George Packer writes compellingly about the decline of conservatism by way of reviewing several new books. Great candid interview snippets from Pat Buchanan make this article a must-read.

Packer’s prognosis, in a nutshell, is that the coming re-emergence of a dominant Democratic Party will be due to the core liberal message being more appealing to large swaths of Americans than the essentially negative, reactionary, fear-mongering employed by the Republican Party since Nixon. He sees this as largely inevitable and systematic, and therefore somewhat misses what is really going on. For example, he writes a propos Ross Douthat and Reihan Salem’s new book:

Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart.

I’m not sure that’s entirely right. From what I can tell from reading Douthat and Salem’s web writing, they’re implicitly hoping to build a new, more logical coalition than the unwieldy one that currently dominates the conservative political landscape. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge corporate interests as a key constituency in today’s Republican party, but rather that they see Republicans drifting away from Big Business and embracing cultural conservatism as the sure path to electoral majorities in the future. If it were to come down to fighting for lower corporate taxes versus social welfare and a pro-life platform, there’s little doubt to where Douthat and Salem’s priorities would lie—they’re hoping to remake the Republicans into a European-style Christian Democratic party. They don’t feel any pressure to worry about any of these cleavages yet, however, as the Democrats are running too far to the left for now to pose any threat of peeling Big Business away from them.

Overall, Democrats should take note of Douthat and Salem: the future will be about building new political coalitions, not about extending the viability of current ones. The current Democratic coalition between urbanites and big labor is as untenable as the Republican coalition between corporate interests and social conservatives. Obama is a unique political phenomenon, a gifted orator who might be able to sell core liberal principles to unlikely voters in the fall. But Democrats had better start thinking about what kind of new winning coalitions they might want to build during an Obama reign. They ought to figure out how to become the party of modernity and liberty, one that is fundamentally pro-urban, pro-environment and internationalist. With energy prices on the rise, the very existence of the Sam’s Club suburbanite and the rural religious social conservative will be squeezed, marginalized and eventually urbanized, rendering the Salem/Douthat-envisaged coalition less attractive a constituency than they seem now.