCain like in the 30-point, 35-point range.  So, he’s doing very well already so the concept that that would be a big barrier doesn’t seem to be true.  And in general, I think it is a big challenge for the GOP dealing with this burgeoning Hispanic population and in particular, with younger Hispanics who are -- their first experiences with politics have been sort of around some of these various iterations in the immigration reform debate and it hasn’t played well at all among Latinos in general, and in particular, among younger Latinos who are getting, sort of, imprinted with this feeling like the GOP as the anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic party; that’s not good for them.

Also, the cohort issue rears its head too, looking at younger folks who are going to be replacing all their voters among the ranks of religious conservatives.  I mean, religious conservatives are becoming less conservative at the younger end.  There have been a lot of articles and they’re basically correct about some of the shifting views among younger evangelicals.  And in general, if you look at the distribution of religious preferences, the fastest growing element of the religious population are those people who are essentially unaffiliated.  So these differences among cohorts and the cohort replacement phenomenon that’s going on is going to really diminish the importance of a lot of issues that the GOP has built its majority on, the things sort of in and around conventional culture wars kinds of stuff and actually to bring it back to their book really underscore the necessity of some of these working class economic issues and addressing them.

Ross Douthat:  Wait, we had the question about foreign policy.  I mean, the answer to that is it can be quick because we actually do not really address foreign policy in the book.  We address it in the context of the history of the Republican majority but hardly at all in the section of the book that deals with prescriptions and part of that is that Reihan and I aren’t -- you write a book together and we aren’t quite as perfectly simpatico probably on foreign policy as we are in domestic policy.  The other reason is, and I completely agree with your point that foreign policy is a huge issue at the root of the current Republican crisis.  But when we started writing the book, it was our impression that, true as that is, there has been no shortage of ink spilled about foreign policy and Republican foreign policy specifically over the past -- well, since the 9/11, certainly, and that there was something of great value to be done in writing a book specifically about domestic policy.  But I think that it’s absolutely true and this is a point David has made in his criticism of the book, that no account of how the working class behaves in American politics is absolutely complete without an account of foreign policy. 

Now I think this dovetails too with the conversation about Hispanics to the points that Ruy and Reihan have made, I would add that it’s clear that Republicans can lose Hispanics on the immigration issue but they can win them and I think that if you look at how well Bush performed among Hispanics in 2004, I think it had a lot more to do with Bush neutralizing the immigration issue rather than winning them on that issue and then actually winning them on the issue that he won white working class voters on in ‘04 which is to say, national security.  So I think that’s a good example of why national security is important and why it is a missing piece that isn’t in our argument.

David Frum:  Let me call on Fred Barnes, gentleman in the front row here and you sir.

Fred Barnes:  I’m Fred Barnes with the Weekly Standard.  My question is this, to follow up on what Ruy noted and the question is this: who among Republicans, among Republican leaders has either embraced your policies or do you hope might?  I can’t think of anybody right off-hand.

Bruce Smith:  Bruce Smith, retired from Brookings and Columbia University, now hanging my head at George Mason.  I’m a Conservative of Staz [phonetic] and Eisenhower and my neighbor, Bill Coleman, here at Variety and I congratulate our colleagues, join the praise -- I haven’t read the book yet myself, looking forward to it.

What gives me a slight unease is this solution section.  This, it seems to me, is not Republican strength or conservative strength.  I don’t know what a wage subsidy is but I’m really indubious about the idea of a brand new healthcare plan before we get cost under control then launch into new healthcare plan.  All of these things are really rather risky.  I think the Republican strength and our Republican problem is that we have failed in really what the core notion of our Party is, that we manage well instead of [inaudible] strongly patriotic but not reckless and foolish that we balance the books, and that we don’t go off on some grand new schemes. 

I don’t think grand new schemes of any sort are really a very good Republican solution.  Even immigration, very key to the country and we have to come to grips with it, I think should be broken up in pieces, to the extent that we offer the chance for Hispanics to join the American dream, to work hard, to make it, to establish some little thing and not have it taken away from you by a reckless government.  I think [inaudible] this is very [inaudible].  It seems to me, I’m a little nervous about pushing too many grand schemes.

Arnold Kling:  My name is Arnold Kling.  I describe myself as having no fixed address and I think there have been here a lot of -- sort of, people from the center patting themselves on the back.  I’m not from the center and so I’m not so happy.  I think -- a couple, I think substantively, I think what the center is going to produce is kind of ridiculous deficits, which we already have, even at county and state levels, unfunded pensions and the biggest problem we have in the country is unfunded Medicare liabilities and I think that the center is just going to give us more of that.

