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The Road to Trump’s ‘Grand New Party’Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam had a vision for how Republicans could reclaim the working class. They never expected Trump to fulfill it.

Ready? I’m ready. All right. We’re going to start. The name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Here we go. From New York Times Opinion. I’m Ross Douthat, and this is “Matter of Opinion.” And this week, I’m striking out on my own to talk about the future of the Republican Party, because the second election of Donald Trump didn’t just win a majority for Trump himself. It also solidified a remarkable transformation in the Republican Party, which has gone from being a party associated with the wealthy and the white suburban upper middle class to being a party that represents a much more diverse coalition. More blue collar with fewer college educated voters. And in this election, with a much more multiracial coalition as well. So that’s quite a shift. And it’s quite remarkable that Trump himself would be the one to accomplish it. So to map out the recent history that brought us to this moment and some of the arguments that Republicans and conservatives have been having about their changing coalition, I’ve brought on a very special guest. Nowadays, Reihan Salam is best known as the distinguished president of the storied right of center think tank the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. But I knew Reihan once upon a time as my fellow somewhat disheveled junior varsity pundit in Washington, DC, where we shared a somewhat shabby rowhouse somewhere in the Northwestern part of the city. I won’t say exactly where to protect both the innocent and the guilty. And where we were both deeply involved in arguments about where the Republican Party was going to go late in the presidency of George W. Bush, which led eventually to the publication of our jointly authored book, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” An argument that is now almost 20 years old. But in the things it got right and the things it got wrong still, I think, has some relevance for debates about the future of conservatism. So I’m really glad that I was able to pry Reihan away from his immense responsibilities and have him join me today. Reihan, good to see you. I am honored and delighted to be with you. Ross, are you honored and delighted? I am both firmly, vigorously. And also it is funny and sad that we as middle aged dads only get to hang out when we’re on a podcast together. So here we are. We were talking about this beforehand, that this is the life, the life of the middle aged pundit dad, as you say, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Would you like to come on a New York Times podcast with me? Although we do, I’m struck by the fact that we have spoken to one another every fateful political moment of the 21st century. And I know that when I’m watching these election results unfold, that after midnight, I do know that Ross Douthat is going to be awake and we are going to talk and we’re going to think about it in real time And that is a very precious gift. That’s right. That’s how the magic happens. Me sitting in a food spattered kitchen - spattered by myself to make it clear. To be clear, I don’t want to blame my wife and children for the food spattering. So, let’s go back in time. We met in the early 2000s in Washington, DC. I really met, then. We really met that. No, technically. Technically, we met as undergraduates at a panel held at the Harvard Institute of Politics and featured featured Bill Kristol. During that George W. Bush presidency. So at that point, you were doing a lot of theater as a Harvard undergraduate, right. That’s right. And I was running the conservative newspaper, so we didn’t have a lot in common except, except that you were except for hearing our paths converged. And I think that one thing is that we both came to conservatism through a kind of winding path. Just the fact that you came from this crunchy Christian world, having parents, Boomer parents, growing up in this secular milieu. I came to it as a son of immigrants growing up in an outer borough, New York, that had been transformed by Giuliani and just coming to conservatism from different angles, but both being at an angle to movement conservatism. And I think that’s something we bonded over early on. Yeah And as I remember it, we were also young journalists everywhere trying to make some kind of a name for ourselves. And we were working and writing at a time when almost all writing and arguing being done in Washington, DC was writing and arguing about foreign policy. This was the period after September 11, after the invasion of Iraq. I was working as a very junior editor for The Atlantic, and essentially foreign policy had subsumed almost all conversation and debate in Washington, DC at that time, and certainly on the political right where there was obviously a rally around George W. Bush’s foreign policy. And then as that foreign policy soured, as the Iraq war ran into difficulties. And I think we maybe not completely consciously and deliberately, but we’re trying to carve out a somewhat different niche by looking for a set of issues that fewer people were writing about in 2005 or 2006. So we ended up converging, in effect, as writers, trying to think through domestic policy. Which again, in that period was an extremely unsexy portfolio for a couple of young writers to have. Indeed totally different. Now, of course when, domestic policy is very, very hot. So one element of this is I think that our views on domestic policy were also a little idiosyncratic. You I think, were drawn to Christian Democratic ideas. And the idea that there was a place for a religious conservative synthesis that was modern and where there was a kind of thoughtful policy dimension that was not reflexively free market, but that took the idea of tradition seriously. And what does it mean to modernize a tradition. For me, I was someone who was very market oriented, but also to someone who was really interested in the idea of emerging critiques of 90s capitalism and what should we take seriously, what should we not. And we were also in some ways reacting to interesting intellectual energies on the left. The kind of inequality obsession that really peaked during the Occupy era was something that you and I had experienced as undergrads and had been around. These ideas were already in wider currency. So it really was