The Road to Trump’s ‘Grand New Party’

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.

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.

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, D.C., 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. That led eventually to the publication of our jointly written 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 that got right and the things that 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.

Reihan Salam: I am honored and delighted to be with you, Ross.

Douthat: Are you? Are you honored and delighted?

Salam: 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.

Douthat: I know. We were talking about this beforehand, that this is 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?”

Salam: Although, 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 after midnight, Ross Douthat is going to be awake and we’re going to talk and we’re going to think about it in real time, and that is a very precious gift.

Douthat: That’s right. That’s how the magic happens. Me, sitting in a food-spattered kitchen — spattered by myself, to make it clear.

Salam: To be clear.

Douthat: I don’t want to blame my wife and children for the food spattering. So let’s go back in time.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: We met in the early 2000s in Washington, D.C.

Salam: Really met then.

Douthat: We really met then. No, technically, we met as undergraduates at a panel held at the Harvard Institute of Politics that featured Bill Kristol during the George W. Bush presidency. So at that point, you were doing a lot of theater as a Harvard undergraduate, I believe.

Salam: That’s right.

Douthat: And I was running the conservative newspaper. So we didn’t have a lot in common except that you were, you know, interested in hearing Bill Kristol speak.

Salam: Except that 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 boomer parents, growing up in this secular milieu. I came to it as a son of immigrants, growing up in an outer borough of New York that had been transformed by Rudy Giuliani and 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.

Douthat: Yeah, and as I remember it, we were also like 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, D.C., was about foreign policy.

This was the period after Sept. 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, D.C., at that time — certainly on the political right, where there was, obviously, a sort of rally around George W. Bush’s foreign policy. And then that foreign policy sort of soured as the Iraq war ran into difficulties.

And I think we — maybe not completely consciously and deliberately — were 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.

Salam: Indeed.

Douthat: Totally different now, of course, when domestic policy is very hot.

Salam: 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 it means to modernize a tradition.

For me, I was someone who was very market oriented but also someone who was really interested in the idea of emerging critiques of 1990s capitalism and what we should take seriously and what we should 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 experienced as undergrads and had been around.

These ideas were already in kind of 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.

Douthat: And it was coming at this moment when — to try to put it in historical perspective — you had a Republican Party that had not been 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, rising crime rates and a sense of foreign policy weakness.

And so out of that, you had this Republican Party that was organized famously around some combination of social and religious conservatism, foreign policy hawkishness and free-market economics.

Salam: The three stools, as they often said at the time.

Douthat: Right. The three-legged stool.

Salam: Right. No, no, the three-legged stool. [Laughs.] Not three separate stools.

Douthat: But that is a serendipitous mixed metaphor because by the time we were young and writing, it seemed 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.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: 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.

Salam: Yes, and the ownership society.

Douthat: Right. The ownership society is the idea that you were going to essentially use different government policies and levers to build a 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 figure out: What would a Republican Party that wasn’t just doing tax cuts for the rich be interested in?

Salam: What if we actually took these ideas seriously and had the right intellectual formation and foundation for them? I think that’s exactly right. In the second term of the George W. Bush presidency, there was this line of argument of call it Mainstream Conservative Inc.

That was essentially saying: 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, etc., etc.

But 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 part of what we wanted to do was — we were not, as I recall, 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 the 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 be something that makes sense, given the ways in which the economy is changing?

So I think we were filling in 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 would seize it.

Douthat: Right. 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, an 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 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, that was where you got basically the policy agenda that we tried to sketch out in the book.

Salam: 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 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, a Long Islander who was 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 in 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 were obviously an ardent pro-lifer and 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 the 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 that there has to be this class break. There has to be this cultural break — the Ross Perot voters, the Northern secularizing working class, the multiracial working class who bring it in. And we were actively fantasizing like lunatics about who is the person who could actually break that and change that.

Douthat: Right. But before our fantasies, let’s say, collided with reality, there was this period when, I would say, our ideas were completely rejected, which was 2008 to 2012.

Salam: A “20??” [Laughs.]

Douthat: Right. I mean, the period in which our ideas are rejected may extend indefinitely into the future, but there was a special rejection when we wrote this book. It came out at the very end of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the financial crisis hit and Barack Obama was elected president. And the mood in the Republican Party picked up on the mood you’ve already described, right?

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 the Republican Party ran with that. And this gave us the Tea Party era.