But anyway, politically, my question is, is the center a shrinking market just the way the white middle class is a shrinking market?  If you look at young people in general, are they sort of more varied?  Are there going to be more people like me who are strongly dissatisfied with the center, not necessarily agreeing with me, some may be completely on the other side of the spectrum?

Ross Douthat:  I’ll take the question about Republican politicians first.  I think the answer is there is certainly no specific Republican politician who has adopted anything close to our litany of ideas although I think, one way to look at our project is it’s a project for a diverse range of Republicans from a Mike Huckabee to a Tim Pawlenti who actually coined the term Party of Sam’s Club to a Sarah Palan in Alaska to a Bobby Jindahl. 

We are trying to create a pool of ideas for those Republicans to draw on.  I think there are a large number of Republican politicians who understand that the Party is in some trouble, or more than a little trouble, but I think the temptation for Republicans who have that insight is to adopt the kind of me-too-ism where the answer to the Republican Party’s problems is simply to take the Democrats best ideas and promise to do them but do them a little more cheaply and with lower taxes and so on.  And I think that that’s a temptation you see in the McCain campaign.  I think you see it specifically in the issue of global warming where the McCain campaign had the correct understanding that the Republican line on global warming, the idea that we simply deny it’s happening and deny it’s a problem is politically and scientifically untenable.  But then they leap straight from that to adopting a sort of less effective version of the Democrat’s plan. 

And so, I think having made some criticisms of Goldwaterism, I would say here that what Republicans need to be is a choice, not an echo, and Republican politicians who want a way forward need a set of ideas that contrast from the Democrats, for their own sake, for the health of the country and so on.  You want to take that?

Reihan Salam:  Sure.  I actually think that, to Bruce Smith’s question, it’s interesting because “grand new schemes” was actually our original title and we decided that scheme sounded a little too devious.  I was actually waxing my mustache and I thought to myself, “Grand new schemes might not sell as many books.”  I think that to your question, I actually absolutely agree.  In fact our whole agenda is to have a more open-ended pragmatic conversation about a lot of problems facing the country.  And so the idea is, when we’re talking about the different slices of the pie, the way that the welfare state in this country works, it’s actually not just what we say it is.  It also includes these tax expenditures.  It includes this series of burdens that firms are dealing with.  For example, when you think about GM versus Toyota and the kind of legacy costs they’re dealing with.  I mean, there are a lot of firms in this country that are really crying out, not for handouts or not for subsidies necessarily although that certainly does happen, but they’re crying out for some kind of more rational system, or rational scheme if you will, that will allow them to actually flourish and survive and innovate. 

And I think that what we want is to build a constituency for a growing, open, creative economy.  One thing you’ll never find us do is, for example, criticizing free trade.  Why?  Because free trade is something that cures the cancer of influence peddling in Washington.  It’s something that -- protection is a way of actually benefitting some at the expense of others.  This is a very powerful, conservative idea and it’s something that we believe is very important.  So, again, how do you build and grow a constituency for that?  Well, you don’t say, “Well, suck it up,” or “Hey, the economy is actually great, guys.”  You say it by saying, “Okay, here are some problems that you have and here’s how we’re going to tackle them through ways that are actually going to build markets, that are actually going to introduce more competition and more transparency into economic life.

Now as to Arnold Kling’s excellent question about the center, I think that the center can mean anything you want it to mean.  You know, there is this -- Michael Lind introduced that you had the radical center versus the moderate middle and things that don’t necessarily really connect with the voters in any way.  Is it really just about branding?  Something like that.  And I think that really, it’s about looking to what are the core conservative and libertarian principles.  What do we really want?  What we want is a growing, flourishing economy.  What we want is more competition.  What we want is more transparency.  And the way to get there is potentially through certain kinds of activism. 

Andrei Shleifer, one of my favorite economists wrote a wonderful book with Robert Vishny called The Grabbing Hand.  And he was saying in The Grabbing Hand, well, there’s an invisible hand model and there’s a helping hand model.  The helping hand model is someone like a Joe Stiglitz saying that these bureaucrats have great ideas and they just want to help people and if they put this program in place, it’s going to be magical.  And then the invisible hand idea is you just retreat and everything is going to work. 