a very dynamic and fun intellectual partnership because we were obsessing over a lot of the same things for very different reasons. Well, and it was coming at this moment where, to try and put it in historical perspective, you had a Republican Party that had been not completely dominant, but very powerful in American politics with a coalition built in the 1970s and early 1980s by Ronald Reagan. That was in part a kind of reaction against Great Society liberalism and a sense of the failures of liberalism in the 1970s, which included galloping inflation included rising crime rates, included a sense of foreign policy weakness. And so out of that had this Republican Party that was organized famously around some combination of social and religious conservatism, foreign policy, hawkishness and free market economics. The three stools, as they often said at the time, the three legged stool or the three. The three legged three legged stool. Not three separate stools, but. Well, that is serendipitous, mixed metaphor because by the time we were young and writing, it seemed like those different pieces maybe didn’t necessarily fit together quite as well. There was a sense that the country was secularizing and becoming more socially liberal. So social conservatism had to adapt and rethink things. And then as you mentioned, there was this very strong, not just left wing, but also center left critique of where the American economy was going. And George W. Bush, when he was elected president in 2000, very explicitly tried to address these changes. This was where the idea, now 25 years old of so-called compassionate conservatism, came in and the ownership society. The ownership society, the idea that you were going to essentially use different government policies and levers to build a kind of society of independent stock owning, home owning entrepreneurs. And a lot of that concept came to grief with the financial crisis, the real estate bubble bursting and so on. But in some ways we were trying to pick up where compassionate conservatism had left off, figure out what it had gotten wrong, and but figure out what would a Republican Party that wasn’t just doing tax cuts for the rich. What if we actually took these ideas seriously and had the right intellectual formation foundation for them. I think that’s exactly right because in the second term of the Bush presidency, there was this line of argument from call it mainstream conservative ink, which was essentially the real failure here is that George W. Bush was not sufficiently rigorous in his adherence to small government orthodoxy. The real. Problem was his Medicare expansion. Et cetera. Et cetera. But actually, there was no one actually defending the idea that, look, you actually have to have a credible, serious approach to the welfare state. And this was the disconnect that we had observed. And we were not as I recall, we were not people who were statists by reflex or anything like that. It was just guys, we need some modicum of realism about how this coalition won and where this coalition has room to grow. And also some realism about American political economy and the fact that the welfare state is not going to go away. Can it actually rest on a more solid, moral normative foundation and also something that makes sense given the ways in which the economy is changing. So I think that we were filling this missing quadrant because there was actually no one willing to defend the proposition that we need to modernize a market oriented conservatism. And social conservatives have a really important role to play here, if only they seize it. And we were framing it also in terms of electoral politics. So the subtitle of the book we wrote referenced the idea of Republicans winning the working class, meaning in our definition, non-college educated Americans of all races and ethnicities. And part of our argument was that there had been after the 1970s, a kind of unfinished realignment in American politics, where a large group of non-college educated voters had shifted from the Democratic coalition to the Republican coalition. These were the voters who got described as Reagan Democrats once upon a time, but that Republicans, because of their inability to quite figure out how to actually run the government, had not been able to fully cement that realignment. And from that was where you got basically the policy agenda that we tried to sketch out in the book. And Ross, I will just note for our listeners that we had a bunch of wacky ideas regarding who could be the Tribune of this coalition. I hate to embarrass you with this, but we talked about who is a blue collar populist who represents just something outside of conventional politics, who is someone who is a celebrity, who is someone who could actually break the stranglehold of what we saw as a kind of cosseted political establishment. So we talked about Bill O’Reilly as someone who is a Long Island middle class, upper middle class, but with a blue collar ethos. We had a bunch of different names. And one of my favorite pieces from the Ross Reihan collabs of that era was 2007, something that must have been painful for you. But we wrote our manifesto for what a Giuliani presidential bid could look like. Painful just because you obviously an ardent pro-lifer. This is something that was very important for you. But we came up with, I think, an extremely compelling vision for what a future Trump presidential candidacy could look like in describing something that would resonate with this working class, lower middle class, the outer borough ethnics of America. So obviously, this was very special to me for biographical reasons. But then we already had in mind there has to be this class break, there has to be this cultural break. The Perot voters, the northern secularizing working class, the multiracial, working class, who brings it in. And we were actively fantasizing like lunatics about who is the person who could actually break that and change that. But before our fantasies, let’s say collided, collided with reality. There was this period when I would say our ideas were completely rejected, which was 2008 to 2012, a 2000 question mark. Question mark, right. I mean, the period in which our ideas are rejected may extend indefinitely into the future, but there was a special rejection. So we wrote this book. It came out at the very end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The financial crisis hit. Barack Obama was elected president, and the mood in the Republican