Salam: Yup.

Douthat: 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.

Salam: And I think what happened in the Tea Party moment is that people saw discontent, they saw opposition to Obama, they saw a weak economy and they saw this grass-roots energy. And the narrative about the Tea Party was this small-government thing, and I think you and I both saw 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.

Douthat: Right. And without getting too deep into the policy weeds, the specific ideas that we associated with and argued for in the book — and have in different ways argued for since — fit into the idea that the welfare state has to be based on respect, reciprocity and support for certain valuable habits and ways of life, right?

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: So we spent a lot of time arguing for family support that would make it easier to have and rear children — again, with an explicit link between some form of responsibility and whatever way the government was spending money, right?

And that, to us, was the sort of 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 I think it’s fair to say they had no positive vision of what the government policy and public policy could be doing to help working Americans in that particular moment.

Salam: The Bush-era positive vision had been discredited, fairly or otherwise. But what was interesting in that moment is: 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. 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. You know what I mean?

Douthat: Well, this is sort of comical, given what happened next, but they were afraid that if they supported anything that seemed too much like big government, then they would be attacked as socialists, RINOs and so on. And none other than Rush Limbaugh attacked us.

Salam: Right, right.

Douthat: We were not important enough to be consistently attacked. 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 what followed four years later.

Salam: And what happened to that entire world of people who notionally were committed to this really hard-core libertarian, small-state vision? Suddenly some of those people are the ones who flipped most aggressively to this very different vision.

Douthat: Right. 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 sort of a larger group of policy writers to which we were somewhat attached that got called the reform conservatives or the reformicons.

Salam: I remember it well.

Douthat: We’re really giving listeners the truly deep cuts. But I think pretty clearly there was a narrative that said: OK, 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 —

Salam: The rise of Donald J. Trump

Douthat: Right. As the actual embodiment of the blue-collar populist tendency that we had been describing. Or was he?

Salam: And of course we would think this, but 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 —

Douthat: But we didn’t. We didn’t anticipate him. Let’s be fair to our own limited foresight.

Salam: Absolutely not. No, no, no, absolutely not. So here’s what I’ll say about that reform conservative moment. 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. [Douthat laughs.] 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” — the idea of: Do you feel safe? Do you belong?’

Donald Trump, the first thing that Donald Trump 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 wasn’t 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.

But a multigenerational, blue-collar, working-class American, maybe whose life has been a little bit chaotic at the edges, isn’t the hero of that 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. 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 every now and again, there was a flash in the pan, there was someone who had run on this but would never penetrate or 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 them in 2012, ambivalently.

So that was, to me, what was so fascinating.

Douthat: You mean by going after Romney’s corporate raiding and outsourcing?

Salam: Exactly.

Douthat: Right. No, there was some sort of proto-Trumpism in the way that Obama ran against Romney as an embodiment of borderless, anti-patriotic capitalism.

Salam: The Obama-to-Trump voters didn’t change. It’s the coalitions that changed around them.

Douthat: But to me, that power that Trump had 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. 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.

I think there was potency in that story, and it would’ve helped Rudy Giuliani in 2012, and it would’ve 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 U.S. jobs to China.

Salam: And the ethnic and demographic transformation of the country.

Douthat: Right.

Salam: And against a backdrop of collapsing birthrates and this deep intergenerational tension that stems from that — he put it together.

Douthat: Right. He put it together, but 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.

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.

Salam: In the right competitive states, yes.

Douthat: 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: OK, Trump did a version of what we 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 G.O.P. coalition. What do you think?

Salam: No, that all sounds exactly right. This was a very strange moment for both of us because, first of all, in “Grand New Party” we literally were saying: 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, wrestling with questions of ethnic change and immigration. I look back at the things I was writing in the second Obama term, and it’s just crazy. I mean, not to pat ourselves on the back, but things that have now become total clichés — like, just getting savagely attacked for saying: 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.

Douthat: Right. Just to clarify our own perspective, we were immigration hawks relative to George W. Bush and John McCain. Our view was that securing the border and having some kind of skills-based immigration policy that limited low-skilled immigration was 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 and to a lot of the descendants of recent immigrants than just saying, “Oh, we’re going to legalize everyone who’s here and” — not open the border, because the open borders moment had not yet arrived on the political left.

But at the very least, the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party had to move substantially to the left on immigration.