The grabbing hand model is that, hey look, the state, there are people within the state, bureaucrats who have interests and so sometimes you need to pursue activist policies if you’re going to actually frame, if you’re going to build a more market-oriented, open society.  Those activist policies are things that are actually counteracting tendencies that exist within the state and so you actually need to be a little bit more creative in terms of your institution building, and that’s the broad framework of this book.

David Frum:  Ruy, do you want to say --

Ruy Teixeira:  Well, that’s not to deny though, there is some risk attached to departing from tradition, as it were and certainly these kinds of schemes would, it would be striking out in a different direction.  My belief is I don’t think there’s much choice about it.  I think, no risk, no reward, and you look at where the voters in center are; by definition, there is a center.  You take the voters’ views and you distribute them across.  There is a center there somewhere, and I think where the center is, is it’s the kind of voters who are looking for solutions to these ongoing problems Ross and Reihan described.  But don’t really think the GOP’s handle on them at this time, and based on recent practice is very effective.  So you have to be able to reach the voters and the only way to reach them, I think, is with some of these risky schemes, that’s the way is.

Ross Douthat:  I’m sorry, David.  I know I’m breaking the rule.  I would just add, I think, to Arnold’s point and to the general point about centrists back-patting.  I think that if the Republican Party actually adopted some set of ideas and one thing we don’t talk as much about in the book is sort of the political rhetoric that would surround them, but part of what we’re talking about is sort of a broader social conservatism.  And I think that social conservatism is the aspect of the Republican Party that historically has received the most, let’s say, unfavorable attention in the liberal press.  And I think at least some of the centrist’s back-patting would actually disappear very quickly and I think Jonah Goldberg may be in the back of the room but speaking of -- I think, the term fascist could actually be thrown around fairly quickly about -- from a sort of left wing perspective on our ideas if a Republican Party -- maybe I shouldn’t have said that, and the cameras are rolling.  Nobody listen to me, it’s a--

David Frum:  I wonder if I could abuse the moderator’s privilege to say something --

Ross Douthat:  Please do.  My God.

David Frum:  -- specifically to Fred Barnes’ very important point.  One of the real tragedies of the 2008 Election, if you are a Republican, is the Republican Party fielded this year, one of the most impressive slates of candidates the Republicans have fielded, maybe since the 1960s.  And it was really remarkable to see how as the campaign progressed, somebody like Rudy Giuliani, my candidate, who comes from Queens, could have been an authentic voice of a kind of a really middle American politics; Mitt Romney with a fabulous record as a businessman and a lot of innovative ideas as a governor; and John McCain, the maverick’s maverick, how each of them became a sort of a reiteration of conservatism as we’ve known it since 1972, each of them pulled in every interesting idea, every deviation you ever had, each of them became -- reinvented themselves in the model of Steve Forbes.  That worked so well the first time, but maybe if we just hit our heads harder on the pavement it’ll work -- better the second time. 

I would submit that we ask -– the Republicans have a tendency to ask the wrong question; they always ask, “who.”  Who, who?  Who’s our leader?  Who’s the savior?  And the real question is a “what.”  What should we think?  And the problem we have, it’s not a problem of leadership.  We have potentially great leaders.  It’s a problem of followership, which is the followers demand that these potentially very exciting leaders become Steve Forbes -- no disrespect to Steve Forbes who does a good job in what he’s doing but who obviously was not acceptable as a candidate for President of the United States.  So maybe, let’s begin with self-criticism before we work on the job of choosing, finding leaders who can express some new thoughts.  And I’ve spoken long enough for a moderator and let me call for three more hands, there are a number of hands.  Secretary Coleman, sir, and who else?  Is there a third hand?  Yes, sir.  Okay, Secretary Coleman.

Secretary Coleman:  Let’s start debating whether something is liberal or conservative and I really don’t understand what that means anymore.  If you’re looking at somebody [inaudible] liberal and conservative or in the other case of where Kennedy  [inaudible] those words but I don’t know what they mean anymore.  [Inaudible] Republican Party seems to me that if we’re going to make it this time, we’ve got to start one, by saying that every year since the tax cut, the federal government has collected more money than it did [inaudible].  I don’t know about 1907 but I know [inaudible] and that’s a very important factor.  Secondly, you’ve got to say that one reason why the poor are still poor is the public system, schools doesn’t do what it used to do and why is that? It’s because 55 percent of the teachers belong to the Democratic Party and you can’t get anything through them and once you get past that, I really get to start out by saying [inaudible] reference on race, you’re Mexican or not, but what happens is that the issue now, we end up with [inaudible] both basing on religion or where we came from, we all could be in bad shape.