Party picked up on the mood you’ve already described. This sense that the only problem with George W. Bush was that he spent too much money, that he was a big government conservative, and it ran with that. And this gave us the Tea Party era, which was effectively a limited government anti-deficit movement, reacting against bailouts, stimulus spending, eventually Obamacare. And that, I would say, set the tone for Republican debates in a way that didn’t preclude some ideas we were interested in. We both have issues where we have libertarian impulses and sympathies. But the general mood of the Republican Party for the four years after 2008 was we don’t need to think about how to run the government. We just need to stand against socialism and figure out how to cut spending. And I think the Tea Party moment, what happened is that people saw discontent. They saw opposition to Obama, they saw a weak economy, and they saw this grassroots energy. And the narrative was the Tea Party, small government thing. And I think you and I both saw it. That’s not really what’s going on here. There’s something else happening. There’s a different kind of discontent. And these guys are missing it. And I think that the “Grand New Party” thesis was closer to being correct than the Tea Party thesis. And just without getting too deep into the policy weeds, the specific ideas that we were associated with, that we argued for in the book and have, in different ways argued for since fit into that perspective you just described. The idea that the welfare state has to be based on respect, reciprocity and support for certain valuable habits and ways of life. Yes, right. So we spend a lot of time arguing for family supports that would make it easier to have and rear children again with an explicit link between some form of responsibility in whatever way the government was spending money. And that to us was the middle ground. And I think pretty clearly the more stringent we’re just going to cut government spending model came to grief in 2012. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on a very well-intentioned and serious blueprint for remaking Medicare and Social Security. But they had no I think it’s fair to say, no positive vision of what the government policy, public policy could be doing to help working Americans in that particular moment. The Bush era positive vision had been discredited, fairly or otherwise. But what was interesting in that moment is that had there been a Romney Ryan administration, I think it’s fair to say that we would have known a ton of people in it. We would have maybe even had some modicum of influence, but they were open to some of these things. But they were so risk averse, they were walking on eggshells. They didn’t really seize the main chance. What I mean. Well, and they were afraid and this is comical given what happened next. But they were afraid that if they supported anything that seemed too much like big government that they would be attacked as socialist rhinos and so on. As none other than the late Rush Limbaugh attacked us. We were not important enough to be consistently attacked, but we were but we were attacked by people in the talk radio sphere of conservatism for selling out conservative principles by being willing to contemplate the government doing certain things. And that’s amusing because, of course, of what then followed four years later. And what happened to that entire world of people who notionally were committed to this really hardcore libertarian small state vision. Suddenly some of those people are the ones who flipped most aggressively to this very different vision. But first, you had this brief opening for Republican politicians who, again, wanted to go back to where George W. Bush started to say, look, we need a middle class, working class policy agenda. We need to look at family policy. We need to look at health care. We need to look at education. And there was a larger group of policy writers to which we were somewhat attached that got called the reform conservatives or the reform of cons. I remember it well. We’re really we’re giving listeners the truly the truly deep cuts. But I think pretty clearly there was a narrative that said, O.K, these guys, the reform conservatives, they’re going to have influence on the next Republican administration, which will probably be led by someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who will modernize the Republican Party in various ways and will be a kind of Republican equivalent of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, something like that. But that story was then completely steamrolled and shattered and everything else by what happened next, which was the rise of Donald J. Trump right. As the actual embodiment of the blue collar populist tendency that we had been describing it is. Or was he really. And of course, we would think this, but the we anticipated someone very much like him When you look to “Grand New Party” itself. But certainly when you look at our conversations around that time. But we didn’t anticipate him. Let’s be fair. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So here’s what I’ll say about that reform conservative moment is that I think you and I both just as lovers of history saw that it’s never going to be just tax credits, right. It’s never going to be just pure, unadulterated wonkery. Narrative is really important. And also just blood and guts are important. And by that I mean public safety crime. These are things that we wrote about in “Grand New Party.” Just the idea that do you feel safe. Do you belong. These basic. Do you matter. Donald Trump the first thing that he did was talk about immigration in a way that was markedly different from how Jeb Bush talked about immigration, markedly different from the thesis that a lot of people in that kind of respectability seeking moment have. And I don’t say that derisively. The big thing that he did was it his specific policy prescriptions about building the wall and what have you. I don’t think it was exactly that. It was rather directional. Jeb Bush gave people a sense, fairly or otherwise, that he cherished immigrants. He was married to an immigrant and he valued them. He saw them as really so central to the American story, whereas a multigenerational blue collar, working class American, maybe whose life has been a little bit chaotic at the edges, you’re not the hero of this story. And I think that Donald Trump made an argument. He did something that was so