Salam: Exactly. An argument was that 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: Oh, 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.

You know, we had a scheme, we had a plan for what it was going to look like, and then it actually happened this much more chaotic way.

Douthat: Right. 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 multiethnic, blue-collar majority on that basis.

Instead, we had Trump winning a minority of the popular vote kind of president, making much darker, more sweeping and, again, in my view, more toxic appeals. But this is my core question: How did we get from there to here? Because in 2024, as I said at the outset, the Republican coalition looks like — 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?

Salam: There are two phases. One is during the first Trump presidency, 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 know, people who had been, call it respectability-seeking conservatives, were ambivalent about Trump. And when they actually turned, when they embraced him — the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, when you think about the kind of early stages of woke discourse — there are a lot of things that happened there, where you saw this kind of diaspora of folks on the broad center-right going in really different directions, depending on what it is that animated the most.

Trump was someone who galvanized this. I think that that’s important to remember, that there was something that happened during that first presidency.

Douthat: 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 sort of 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 sort of a retreat from urban policing.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: A spike in crime, so crime came back. You had, in the beginning of the Biden administration, an unwise stimulus package and recovery bill that goosed inflation and brought inflation back, which 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.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: So you could tell a story where 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.

Salam: Yeah.

Douthat: 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?

Salam: That’s one reason I stress these two different periods from the first Trump presidency and then the Biden presidency.

So, big picture, 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 have that Trump was the one thing standing against that.

So I think that 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.

You know, in 2020, 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 it was pretty chaotic in 2020, right?

And then despite that, the massive gains that he made in that election against this whole of society effort —

Douthat: Well, he didn’t make massive gains relative to 2016. He made massive gains with a certain set of voters, again, minority voters, for instance, while losing voters in the suburbs, losing pieces of the white working-class vote.

Salam: Right. It’s a good point.

Douthat: So he essentially did a trade-off —

Salam: A less efficient coalition but a coalition that, in a sense, as you’re saying, 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 know — call them center-right normies who are alarmed in some respects by the Trump phenomenon — 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: 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 I don’t know if we have.

Douthat: But centrally that had some very specific economic policies. Policies for how the government taxes and spends and regulates, right? 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?

Salam: 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, “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, “OK, that means that we’re going to import more strawberries” or this or that, things that are low-scale labor-intensive goods. That’s one formula.

Or you could say you were going to have a selective immigration policy and we’re going to embrace trade. 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 and 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-Ryanism. Let’s just kind of see if we can be chill and just hope everything’s going to be fine. And it’s largely rhetorical.

Then there were other people who were real post-neoliberals, anti-neoliberals who didn’t have cadres. They were trying to coexist with one another in this White House where it was, you know, one voice was dominant one day. You know, Steve Bannon had one perspective, and Steve Moore had a different perspective.

Douthat: Right. That’s a good way to distill it, right?

Steve Moore, for those who don’t know, is a long-term sort of right-wing supply-side economist who 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 into 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 Week became a joke.

Salam: Right.

Douthat: 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.

Salem: 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’s 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 —

Douthat: But is there any chance that the Republican Party is about to not be the party of private property and wealth building?

Salam: No, no, I think you’re right.

But I do think that you have some people on the right who basically embrace kind of left ideas about inequality and what have you. And I think that’s a dead end.

Douthat: Right. So just to sort of set out categories: There is a kind of thoroughgoing populist right that essentially shares not the prescription but the sort of critique of how the American economy has performed for the last 30 years that you see on the left.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: That says the economy has just not worked for 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, right?

Salam: 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.

Douthat: Tariffs 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 right, I think he has come to inhabit sort of that libertarian space where he’s ended up in charge of a commission that’s supposed to figure out how to, you know, transform the federal government —

Salam: Slash trillions of dollars of federal spending —

Douthat: Right. That is not the Tea Party, but it has something in common with Tea Party ideas.

Whereas the Vance perspective, in certain ways, it goes all the way to the sort of deep structural critique you were talking about that you don’t agree with. But in part, it’s just more based around the idea that the working class in America needs certain forms of help and support that it hasn’t gotten and that traditional Republican policymaking making hasn’t delivered.

Salam: Yeah.

Douthat: And I see that as the tension inside the Trump administration going forward. Are we returning to a kind of dynamism-oriented libertarian government cutting? Or is there some sort of populist synthesis available?

Salam: 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 occupy that space?