David Frum:  Sir, you’re next?

Will Hancock [phonetic]:  Hi, Will Hancock.  I’m a law student and I’m an intern with ATR.  Just curious to know what you think about how conservatives can address the issue of entitlement spending.  It’s an obvious problem for our country and every time it’s been brought up by a major candidate, they’ve been defeated on it; President Bush with his social security privatization plan and Fred Thompson at the Republican primary got hammered on that and it seems to be something that the conservatives are going to have to address in the future but it’s a hard political issue.  Just curious to know how you would address that politically.

Ross Douthat:  That’s a good question.

Hyssop Chet [phonetic]:  Hyssop Chet.  I have a question about neoliberalism with the concept comparing neoconservative, you mentioned.  Just that the concept is not clear to my understanding and just considering all the efforts by the United States, even leadership of the liberalization in the world trade -– neoliberalism these days –- just that you know, occasionally in October, various countries sometimes resolute nationalistic protective trends, a more active –- so just that you know, would you clarify your usage of the terminology neoliberalism, that be neoconservative also in the trade historically on the part of the efforts of United States?

Ross Douthat:  Sure, let’s take the last question first which was clarify our use of the term neoliberalism and in my exchange with Matt Miller, I was using it -– neoliberalism broadly understood in the context of the world economy, I think we are all neoliberals in the sense we’re all the heirs of Thatcher and Reagan and so forth.  Neoliberalism in the American context refers to -- God, I’m not explaining this well.  Maybe I should kick it –- I mean --

Reihan Salam:  In the domestic political context, it just refers to a movement of folks who are drifting away from very status-oriented economic policies in the United States and we’re emphasizing market-oriented policies to achieve liberal ends.

Ross Douthat:  Right.  So Bill Clinton is both a neoliberal in the global sense of the term, in the sense that he was in favor of free trade and free markets, and so forth, and a neoliberal in the American sense of the term, in the sense that he was a pro-market reformist within the Democratic Party.  George W. Bush by contrast would be a neoliberal, in the global sense of the term, allowing for some deviations on steel tariffs and so on, but not a neoliberal in the American context.  Does that make sense?  Neoliberalism in the American context refers to the reform movement within the Democratic Party to move the Party towards the center.

Male Voice:  [indiscernible]

Ross Douthat:  Well, neoconservatism, again, is a very fraught word that now has been associated with a certain set of foreign policy positions.  The neoconservatives of the 1970’s in domestic policy, which was the tradition I think Reihan and I would identify ourselves with were, in most cases, former Democrats, former liberals who moved to the right or felt that the Democratic Party had moved to the left but who in domestic policy took the view that the appropriate posture for the American right was to attempt to reform, streamline and create more free market mechanisms within the existing welfare state rather than simply attack welfare state programs with an eye towards abolishing them.

David Frum:  Let me just stop the panel here to say, let’s strike the word neo and ask you to address Secretary Coleman’s question, do the words the liberal and conservative mean anything anymore, at least from the point of view of the three panelists here?

Reihan Salam:  Well, actually, I thought that was really a terrific question in part because it sparked thoughts about David Frum’s observation that conservatism was a political movement that responded to a particular moment in time, that responded to a particular set of domestic challenges and this is something that Ross alluded to as well in his historical overview.  I think that when you’re thinking about some issues like, for example, synthetic biology, what is the liberal or conservative view on this issue or the idea of man-made viruses?

Male Voice:  [indiscernible]

Reihan Salam:  Yes, exactly.  I mean, there are a lot of fascinating issues on the scientific horizon that are really going to challenge a lot of basic beliefs that we have about human nature.  And I think that part of why Ross and I were both drawn to this project is that we want to preserve a kind of open, free, and creative society and so we want to address some of the anxieties about that.  So a lot of what seems like creative destruction, a lot of what has caused a lot of economic Sturm und Drang, actually these are very constructive processes. 

We’re not exactly sure what’s going to come off it but we have good reason to believe that very good things and a lot of wealth is going to come out of it.  So I think that this scenario that actually cleaves across a lot of different lines, a lot of different partisan and ideological lines.  But I do think that conservatism has a core meaning, and sort of the core meaning is really about of valuing certain kinds of family structure.  It’s about certain kind of normative beliefs, also about, frankly, public paternalism.  I think when you look at the left in the United States, it’s very interesting and quirky because it both has this very individualistic strand that breaks it off from the European left which has this solidaristic, nationalistic orientation, or at least that’s the real source of its strength built in these societies defined by their homogeneity rather than their diversity. 