shattering, but it was basically a directional argument that we decide that we’re going to put Americans first. And it’s something that you could plainly see in the politics of the right for the previous decade and a half. So anti-immigrant and anti-immigration sentiment, restrictionist sentiment in various guises had been a really powerful current in Republican politics. And there were every now and again, there was a flash in the pan. There was someone who would run on this but would never penetrate, would never break through. And Trump is someone who was able to really capitalize on it. And again, I don’t actually think it was necessarily about the policy specifics, but it was I am listening to you. I am listening to you. And this immigration issue is a synecdoche for a ton of other issues where there are people who are not listening to you, they are not respecting you, they are not taking your concerns here seriously. And I will. And I think that was hugely powerful. And of course, it applied in a bunch of other domains, too. With regard to trade, with regard to China and the threat that it poses, the idea of an elite that is selling out our country. Those themes were there. It was visible, and Obama was the one who capitalized on them in 2012 ambivalently. So that was to me what was so you mean by going after Romney’s corporate rating and exactly. Outsourcing exactly. Exactly right. No, there was some proto Trumpism in the way that Obama ran against Romney as an embodiment of borderless, anti-patriotic capitalism. The Obama Trump voters didn’t change. It’s the coalitions that changed around them. But to me, that power that Trump had won was substantially different from the vision that we were offering. If you go back, it was, in the end, just a much more powerful story. Like we thought we had this story about here’s how the government can stand up for people who work, people who raise families, all of these things. And I think there was potency in that story and that it would have helped Rudy Giuliani in 2012. It would helped Marco Rubio in 2016. But Trump just blew it up bigger in the way that you describe. He folded in the entire post 1991 globalization push. He folded in the outsourcing of US jobs to China and the ethnic and demographic transformation of the country. And against a backdrop of collapsing birth rates and this deep intergenerational tension that stems from that, he put it together. He put it together. But he also did so in a way that certainly from my perspective in 2016 was often malignant. I think I wrote a column at that time describing Trumpism as a kind of dark mirror universe version of Grand new party, where he was making a pitch to the kind of voters we wanted the Republican Party to make a pitch to. But it wasn’t just more sweeping, it was more demagogic. And there was this strong white identity politics component that liberal critics were not wrong to see in it. Now, I think there was always an underestimation, not everywhere on the left, but among many liberals, of how important economics was to Trump’s appeal. He was literally flying around the country, going to cities where factories had closed and where jobs had gone overseas and saying I. Will bring back the good times. If you can’t write that out of the 2016 story. But in the end, what he did electorally was not in that election to build the pan ethnic working class Republican Party. He boosted the Republican share of white working class voters beyond what the Romney campaign had imagined in the right competitive states, in the right competitive states, he flipped the Midwest, but he won more electorally important votes, and he won the election without a popular vote majority. But I think it was reasonable to look in that moment from our perspective and say, O.K, Trump did a version of what we’d urged on the Republican Party, but there was both something clearly toxic about the way he did it, and it didn’t build a new majority. Donald Trump didn’t come into office in 2016 with majority support. He didn’t complete the realignment. He just boosted a particular part of the working class share of the GOP coalition. What do you think, though. That all sounds exactly right. This was a very strange moment for both of us because, first of all, in “Grand New Party” itself, we literally were saying that, look, if you do not embrace our path, there will be a demagogue who will capitalize on this discontent, on this rupture between call it the conservative elite and the small C conservative majority, or what we saw as an incipient potential conservative majority. We were both in different ways that with questions of ethnic change, immigration. I look back at the things I was writing in the second Obama term, and it’s just crazy things are I mean, not to Pat ourselves on the back, but things that have now become total cliches, just getting savagely attacked for saying that Hispanics do not care about Amnesty. This is not the issue. Just talking about the idea that there is a more balanced, sane approach to immigration that can build a kind of multiethnic, working class conservative majority. Because an important just to clarify our own perspective. Like we were immigration Hawks relative to George W. Bush and John McCain. Yes, right. Our view was that securing the border and having some kind of skills based immigration policy that limited, low skilled immigration was one the policy sweet spot, the place where you could have substantial immigration, but not at a rate that was too disruptive, but also something that, as you just said, would appeal more to Hispanic voters, to a lot of Exactly. The descendants of recent immigrants than just saying we’re going to legalize everyone who’s here and not open the border, because that wasn’t the open borders moment, had not yet arrived on the political left. But at the very least, there was the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party had to move substantially to the left on immigration. Exactly an argument was that an emphasis, a Frank emphasis on the importance of assimilation and the idea that immigration policy should be in the National interest, that there was such a thing as too fast or too many, and that actually it was legitimate. And not racist. And then to see Trump in this moment, it almost felt like my gosh, there’s going to be a backlash. He’s going to talk about immigration in this way that is inciting and it’s going to be something that will jeopardize the formula. The coalition that we had