Grand New Party Is Loose!

Now the book promotion starts: Grand New Party is coming out tomorrow. That’s right. You can order it on Amazon. I think you’ll like it. Ross and I have been thinking about this stuff for a long time, and it feels really good to have something tangible to show for it. He is a true friend, and a great person to have on your team.

I’ll just note that this book is an odd duck in some ways — it is written by two conservatives who are both optimistic about the prospects for and the relevance of conservative solutions, yet we also think there’s a lot of wishful thinking on the right. And we go after it in pretty tough terms. We recognize that liberals and social democrats are right to worry about the changing shape of the economy. Yet we believe that the prescriptions offered by the left often exacerbate the problems they’ve so assiduously diagnosed. All this is to say that we hope the book finds an audience, particularly among those of you who, like Andrew Sullivan and Mark Levin and Jonah Goldberg on the right and Mark Schmitt and Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait on the left, are inclined to disagree with us — to take us on for our oversights, to challenge us where we need to be challenged.

Here’s a clip from the crazy Bloggingheads episode Sang Ngo and Bob Wright very kindly let us record for your viewing pleasure (and puzzlement).

I know I’m very sentimental, so I’ll keep this short: my mother and father are very cerebral people who cared deeply about the fate of the world. I remember spirited arguments about Soviet power, the Contras, the first Gulf War, whether V.S. Naipaul was a racist, Bill Clinton vs. Jerry Brown, when and how the Mughals went wrong. But my parents never had the chance to take part in the wider world of ideas. They basically busted their backsides so I could have the time to read and think and screw-up and dust myself off. My sisters, both a lot older and both of whom grew up under more straitened circumstances than yours truly, made a lot of sacrifices for me too — going to parent-teacher conferences, teaching me how to do long division after I almost flunked out of 4th grade, making me mixtapes. The fact that I share a byline on a bona fide book blows my mind. I hope it’s not the last one. But even if it is, I’m feeling pretty stoked.

For those of you who dared to venture below the fold, behold a childhood photograph that I found in my parents’ house this weekend. Around this point in my life, all I cared about was drinking apple juice and jumping from sofa to sofa. (That’s still very nearly all I care about.)

I’m pretty sure I was mildly dyslexic — you try spelling “Reihan” properly — and I spoke a crazy Banglish patois. I’m pretty sure no one would have ever guessed that I’d one day have something to do with writing words. And who knows, maybe I made a terrible mistake! But anyway, I really hope you guys read the book and find it thought-provoking.