I think in the United States you have this tendency, this kind of anti-authoritarian tendency to question the patriarchy and things like that.  And conservatives basically say, “Look, we have this model of society built around two-parent families that has worked very, very well and we also now see in a changing economic environment that it actually is an even more powerful force to kind of motor people in terms of making economic progress.  So I think that that is a kind of core conservative idea that we strongly identify with and that remains very, very relevant.

But I’d also mention to Secretary Coleman regarding your observation about our public schools.  In the recent PIPA study comparing schools internationally, they would say, “Oh, Finland’s number one, they do great.”  But actually, if you’re looking at non-Hispanic white children, they’re doing as well as Finnish kids.  They’re actually doing better in the sciences than many East Asians countries including South Korea so [audio glitch] public schools so [audio glitch] I mean think that for their public schools [audio glitch] have much deeper problems in the family structure.  And that’s something that really does cleave across different groups and it’s something that is why I think the idea of the melting pot which is something that is a deeply conservative idea is so powerfully important because what we need to do is grow the American economic mainstream and the American cultural mainstream and that means that prescriptions that sort of call for more divisiveness and more segregation are very bad.  Measures that are actually trying to include the poor who haven’t yet made into the working class into that sort of legal mainstream economy, and that was the great achievement of welfare reform, this is crucially important, it ought to be crucially important to conservatives.

David Frum:  Ruy?  Liberal, conservative, mean anything?

Ruy Teixeira:  Well, I’m a neo-neo-liberal so I don’t want to confuse people by talking about that.

Ross Douthat:  Well, there’s a question about entitlement too, but you’re probably better equipped to answer –-

Reihan Salam:  Yes.  I mean, the one thing about -- when you look at the Bush proposal, this was not something that actually reduced entitlement spending, necessarily.  It was an idea that I think was a very appealing idea and a lot of ways, it was very vague, but I think that it was not something that was actually answering the problem that was being posited.  And I actually think that when you’re looking at solutions, I think the idea of ownership is actually very, very attractive. 

For example, Phil Longman has introduced this idea of early retirement accounts, the idea of being that if you want to retire at, say 62, well, you’re going to have to do it on the base of this private account, but guess what?  Once people have that ownership, even if they have a notional account, they’re actually more likely to remain in the workforce for a longer period of time.  I think that’s the kind of strategy we need to pursue.  Not the idea of slam-bam, let’s have something really dramatic, but let’s have something that’s small, unthreatening but that’s going to be a lever of tremendous cultural change, that’s going to lead people to -- if you look in Sweden and their performance, the main thing they did is just say, “Okay, we’re actually going to have a notional account.  You’re going to see how it actually grows in real time.  This is what belongs to you.”  And so what you’ve seen happen is that actually people believed this to be true and they want to see it actively grow if they can make it grow.  Whereas our system is this like weird, quasi-mythological hybrid that is not really doing us very much good in society.   But of course, Medicare or Medicaid are a much, much more important issue than social security in terms of the scale of the problem, and I think that that’s where an issue where we propose, frankly, pretty radical and cooky healthcare solutions because we think that we need to think in a much more Arnold Klingian way than in this very conventional way that we’re just going to stick a gun to everyone and say you’ve got to buy healthcare under this very conventional system or we’re going to try to subsidize it and keep pouring money into a sinking ship.  I think that’s a very bad idea. 

I think we need to really go back to root questions about what we really want to pay for, medical care or do we really want to pay for health and wellness?  But this is not something that we’re going to be able to address in ten seconds but I think you’re on the right track.

David Frum:  We have ten minutes so what I would propose we do is this: if there’s anyone in the audience with a burning question that is completely different from anything that has been asked so far -- Steve Hayward and then each of the panelist will then have -- I'll give each of them a chance to pick up on the question and integrate it into their three-minute summation.  Steve?

Steven Hayward:  Thank you.  Steve Hayward, AEI.  I’m not sure if it’s a burning question but I wanted to put Ruy on the spot a little bit because his fondness for the book troubled me a little bit.

Ross Douthat:  Troubled me as well.

