But as editors at the Atlantic magazine, they are really part of the newly emerging neoliberalism in various new institutions and projects in Washington. They draw on the ideas and thinking of this neoliberal crowd, the future heart of the Democrat party, rather than the conservative and free market think tanks and institutions that form the intellectual base of the Republican Party. ~Peter Ferrara

Ross and Reihan can defend their case on their own, I’m sure, but a few points need to be made here.  The meaning of neoliberalism here is vague, and I expect that it is deliberately vague so that it can include what Ross and Reihan are proposing, but if it is meant in any way other than referring to the support for global free trade that goes by that name it seems to me that it is not correct.  Certainly, it is misleading in another way, unless you want to conflate the neoconservative tradition, from which Ross and Reihan are consciously drawing, with the domestic neoliberalism of the last twenty years.  It would also be misleading when you consider Ross and Reihan’s own description of neoliberalism as “very much an ideology crafted by the upper-middle class, reflecting their concerns and their prejudices in its mix of tough-on-crime posturing…liberal internationalism…fiscal conservatism…and social liberalism.”  It is the last one in particular that distinguishes Ross and Reihan from neoliberals in a significant way. 

Meanwhile, it is doubtful that neoliberalism is actually the heart of a future Democratic Party, and as I noted in a piece for TAC last year the progressive wing of the party had already started declaring the demise of neoliberalism in the wake of the ’06 midterms.  Perhaps they were premature in their declarations, but even to the extent that progressives are not going to repudiate certain aspects of the neoliberal legacy neoliberalism represents the Democratic Party’s past much more than it represents its future, or at least that’s the way it appears right now.  In some respects, the neoconservative and neoliberal traditions do converge or run on parallel tracks, but from what I find in GNP I do see some important differences with neoconservative social policy as well.  In their emphasis on family formation and stability and particularly in their natalist proposals, Ross and Reihan’s vision represents something noticeably different from both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which is to say a policy agenda that actually concerns itself with the interests of families in both economic and cultural terms.     

As I have outlined before in a column earlier this year and in many blog posts, I do not share Ross and Reihan’s confidence in meliorism oriented towards conservative goals and I share Ferrara’s doubt that operating through the welfare state for conservative ends is possible.  It seems to me that Ferrara does score some hits when he questions the efficiacy of the GNP agenda as policy, especially concerning tax credits, and he is right to insist on entitlement reform, but it also seems hard to deny that Ross and Reihan are correct that, as an electoral matter, Republicans have won landslides and majorities in Congress when they have run to reform the welfare state rather than abolish it.  Ultimately, Ferrara doesn’t seem to disagree that this should be the approach, but dislikes the specific proposals in the book. 

There are redeeming features in the GNP vision, some of which echo the concerns of many dissident conservatives, and one example of this is the book’s paired goals of “economic independence and cultural solidarity.”  On the whole, I would say that the goals of a wide distribution of wealth and power and cultural solidarity are goals that Bolingbrokean paleos share with the authors, and where we have differed over the years has been over the question of how to secure the independence that comes from such a wide distribution of property.  The danger of social stratification according to class, which in turn reinforces itself through stratification of access to education and wealth, is a real one, and Ross and Reihan correctly examine the role of mass immigration in exacerbating income and social inequality. 

Where I tend to agree with Ross and Reihan is in their critique of “leave us alone” politics, but we find fault with it for different reasons.  While the latter does represent a real constituency, this sort of politics typically expresses itself in policies that make an idol out of a certain kind of deregulation without also taking any interest in distribution or decentralisation.  From the decentralist and distributist perspectives, this simply enables a different kind of concentrated wealth and power, corporate power, to emerge alongside and in collaboration with concentrated government power.  The “leave us alone” politics wars (often only rhetorically) against one kind of dependence to help create another, and the harm that this does to the nation’s social fabric is dismissed as inevitable or as positively desirable upheaval.  This relates to one of the central insights of George Grant into the problems of American conservatism, which has precedents in old-fashioned Jeffersonian suspicion of concentrated wealth and power, and this is that reducing the size and scope of government will simply expose the people to an economic oligarchy unless those concentrations of power are not also decentralised.