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.

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 families or networks of families or community. It’s a pluralistic vision for what the world, 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 that 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 JD is thinking about in a really impressive, earnest, genuine way — I think he’s wrestling with problems that are really, really hard for government to solve. And I think a lot of thoughtful people, including us in earlier eras, were kind of thinking about what can government do to kind of affirm certain ways of life or what have you.

And I guess I’ve come to find those things less tractable, but what I do find tractable is some of the kind of zany dreams of terraforming Nevada as well as terraforming Mars. Just stuff like that.

My dream second Trump presidency would take big swings like that and hopefully not have them end in tears and 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. I just think that the game of inches on social policy is ultimately not going to be creating a culture that celebrates and allows families to thrive.

Douthat: Right. So ultimately, you have turned against some of the arguments in our book, right?

Salam: Oh, Ross.

Douthat: Not turned against, precisely, but our original brief was that the Republican Party and conservatism need to be working in the nuts and bolts of government.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: To a degree that sort of progressives take for granted, and focused on not sweeping policy interventions but carefully tailored policy interventions that support work and family, right?

And I do think that in your arc, the experience of watching Trump come along and sort of sweep all that off the table with his Trumpian style. Watching then the left come along and, in my formulation, bring back the 1970s in certain ways has brought you back around not to the Tea Party but, let’s say, to Ronald Reagan.

I think you’re in a sort of 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.

Salam: That’s not entirely unfair.

Douthat: Right.

Salam: I do think that, you know, remember —

Douthat: You have betrayed me, Reihan. [Laughs.]

Salam: 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.

Douthat: The Biden administration did do, temporarily, a version of the kind of family policy —

Salam: The biggest, most ambitious version, and look, we could litigate specifics of this or that policy, but I think that that was humbling for me.

Not because I now believe that, oh, let’s jettison the child credit or what have you, but it was humbling because these are things that they attempted to do. And look at that child credit. One year. Did it mechanically reduce poverty, and did it have some salutary effects? Absolutely.

Douthat: Birthrates, Reihan. Even on the margin.

Salam: But did working-class and lower-middle-class people — was this something that people were like: We’re going to have to fight for this. Was this something that created a groundswell?

Douthat: No, it did not. It did not have anything like the political effects that the Biden administration expected. I agree.

Salam: And that’s right. And also, I think there was another element of the “Grand New Party” argument. A lot of it was corrective, and a lot of it was: Look, we’re not going to dismantle the New Deal-era welfare state.

There have been moments when 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, 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, that is ultimately going to have to be cultural change.

And 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 an 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 the lodestar is: What can dollars and cents accomplish versus what can create 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.

Douthat: And I want to say that 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 —

Salam: In the run-up to the financial crisis. Yes.

Douthat: In 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 when there was room for government policy to be more activist. And that moment, in a way, gave us the first Trump presidency.

I think there’s a lot less room for that right now. I think the shadow of inflation hangs over policy activism —

Salam: Yes. Fiscal consolidation looms.

Douthat: Yep. And the bill for entitlements is coming due.

But then more generally, the U.S. 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, than did the economy of George W. Bush.

Salam: Yes.

Douthat: The last 10 or 15 years have been better for working-class Americans than were —

Salam: The great compression of wages. Yes.

Douthat: Right. Upper-middle-class professionals are no longer pulling away from the working class.

So when you look at those forces, I think there’s less reason to be quite as activist in public policy in support of the working class relative to when we started writing about these issues.

And I agree with you that in the best version of Muskian 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 Muskian influence in those areas. But I do still wonder, and maybe this is where we can come to a conclusion: Does 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 need 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 create growth and create fairness both, to create opportunity and sustain the American dream”?

And I’m not sure — I’m not 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 we’re really close to being there.

And I’ll give you the last word.

Salam: Well, one strange bookend is that we began by talking about how we came to our obsessions with domestic policy in the shadow of Sept. 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, derisking, 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 or how we redress American stratification, but rather just how are we forced to remake the American economy in what could be a wartime 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 — in what you might call the meritocracy voters.

I’m really interested in these people who really care about opposing diversity, equity and inclusion, who really care about public safety, urban chaos. 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.

Douthat: Well, on that note, we’ve barely begun [Salam laughs] 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 in the future, Reihan.

And for now, I just want to thank you for joining me on “Matter of Opinion.”

Salam: Thank you, sir.