hoped to see. We had a scheme, we had a plan for what it was going to look like, and then it actually happened in this much more chaotic way. I mean, our plan was Marco Rubio, let’s say, or someone like him reinventing himself as a kind of moderate restrictionist on immigration while having a more middle class friendly agenda than Mitt Romney and winning a multi-ethnic blue collar majority on that basis. Instead, we had Trump winning a minority of the popular vote, President making much darker, more sweeping and again, in my view, more toxic appeals. But so then how this is my this is the core question. How did we get from there to here. Because in 2024, as I said at the outset, the Republican coalition looks not completely, but it looks like the coalition we imagined 20 years ago. But guess what. It was Donald Trump, who did it. So how. There are two phases. One is during the first Trump presidency period, you saw these dramatic gains in urban counties. You saw really material gains among Hispanic voters between 2016 and 2020. And that was in the thick of the COVID crisis. That was in a moment when as many of our listeners will recall, our senses were being assaulted at all times. So many things that radicalized people that we people who had been call it respectability seeking conservatives were ambivalent about Trump. And when they actually turned, when they embraced him, the Kavanaugh hearings, when you think about the kind of early stages of woke discourse, just there are a lot of things that happen there where you saw this kind of diaspora of folks on the broad center right going and really different directions depending on what it is that animated them most. And Trump was someone who galvanized this. But I think that that’s important to remember that there was something that happened during that first presidency. But this is my question about that galvanizing effect, which is, was it purely negative in the sense that you could make a case that what happened in Trump’s presidency, especially at the end and to some extent in Biden’s presidency, but really in that, pre COVID and COVID window, was that liberalism and the left kind of recreated some of the crises in miniature from the 1970s that had made the Reagan coalition possible in the first place. After the killing of George Floyd, you had riots and a retreat from urban policing. Yes, a spike in crime. So crime came back. You had in the beginning of the Biden administration a unwise stimulus package and recovery bill that goosed inflation and brought inflation back, which it hadn’t been around since the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then you had without litigating all the details in woke progressivism, a form of cultural radicalism that looked a bit like the cultural radicalism of the 1970s. Yes so you could tell a story where all of basically everything we were saying in the Bush presidency was premised on the idea that the 1970s weren’t coming back and the Republican Party therefore needed this forward looking agenda. But maybe what happened in Trump’s presidency was that briefly, the 1970s did come back. And so the Republican coalition could expand to include blue collar Hispanics and all of these extra voters without having some dramatic shift in agenda of the kind we’d imagined. What do you think. That’s one reason I stress these two different periods from the first Trump presidency and then the Biden presidency. So big picture, I think that when you say negative, I do think the first Trump presidency, the real thing that happened was this galvanizing, this coalescing, this transformation of the left that happened, this sense of cohesion, just cultural power, cultural institutions, prestige, status, the idea of affluent, educated, but also just high status, high prestige people exerting this incredible power. And the sense that many people had that Trump was the one thing standing against that. So I think that was one foundation of it. Then you see a Biden presidency where I think there was this view that we are in the midst of a kind of Democratic emergency. This legitimates real dramatic change. We need to question neoliberalism. We need to dismantle systems. We need to do something really new and different in 2020. Oh my gosh, when you look at the state of the Trump presidency in that moment, I don’t think anyone would argue, including those who see a lot of virtue in that presidency as I do, I think they got some big important things right. But that it was pretty chaotic in 2020. And then despite that, the massive gains that he made in that election against this whole of society effort he made kind of incredible. Well, he didn’t make massive gains relative to 2016. He made massive gains with certain set of voters, again, minority voters, for instance, while losing voters in the suburbs. And losing pieces of the White working class vote. So he essentially it’s a good point. It’s a good point. There was a trade, a less efficient coalition, but a coalition that in a sense, as you’re saying, kind of reflected the outlines of what you and I had envisioned in the past. Of course, there are people who are determined, bitter ender never-trumpers, who are gone from the coalition. But then the number of people that you and I both call them center-right normies, who are alarmed in some respects by the Trump phenomenon, but then who found their way back into the coalition as a reaction to that kind of integrated progressive. Apparatus and the question now is the question that you and I have been struggling with and thinking through. And passionate about for this century, which is there some positive case here. Is there something that is dynamic and real and substantive that can fill this vacuum. Are we something other than merely being anti-left? Do we really want the left to be the only dynamic force, or do we want there to be another dynamic force. And what we envision in “Grand New Party” was the right as a culturally creative, dynamic force that was offering this moral ethical synthesis that actually made sense and that you could kind of champion and carry forward. And then I don’t know if we have, but centrally, that had some very specific economic policies. Yes policies for how the government taxes and spends and regulates that we’re supposed to be not just winning working class votes, but building a more prosperous middle class American future. And so let’s look back at the first Trump presidency and then forward to the new Trump presidency to ask, were