In “Grand New Party” (Doubleday, 256 pages, $23.95), Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have written a subversive book on public policy and the future of American conservatism. The book is subversive because, in the end, the authors urge the Republican Party to give up on its dream of drowning the federal government in a bathtub. But in doing this, the two young, idiosyncratic conservative writers, both editors at the Atlantic, make a fairly persuasive case that the old Goldwater-Reagan rhetoric of anti-socialism will consign the party to a political wilderness in the 21st century.

At stake is the support of the working class. In the opening chapter of the book, the two authors show that blue-collar voters have flitted between Democrats and Republicans for nearly 40 years. And, once again today, that demographic is ripe for the picking. The kind of big-government, union-driven policies favored by most Democrats fail to address the anxieties of America’s janitors, legal secretaries, and Wal-Mart employees; indeed, as Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam point out, the Democrats want to destroy Wal-Mart, an economic institution the writers say is responsible for a good deal of working-class prosperity. But, the authors argue, the Republicans, too, have failed to assuage the anxieties of working-class and middle-class families and establish through public policy the kind of social infrastructure that will allow working Americans to thrive. The Republicans would be wise to shore up support among those middling Americans toiling in the less glamorous jobs in our post-industrial economy, and Messrs. Douthat and Salam offer a collection of policy proposals they believe would achieve just that.

In the closing chapters, the authors propose that today’s Republicans borrow their policy approach from President Clinton, who of course borrowed much of his neoliberalism from conservatives. To that end, the Republicans should consider a wage subsidy for the working poor, give public schools the same kind of budget flexibility as charter schools, and focus on the growing rates of divorce among those Americans who have not received college degrees.

The book is at its best as it traces the history of the intersection between American politics and American prosperity in the 20th century. In so doing, the authors rescue the term “neoconservative” from its current caricatures in the press, presenting the movement as a pragmatic approach to fixing discrete problems through good government. In fact, much of their book seems to draw on this tradition, outlining ways in which modest shifts in public policy and targeted government programs might stabilize the American family, reduce crime, and expand economic opportunity.

The chapter on the Bush presidency is also smart. Messrs. Douthat and Salam write that the current conventional wisdom in conservative circles — that President Bush abandoned the movement and embraced big government — is “an appealing fantasy.” They compare it to the “liberal fantasy” that President Bush was too conservative. The truth is in the middle, they write.

Bush’s vision owed its greatest debt to Nixon. By now, it’s become a conventional wisdom that the Bush White House resembles the Nixon White House more than any other, and the comparison is deployed, without fail, as a term of abuse. But just as Nixon crafted a new ideological synthesis that made working class conservatism viable in the first place, Bush reinvented the Nixon coalition for a new millennium and attempted to succeed where Nixon failed–by making the Republican Party responsive to the economic concerns of the working class, the Sam’s Club voters who had swung back and forth between the two parties for thirty years, and by expanding the GOP’s appeal beyond working class whites to Hispanics and blacks as well.

In this sense, the two authors are arguing that the things about Mr. Bush’s presidency that maddened the core of the conservative movement — the extension of amnesty for illegal immigration, for example, and his emphasis in 2000 on education and the creation of government-funded faith-based initiatives — were crucial to the electoral successes for Republicans until 2006, and should be models for Republican initiatives going forward.

David Frum made a similar argument in his latest book, “Comeback.” One can also find these sentiments articulated in David Brooks’s columns for the New York Times.

Some other conservatives are noticing the trend, and taking a stand. On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have been aiming some of their barbs at the elite conservatives they believe are trying to soften their party.

And this is the real discussion for conservatives after Bush. Can a conservative politics in the spirit of Goldwater prevail, when two ostensible conservative presidents, each with two terms, failed to undo the New Deal and the Great Society? Messrs. Douthat and Salam say it cannot. Messrs. Limbaugh and Levin would like to try.

Perhaps both sides are correct. The radio talkers are right in that conservatives will lose their identity and cohesion if they pander too much to the economic anxieties of attractive constituencies. Being a conservative is not just a function of one’s place in society; it is also a philosophical set of choices about liberty and, ultimately, the role and size of the government.

But Messrs. Douthat and Salam are also right that conservatives have to frame their ideas to meet the needs of the unconverted if they wish to govern. In the end, it may take a little bit of both. Republicans should read this book if they want to unlock new majorities, but they must also listen to Rush Limbaugh to remember why it is they wish to govern in the first place.

elake@nysun.com