Steven Hayward:  I don’t think it’d be pejorative although it might be mischievous for me to characterize your praise in the following way.  You like the book because it makes two concessions to a liberal point of view.  It makes a concession to a liberal perception of difficulties of the social economic status of the working class and it makes a concession to a liberal point of view or sort of abandons the knee-jerk conservative opposition to using government for any social purpose, all fine and dandy. 

I’m wondering if there are symmetrical aspects of the conservative perception that you think liberals should be taking to heart from Ross and Reihan or other conservatives like David?  In other words, how would you be self-critical of liberalism in the same way that Ross and Reihan have been self-critical of conservatism?

David Frum:  Very good.  That’s a great jumping off point to give each of you three minutes and we’ll start with Ruy first and work then backwards down the panel in the opposite order from that which we began.

Ruy Teixeira:  Okay, yes.  I would say it’s one of the reasons or some of the reasons that I like it, that there’s a liberal -- in that there is some concession to why I consider it to be the reality of working class problems and they don’t seem to be totally enamored of the old-time religion coming out of the Goldwater strand of, sort of, libertarianism to solve these problems.  They recognize that’s probably not going to be out of it, so I like that because to me that sounds correct.  I mean, it seems right. 

There’s a lot of other stuff in the book I like.  The whole sort of, I think, the political realism of looking at the centrality of the working class, particularly the white working class, to the Republican coalition is quite good; some of the things that they had to say about the relationship between economic and social problems.  In other words, some of the things I dwelt on in my opening remarks, I think all that’s good so it’s not just that they’re sort of conceding something to my liberal, knee-jerk conception of the world.  I think they’re conceding something to the true state of the universe as I see it and I don’t think I’m the only one.

Now, are there things that the liberals should concede to the conservatives?  Of course.  I mean, that’s why I think that so many of their ideas are worth considering and debating.  I think there has been a broad movement among liberals not to assume that the best program is always to spend a lot of money, the best program is always to statist intervention and direction, that there’s a lot of different ways to achieve the desired liberal outcomes and we should be open to things that have greater reliance on the market than has previously been the case with liberal solutions, more encouragement of individual initiative, there’s a variety of things.  I mean, liberals need to be very pragmatic and realistic about what works and I consider, to some extent, where Reihan and Ross are coming from as being very pragmatic about thinking about the political and economic realities of this society and a political strategy at this sort of [audio glitch] [indiscernible]as we used to say in grad school.

David Frum:  Ruy, would you concede to them that the decline of the two-parent family is a social problem?

Ruy Teixeira:  Of course.  I almost didn’t think that was worth mentioning, it’s because it seems so obvious.  And I think, again, this is something that liberals have really bought into big time in the last ten years, that the decline of the two-parent family is in fact a problem; the traditional family structure does work or not, it doesn’t mean we should demonize people who are in nontraditional families.  And nontraditional families are going to continue to grow based on all the latest trend analysis and there’s great paper on this and in my forthcoming book from Brookings, it’s coming out of the conference. 

But nevertheless, we have to respond to the realities of the fact that there’re serious problems with nontraditional families, that two-parent families work best and we have this kind of class fractionization now in terms of whose got the most access to those kinds of families.  And there’s a connection between those problems and economic problems as kind of a feedback loop.  All this stuff’s very important so that’s why I think it’s good they conceded a little bit to the more standard liberal take.  I’ll concede something to the more standard conservative take but I think we should all do it in a pragmatic, open-minded kind of sense.  We can have a dialogue about these things, take the things that make the most sense that seem the most solidly based, empirically, and then we could debate about what actually works and I think that’s the debate worth having.

David Frum:  Thank you, Ruy.  Reihan, you were second, right?  So, you’re second again.

Reihan Salam:  Here’s what worries me about the political left and also the revival of social democracy in the Western world writ large, particularly here at home.  It’s the fact that economic optimism is something that actually feeds on itself.  When you believe that it’s possible for you to get ahead, that the rules are not rigged against you, that it’s possible to meet that economic progress provided you work hard, then actually that belief shapes your ideology and it also shapes a lot of other things about your life.  But then when you don’t believe that to be true, when it then shapes your ideology, you believe that the system is rigged against you, then you’re likely to vote for a bigger government. 

