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Ross Douthat has an interesting post on Sarah Palin and the vision of the Republican Party he (and Reihan Salam) set forth in Grand New Party :
The chattering classes are already inclined to treat the Republican Party as a gathering of gun-toting yahoos with too many damn kids; if the GOP made its working-class populism more explicit, adding economic as well as socio-cultural elements, and found standard-bearers who embody the background and aspirations of the Sam's Club demographic more completely than a son of privilege like George W. Bush, the results would lend themselves to even greater hysteria, condescension and demonization than the Republican Party's current incarnation.I think the coverage of Sarah Palin to date - by colleagues I used to respect and publications I normally admire - at least partially vindicates this theory about the reception that would greet the kind of GOP I'd like to see.Last week, I wrote a review of Grand New Party that made two basic arguments. The first is that Douthat and Salam were not, in fact, calling for a simple injection of economic populism. They did not want a Republican Party focused on the working class. Rather, they want to see Republicans focus on the nuclear family, and they understand such a reorientation to be a de facto turn toward the concerns and anxieties of downscale Americans. Much of their analysis is an extended argument about the economic benefits of cultural traditionalism, and thus the rationality of low income voters who seek to preserve the traditional family structure.