Rush Limbaugh slammed Grand New Party, the new book by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, based on a brief description of the book. Reihan Salam has an interesting response to Limbaugh’s critique. Douthat, meanwhile, parries Noam Scheiber’s suggestion that the authors’ hopes for the GOP to serve working-class interests are futile, since “[t]he people who fund and run the GOP are simply too committed to the idea of cutting taxes for affluent people and reducing government spending.” Some conservatives will be tempted to reply that they don’t have much to show for that “commitment” on spending.

But even the point about taxes and the affluent needs modification. The first tax cuts that the Republican Congress proposed in 1995 were child tax credits, and those credits ended up being capped so that the affluent could not benefit from them. And while it is of course true that Bush’s 2001 tax cuts (and even more his 2003 tax cuts) were worth much more money to the rich than to the poor, several of the big-ticket tax cuts he got enacted were designed primarily to help lower-middle-class voters: the expansion of the child credit, for example, and the reduction of the bottom income-tax rate. Now it might be said in response that these policies were not what Republicans were after in their heart of hearts, but what they had to do to win votes. But that’s neither here nor there, since Douthat and Salam are saying that Republicans should follow their advice in part because it would win them votes. And they are not asking Republicans to do something that they have never done before.