What happens in a bigger government?  A bigger government actually does rig the rules in favor of favorite insiders in a way that actually further entrenches that economic pessimism and it makes it harder to take on incumbents.  That’s extremely dangerous.  So, again, there are a lot of people who believe that what we’re trying to do is kind of make concessions to the left, et cetera.  Not at all.  What we’re trying to do is be sure that actually we’re sparking economic optimism.  In an environment where consumer confidence is as low as it is right now, in whatever the objective economic facts are, when you look, for example, the picture on consumption and equality or leisure and equality, actually there is some very, very positive trends but in a way, those economic facts don’t matter when people feel like there’s something very cribbed about their lives.  They feel like the economic possibilities for their children aren’t there. 

When you’re looking at the white working class, and this is a point that Ruy has made a lot of times, very persuasively, you’re talking about an incredibly diverse group.  You’re talking about some people who don’t have a college education who are quite wealthy and successfully, they’re small-scale entrepreneurs.  You’re talking about other people who are high school dropouts who’re really struggling with an economy that literally doesn’t make sense to them at all.  What do they all have in common?  They see that, actually, that four-year college degree makes a big difference for children in terms of seeing to it that you have some stability or something that you can rely on in an economic world where you can’t really rely on these other assets and an economic environment that’s not going to change.  So I think that really, this is a case for optimism.  And when you look at Republicans who are blue-collar Republicans as well as Republicans who are more affluent, they’re someone who do just have a brighter view of American life.  So I think that actually that’s something that we certainly paid very close attention to.

Another thing I want to mention briefly is a lot of folks on the left believe we’re going to look to Western Europe, we’re going to look at their institutions, we’re going to look to Denmark and doesn’t that work great.  Here’s the problem: America is the frontier society.  If you look at educational attainment levels in the United States, they’re now being slightly exceeded in the youngest cohorts in some countries Europe which is not a totally good thing, but when you’re looking at the skill distribution, that’s a big explanation for rates of inequality that we have.  And actually, when you look at pretext and equality in Germany and many other countries in Europe, it’s actually very similar to pretext and equality in the United States.  That’s not a place where they’re ahead of us and actually, they’re going to see their inequality rate increase because, again, they’re going through a lot of the same economic transitions.  So that means that we cannot rely on the economic models offered by other people.  We need to forge our own American social model that’s going to resolve some of the contradictions of the American social model, some of the lack of transparency that’s going to build on our strengths, and that’s something that we’re going to do that’s going to make a great contribution to the world.

David Frum:  Ross, you’ve got cleanup.

Ross Douthat:  I’ll be very, very brief.  Since Ruy brought up pragmatism, I just want to say that I think our book is written in response to what I think is the core challenge facing the American right today, which is what does it mean to be a center-right movement in a country that is not, sort of, dominated by hostility to the existing welfare state and I think that the models that conservatism has tended draw on are the models, obviously, of Reagan in the United States but also of Thatcher in Britain, of a conservatism that came to power in a very different period in American life, a period that was dominated by bureaucratic failure and public disgust with existing institutions.  And if you look at America today, it just isn’t like that.  I mean, you can do polling numbers where people say they don’t trust Congress and so on but the level of hostility towards government programs, towards the, sort of meat, of the federal budget -- the level of confidence is vastly higher than it was when conservatism came to power. 

So the challenge for the right is, can there be a center-right majority?  Can there be a meaningful important conservative politics in a country that isn’t where the United States was in 1979 and 1980.  And I’m not sure what the answer to that question is.  I think, one of the lessons of the Bush years where there were certain concessions made to these realities and an attempt to move -- I'm not sure I’d say to the center because I agree with Reihan.  The center is very fungible term, but an attempt to sort of address the realities of America in 2000 versus America in 1980, a lot of those efforts ended in failure and they’ve ended, obviously, where the Republican Party is today.  So I think a certain degree of skepticism is totally in order about what we’re proposing in our book given the record of the last eight years.  But I’m also hopeful, I think that a center-right majority is possible and plausible and I think it’s something worth pursuing.

David Frum:  Thank you.  Right on time.  I would like to thank our very distinguished panel for a fascinating conversation based on a very important book.  We are honored to have all of you in our halls.  Do not be a stranger.  And we look forward to Ruy’s book which is a culmination of an absolutely fabulous all-day session that he organized, by Ruy and by AEI’s own Karlyn Bowman that brought together more numbers on the shape of the American nation, the American electorate, and the American workforce and probably, anybody who did not attend the conference, have ever seen before in their lives, I would urge you to pre-order your copy now.  And I thank our audience for their excellent questions and their attention.  And good afternoon, bye.

[End of Transcript]