"Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene", writes David Brooks in the New York Times. Instead of rising through the official channels of the movement, he says, "they found their voices while blogging. The new technology allowed them to create a new sort of career path and test out opinions without much adult supervision."

In passing Brooks mentions Will Wilkinson, Megan McArdle, Yuval Levin, Daniel Larison, Julian Sanchez, James Poulos, Matt Continetti and, Ramesh Ponnuru. He then goes on to plug a new book by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — ‘Grand New Party: How Republicans can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream‘. According to Brooks, the book is "the best single roadmap of where the party should and is likely to head" (Douthat isn’t so sure the party will take his advice ).

I haven’t had a chance to read Grand New Party, but it sounds like it’s in the same genre as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers’ America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters. — a 2000 book that argued that Democrats could win back the white working class by focusing on values (this book, in turn, was a successor to Scammon and Wattenberg’s The Real Majority).

These kinds of books are mostly spin. Instead of presenting a coherent philosophical and policy position, they try to craft a message that will appeal to the target group without alienating the party’s base. Policies are chosen for their value as symbols rather than because there’s evidence they’ll actually work. Maybe Douthat and Salam’s book is different. But I’m not surprised that Douthat feels an affinity for the early neoconservatives and Britain’s David Cameron.

Of all the writers in Brooks’ list, Will Wilkinson is my pick. It’s not because I always agree with him (or because he links to my posts), but because he takes political philosophy and social theory seriously. When Will wants to know how the economy works, he doesn’t consult an opinion poll to find the answer.