Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam
Reihan Salam at the 2008 Texas Book Festival.
Born	রায়হান মরশেদ সালাম Reihan Morshed Salam (1979-12-29) 29 December 1979 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Author, Journalist

Reihan Morshed Salam (/ˈraɪhɑːn səˈlɑːm/; born December 29, 1979) is a conservative American political commentator, columnist, and author. He is the executive editor of National Review and a columnist for Slate, as well as a contributing editor at National Affairs, an interviewer for VICE, and a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. He has also appeared on a number of radio and television shows, including NPR's Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, Tell Me More, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, NBC Universal's The Chris Matthews Show, WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, BBC's Newsnight, ABC's This Week, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report", and American Public Media's Marketplace.

Early life

Salam was born in Brooklyn. His parents are Bangladeshi-born immigrants who arrived in New York in 1976; his father is an accountant and his mother is a dietician. Salam attended Stuyvesant High School and Cornell University before transferring to Harvard University, where he was a member of the Signet Society and lived in Pforzheimer House. He graduated from Harvard in 2001 with a degree in Social Studies.

Grand New Party

He co-authored Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with Ross Douthat. The book grew from an influential cover story for The Weekly Standard, which called for a reinvention of Republican domestic policy.

The Republican party, Salam and Douthat argued, had become "out of touch with its own base", and its Bush-era, big-government policies were "an evolutionary dead end". Salam and Douthat instead advocated "tak[ing] the 'big-government conservatism' vision" of Bush and giving it "coherence and sustainability" by vigorously serving the interests of the less affluent voters who had become the party's base. The platform would include "an economic policy that places the two-parent family—the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security—at the heart of the GOP agenda".

Political views and style

Salam has been described as "Literary Brooklyn's Favorite Conservative". He has written that he intends to "pump ideas into the bloodstream of American conservatism".

I write in the hope and expectation that people read people with whom they disagree to challenge their settled views. Suffice it to say, this isn't generally the case, but I'm happy to continue behaving as though it is, as it is true of enough people to justify the effort.

He strongly supported the Iraq war but has since called it a disaster of "world-historical proportions". He claims to advocate policies that strengthen traditional family structure and has supported gay marriage. He has described as "brilliant" such figures as Canadian Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen and Reagan adviser and neoclassical economist Martin Feldstein.

Among other things, Salam has taken a strong interest in congestion pricing and the encouragement of denser living arrangements, the promotion of natural gas and nuclear power, reform of the U.S. tax code, and the fostering of a more competitive and diverse marketplace of educational providers. He also supports illegal drug decriminalization in the U.S.

He has called for reducing immigration levels to encourage assimilation and integration.

In the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, he argued that white flight and unsustainable sprawl had contributed to high poverty levels.

Drawing on the San Francisco Bay Area as an example, he has identified restrictive zoning policies as an important barrier to upward mobility in America.

He has defended work requirements for welfare recipients, in New York City and elsewhere.

In May 2014, he suggested that while the war on drugs had failed, the time had come for governments to curb alcohol consumption through the use of higher alcohol taxes.

He has courted controversy for advocating the end of automatic birthright citizenship, advocating the legalization of sex work, and advocating the financing of more generous tax breaks for parents via higher taxes on affluent childless adults.

He believes it is "racist" for people to date only those of their own race.

In April 2014, Salam controversially suggested that non-parents ought to be taxed more while parents taxed less in order for the parenting burden to be shared by society.

External links

• Official Website
• Profile of Salam at TheAmericanScene.com
• Profile of Salam at The New America Foundation site
• Slate articles by Salam
• Video debates featuring Reihan Salam on Bloggingheads.tv
• Reihan Salam at the Internet Movie Database
• "They're Young, They're Bright, They Tilt to the Right" A conversation with Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam from n+1
• Review Essay by Salam in March/April Foreign Affairs The Missing Middle in American Politics; How Moderate Republicans Became Extinct
• Appearances on C-SPAN