The Republican Civil War

Can the GOP make a comeback by embracing the welfare state?

Daniel McCarthy from the November 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

All that is unfortunate, but does it amount to a “crisis,” as Douthat and Salam say? It’s hard to tell—just as it is hard to say, without a more precise definition of working class, whether the upper income brackets of the Sam’s Club vote are suffering the same maladies as the lower strata.

In any event, Douthat and Salam offer several policy suggestions, some sound and some not. More vocational education in public schools is an unobjectionable idea, for example, and the authors are right to point out that skilled trades such as plumbing and carpentry provide very healthy salaries and reasonable job security. There’s no way to outsource fixing a leak in Poughkeepsie.

The authors’ plans to make the tax code family-friendly are more problematic. They endorse one revenue-neutral plan that would vastly expand the per-child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000. The catch, of course, as with any revenue-neutral plan (as opposed to an honest-to-God tax cut) is that the money has to be made up somewhere. There is an air of political unreality to much of Douthat and Salam’s tinkering; they suggest, for example, restricting the home mortgage deduction to “lowincome individuals and families with children,” a proposal not likely to find favor with politicians who need votes from higher-income individuals and people without children as well.

Beyond tweaking the tax code, Douthat and Salam would have government at the federal and state levels create many new programs and regulations to help the Sam’s Club class. They propose wage subsidies to augment the income of “less-educated single men with low-paying jobs” and “Summer Opportunity Scholarships” to give “poor elementary-school students a voucher to pay for a six-week summer enrichment program.” They want the government to directly create “job opportunities for the working class and in particular for young men from inner-city backgrounds” by “hiring thousands of new police officers,” and they propose the establishment of national or state-level credentialing examinations for high school students.

Douthat and Salam’s statism comes through most strongly not in their particular proposals but in their overall philosophy. Theirs is not a world in which the social order is best left alone but one in which government “supports innovators and self-starters of all stripes, and always takes the side of the common man.” They praise the “maternalist,” profamily spirit of New Deal programs such as Social Security, yet they seem oblivious to the ways in which government policies have created much of the instability that now afflicts workers and everybody else. Medicare and Medicaid have made health care far more expensive, even as vast federal subsidies to higher education have made college much less affordable by enabling schools to charge more for tuition than the market would otherwise bear. Social Security, whatever its maternalist intentions, helped to sever ties between the generations by making old people more independent from their families. It has had the additional effect of taxing younger and poorer people to support older and wealthier Americans, which is hardly good for family formation.

Douthat and Salam never look at government with skeptical eyes, only with eyes full of hope. They never consider what unintended consequences might arise from their benevolent planning, or what happens when ivory-tower populism meets hard political reality. Not only would their proposals be more likely to create Democratic majorities than Republican ones; they would also harm the very working-class voters Douthat and Salam aim to help—and would certainly harm everyone else by making government more expansive and expensive. Grand New Party is less a blueprint for reinvigorated conservatism than yet another dewy dream of social democracy, where a loving government allegedly looks out for the little guy.

Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.