there in the first few years of the Trump presidency something that looked like a forward looking economic policy agenda for middle class America. Do you think this is an area where I suspect you and I have some subtle differences of perspective. I guess I’m a big trade off, obsessive and just the idea that, when you have a package deal, this thing has to fit with this thing. So, for example, you could say that I want to have no immigration or very little immigration or radically reduced immigration, but also I’m going to embrace trade. And I’m going to say that, O.K, that means that we’re going to import more strawberries or we’re going to import more of this or that, things that are low skill, labor intensive goods. And we’ll do that. That’s one formula. Or you could say you’re going to have a selective immigration policy and we’re going to embrace trade. What I mean. I think that there are a lot of things about that Trump moment because you had all these outsiders who were coming in and they had conflicting imperatives. There were some people who came in who were like, let’s hope that Trump just isn’t serious about his trade agenda or about the idea of making a radical break with romney-ryan ISM or what have you. And let’s just see if we can be chill and just kind of hope everything is going to be fine and it’s largely rhetorical. Then there are other people who were real post neoliberals, anti neoliberals and who didn’t have cadres. And so they were trying to coexist with one another in this White House where it was, one voice was dominant one day. And Steve Bannon had one perspective and Steve Moore had a different perspective. Well, that’s a good way to distill it. Steve Moore, for those who don’t is a long term. Wing economist who supply side, supply side economics just wants to cut taxes. And cutting taxes is the solution to all of life’s problems. That’s slightly unfair, but only slightly. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, when he initially came in to the first Trump administration, said, we’re going to do a kind of right wing New Deal. We’re going to spend a ton of money on infrastructure and we’re going to rebuild the American working class that way. And one way to look at the first four years of Trump is that Moore got what he wanted and Bannon didn’t. Infrastructure became a joke. Trump did cut taxes in a way that included some family friendly provisions, included some ideas that you and I supported, but was still a fairly conventional Republican tax cut. And in a way, the Trump innovation was just to say, we’re just going to run the economy hot. We’re not going to worry about entitlement spending or anything like that, and we’re going to raise wages with a hot economy, and that’ll be it. That’s the real innovation, which is that Trump recognized that taking Medicare and Social Security off the table is something that would shatter the Obama coalition. It would really change things. It would make the cultural issues more salient. I do believe in wealth creation. I am not a huge fan of high taxes. I do believe there is a place for that, but it has to be connected to some larger vision for what it is we want when it comes to upward mobility and the Bush ownership society, imperfect as it was, there was some thesis there. I think that with the first Trump presidency, it just didn’t really come together. It didn’t gel. And in the absence of COVID, who knows. Maybe we would have seen something different going forward. I just think that if the Republican Party is not the party of private property and wealth building, so I don’t think. Is there any chance that the Republican Party is about to not be the party of private property and wealth building No, no, I think you’re right. But I do think that you have some people on the right who basically embrace a kind of left ideas about inequality and what have you. And I. That’s a dead end. So there’s just to set out. Set out categories, right. There is a kind of thoroughgoing populist right that is essentially shares not the prescription, but the critique of how the American economy is performed for the last 30 years that you see on the left right. That says the economy has just not worked for middle, middle class America. And we need therefore, a kind of radical overhaul. And to the extent that there is strong kind of intellectual support for, let’s say, the huge Trump tariffs. It often comes out of this perspective. And tariffs being just the tip of the spear in a way. The really rigorous, thoughtful people envision some larger reordering of the American economy. But tariffs are kind of a symbol of this tariffs as right as an opening into dramatic industrial policy that presumably would go beyond what the Biden administration did. I personally think we may or may not get Trumpian tariffs. I don’t think you’re going to see a dramatic right wing restructuring of the American economy. I think the question is a little narrower than that. So take the vice President-elect of the United States, JD Vance, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Who both have obviously strong associations with this administration. Musk himself was originally a Clinton Democrat. He was never a doctrinaire libertarian. But as he has moved. I think he has come to inhabit that libertarian space where he’s ended up in charge of a commission that’s supposed to figure out how to transform the federal trillions of dollars from federal spending. It is it’s not the Tea Party, but it has something in common with Tea Party ideas there. Whereas the Vance perspective in certain ways, it goes all the way to the deep structural critique you were talking about that you don’t agree with. But in part it’s just more based around, I think, the idea that, the working class in America needs certain forms help and support that it hasn’t gotten and that traditional Republican policymaking making hasn’t delivered. And I see that as the tension inside the Trump administration going forward. Like, are we returning to a kind of just dynamism oriented, libertarian government cutting, or is there again, some populist synthesis available. My vision and. I wonder how you react to this. We were talking about this idea of the right as the anti-left and what are the ideas that kind of occupy that space. What dominates my vision is that the thing that is healing ultimately is going to be the embrace of certain values, ideas, sensibilities, habits that contribute to human flourishing ultimately, and that the idea that you’re going to look to a tax credit or the idea that you’re going to look to the state to deliver this, it’s just not going to happen. You need the state to be competent within its domain, highly effective, capable and competent within its domain to create the conditions so that we can actually build these really families or networks of families or it’s a pluralistic vision for what the ultimate solution is going to look like to this discontent you’re describing. And the fantasy of government fixing these things is something that stems from this intense secularization and this kind of collapse of communal life. And so when I think about Musk, I guess my reaction is this seems very exciting, the idea of celebrating the energy of building and creating and the idea of unleashing wealth creation, these kinds of things can be good and healthy. What I see as kind of thinking about in a really impressive, earnest, genuine way, I think he’s that with problems that are really, really hard for government to solve. And I a lot of thoughtful people, including us in earlier eras, were kind of thinking about what can government do to affirm certain ways of life or what have you. And that’s just that stuff is just I guess I’ve come to find those things less tractable. But what I do find tractable is some of the zany dreams of terraforming Nevada as well as terraforming Mars stuff like that. My dream second Trump presidency would take big swings like that and hopefully not have them end in tears and kind of be laughable. I really want to think in big creative ways. How do we have a limited government that is highly effective and energetic within its limited domain, whether that’s crime control, whether that’s breakthrough scientific research, this kind of thing. But I just think that the kind of Game of inches of social policy, it’s just it’s ultimately going to be creating a culture that celebrates and allows families to thrive. So ultimately, ultimately, you have turned against some of the arguments in our book. Ross not turned against. Precisely but that was our original brief, right. Was that the Republican Party and conservatism needs to be working in the nuts and bolts of government to a degree that progressives take for granted and focused on, again, not sweeping policy interventions, but carefully tailored policy interventions that support work and family. And I do think that in your arc, the experience of watching Trump come along and sweep all that off the table with his Trumpian style, right, watching then the left come along and in my formulation, bring back the 1970s in certain ways, right, has brought you back around not to the Tea Party, but let’s say to Ronald Reagan I think you’re in a Reaganite space where it’s good for the government to support some big projects in science and innovation. But ultimately, if American society is going to heal, it’s not going to be government policy doing it. That’s not entirely unfair. I do think that remember, you have betrayed me. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, 2016, the Biden presidency, they were to their credit, let’s be fair to them. They were actually drawing on these ideas. Big, ambitious child credits and what have you. The Biden administration did do temporarily a version of the. Yes of the biggest, most ambitious version. And things that kind of and look, we could litigate specifics of this or that policy. But I think that was humbling for me, not because I now believe that, let’s jettison the child credit or what have you. But just it was humbling because these are things that they attempted to do. And look at that child credit, one year Yes Did it mechanically reduce poverty and did it have some salutary effects. Absolutely birth rates. Look, but even on the margins. But even and also, did working class and lower middle class people was this something that was this very, we’re going to have to fight for this. Was this something that created a groundswell? It did not. It did not have anything like the political effects that the Biden administration expected. I agree. And that’s right. And also, I think there is another element of the Grand new party argument. It was partly, a lot of it was. Reactive and a lot of it was, look, we’re not going to dismantle the New Deal era welfare state. There have been moments of actually government, but also a cultural elite can work together to create the conditions for flourishing families. And even now, I don’t think there’s specific recommendations there that I would jettison. Yeah, there’s a place for that, but I certainly am more taken with the idea that the kind of healing that I think you and I both want, the kind of that is ultimately going to have to be cultural change. And by the way, there are things government can do. I think about Thatcherism one of Margaret Thatcher’s things is that she wasn’t just laissez Faire. She was running an activist conservative government that wasn’t just targeting the size of the state, but it was also targeting civil society organizations, government bureaucracies and educational establishment that was hostile to what she saw as the vigorous virtues that families needed to thrive. Government could not instill those vigorous virtues. Government could fight against the cultural, institutional forces that were undermining those who manifested the vigorous virtues. I think that that’s exactly right. That is an activist agenda for the right. And I think that it relates to certainly crime and public safety, but it also relates to how we think about entrepreneurship and how we think about family policy. So there is a place for smart social policy, but it’s all about the lodestar is what can dollars and cents accomplish versus what can creating room for the cultural forces that we want to see thrive. So when I see someone like Musk, do I see him as an imperfect and flawed figure. Of course. But also he’s someone who represents a kind of cultural force. And I see that as healing. Yeah and I want to say that I’m in prodding you this way. I actually agree with what I take to be part of your evolution. And in part, I agree with it because I think the American economy overall just looks different in 2024 than it did when we were making a lot of these arguments earlier that we have in the run up to the financial crisis, the run up to the financial crisis, and then there was a period of real wage stagnation in American life, in a climate of low inflation, where there was room for government policy to be more activist. And that moment, in a way, gave us the first Trump presidency. And I think there’s a lot less room for that right now. I think the shadow of inflation hangs over. Fiscal consolidation looms. And the bill for entitlements is coming due. But then more generally, the Uc economy, while the Biden era inflation was dreadful for a couple of years, it’s actually done better by working class Americans who were the core constituency we were worried about then. Did the economy of George W. Bush the last 10 or 15 years have been better for working class Americans than were the Great Compression of wages. Yes, upper middle class professionals are no longer pulling away from the working class. So when you look at those forces, I think, Yes, I think there’s less reason to be quite as activist in public policy, in support of the working class relative to when we first started writing about these issues. And I agree with you that in the best version of Musk and dynamism, there is something that is the best kind of libertarianism. The worst kind of libertarianism is just the kind that is we don’t care how we cut the programs as long as we get to a balanced budget and so on. I am and always will be against that kind of libertarianism. The best kind of libertarianism is the kind that says, why shouldn’t we have self-driving cars and why shouldn’t we go to Mars. And all of these things. And there are various forms of government regulation that stand in the way. So I am at least somewhat optimistic about Musk and influence in those areas. But I do still wonder, and maybe this is where we can come to a conclusion is a political coalition that aspires to run the United States of America for an extended period of time, something both political coalitions have failed to do. Still at its heart, needs a basic economic agenda that says, here’s how we’re on your side, middle America. Here are the policy changes that we want to make to create growth and create fairness, both to create opportunity and to sustain the American dream. And I’m not sure. I’m just not sure I don’t think that the second Trump presidency that you could sit down and say, here is the Trump economic agenda that is an equivalent of even the Reagan agenda or before that, the Roosevelt agenda that most Americans would recognize. I think fundamentally Trump has built this new almost majority on, as you keep saying, anti-left sentiment. And I think that to actually get to the point where it is a durable majority under Trump or any other figure, you would need to be able to say to the average voter, this is what Republican policymaking looks like and here’s how it helps you. And I don’t know. I don’t think I don’t think we’re really close to being there. And I’ll give you I’ll give you the last word. Well, one strange bookend is that we began by talking about how we came to our obsessions with domestic policy in the shadow of 9/11. And when you’re looking at the political economy, debates of this moment and what will unfold in the Trump presidency, it is about another set of geopolitical crises surrounding decoupling, de-risking, how to meet the challenge of China, and our deep enmeshment with China and Chinese economic growth. And it could be that it’s not going to be primarily about our dreams for how we reorder the American class system, how we redress American stratification, but rather just how are we forced to remake the American economy in what could be a war time economy. That’s something that I stay up late thinking about a lot. And the other thing I’ll say about this coalition that I find interesting and exciting. We’ve talked about the changing ethnic character of the coalition I’m really interested in, and this is where our biographies diverge and what you might call the meritocracy voters. I’m really interested in these people who really care about opposing HINDI, let’s say, who really care about public safety, urban chaos, and who are people who are more important in their influence than their numbers. Will a Trump presidency consolidate support within this group, or will a reinvigorated center left be able to win them back. That to me is a really interesting question that intersects with a lot of what we’ve been talking about. Well, on that note, we’ve barely begun to consider the possibilities for a second Trump presidency. But then again, the second Trump presidency itself has not begun. So I’m sure that there will be opportunities for us to relive our misspent youth again again in the future. Reihan and for now, I just want to Thank you for joining me on matter of opinion. Thank you, sir.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam had a vision for how Republicans could reclaim the working class. They never expected Trump to fulfill it.CreditCredit...New York Times

On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” Ross Douthat is joined by his good friend Reihan Salam, a former housemate and co-author and the president of the Manhattan Institute. As young conservatives, the two teamed up in the waning days of the George W. Bush era to write “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

After Donald Trump’s second election victory, the two look back at their prescriptions and debate what they got right and wrong about building a durable Republican majority.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To watch the full episode, click the play button on the video above. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.

The Road to Trump’s ‘Grand New Party’Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam had a vision for how Republicans could reclaim the working class. They never expected Trump to fulfill it.

Ross Douthat: The second election of Donald Trump didn’t just win a majority for Trump himself. It also solidified a remarkable transformation in the Republican Party, which has gone from being a party associated with the wealthy and the white suburban upper middle class to being a party that represents a much more diverse coalition — more blue collar, with fewer college-educated voters and, in this election, with a much more multiracial coalition as well.

That’s quite a shift, and it’s quite remarkable that Trump himself would be the one to accomplish it. So to map out the recent history that brought us to this moment and some of the arguments that Republicans and conservatives have been having about their changing coalition, I’ve brought on a very special guest.

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