Editor's note: The following interview with Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, appeared in The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Confidential
The 39-year-old author and editor will steer the Manhattan Institute during a time of upheaval on the right
Reihan Salam has made a name for himself as an iconoclastic conservative thinker. More than a decade ago, he and Ross Douthat (now a columnist for the New York Times) made a splash with a coauthored book titled “Grand New Party,” which argued that the GOP needed an activist policy agenda to win back working-class voters. Last year, in a book on the immigration problem, Mr. Salam called for amnesty, assimilation and a shift toward admitting higher-skill newcomers.
He is a 39-year-old Muslim whose parents emigrated from Bangladesh. He shaves his head and lives in the progressive enclave of Park Slope in Brooklyn. And he is, to the surprise of those expecting a more conventional choice, the new president of the Manhattan Institute, the influential conservative think tank whose ambitions long ago spilled beyond the confines of New York City.
Mr. Salam takes on his new role in the conservative intellectual establishment at a time of unusual ferment. The advent of Donald Trump has upended much that once seemed immutable in American conservatism. Old ideological alliances are fraying.
So will he steer the Manhattan Institute in a sharply different direction? What is his vision for the future of American conservatism? Is his idol the communitarian Edmund Burke or the individualist John Locke? Is he a nationalist or a cosmopolitan? Trump or never-Trump? Mr. Salam isn’t taking the bait.
“I’m a coalition builder,” he says earnestly over a long, animated lunch in midtown Manhattan. He argues that the institute, like conservatism itself, should be a big, open tent. “Conservatism is always refreshed by refugees from other political traditions,” he says.
“When you’re a columnist, your job is picking fights,” he says of his previous work. “When you’re the leader of an institution, you have to build consensus and solve practical problems.”
Think tanks have long played an outsize role in developing America’s right-leaning intellectual infrastructure, and since its founding in 1977, the Manhattan Institute has carved out an unusual niche: It examines urban problems and policies through the kind of market-oriented perspectives that can be scarce in big-city American politics.
“Most of our major urban centers have become political monocultures,” Mr. Salam says, “where a small number of voters—in many cases, a small number of primary voters—are driving rigidly ideological agendas that threaten to undermine public safety and private-sector job growth.”
Though the Manhattan Institute has worked on urban problems with a range of public officials over the years, it had a particularly close working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, New York City’s mayor from 1994 through 2001. Mr. Giuliani was particularly receptive to the think tank’s arguments for school choice, lower taxes, less regulation and a diminished role for public-employee unions.
Will those remain causes for the institute? “The policies you mention will continue to be high priorities, but we won’t succeed unless we win over people” who don’t already share our values and beliefs, Mr. Salam adds later by email. “In some cases, our scholars will make clear, principled arguments that have little shot of being embraced in the moment but that can set the stage for future policy victories; in others, they will try to identify compromises and pragmatic accommodations.”
Additional priorities, he says, include a strong economy and a healthy culture. “I am deeply concerned about what I call punitive multiculturalism—a cultural politics that revolves around the demonization of putatively privileged groups. We want to foster a policy conversation focused on developing the potential of all Americans, regardless of color or class.”
In a sense, Mr. Salam grew up in his think tank’s New York. The Manhattan Institute played an important role, for example, in advocating the influential “broken windows” theory of policing, which emphasizes public order and was put into effect in the city during Mr. Salam’s teenage years. He was raised in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, a neighborhood long home to many Orthodox Jews, and he remembers his parents sometimes working two jobs each, even as they studied—his father for the CPA exam and his mother for a master’s degree that helped her to become a renal dietitian.
Mr. Salam followed his sisters into the city’s elite public Stuyvesant High School (lately the subject of controversy because few black and Latino students do well enough on the standardized entrance exam to get in) and went on to Harvard for his undergraduate degree. His upbringing took place largely among working-class Brooklynites. There were few nearby Bangladeshi immigrants, and his friends came from across New York’s complex ethnic mix. He fondly recalls an Italian-American grandmother in his building who lavished love and lasagna on him when he was boy.
Mr. Salam’s memories of the period around 1990 also include the city’s crack epidemic and the climate of hostility surrounding an African-American boycott of two Korean-American stores over discrimination charges. In Mr. Salam’s liberal family, he says, Mr. Giuliani’s election as mayor in 1993 was seen as “some sort of calamity,” yet he believes there is no denying that the city subsequently improved. These experiences, Mr. Salam says, helped to make him a conservative who embraces diversity while eschewing identity politics.
In keeping with this ideological ecumenism, he has written for a range of publications over the years, including Slate, the Atlantic and National Review, where he worked as executive editor. He says that he has always loved finding and cultivating talented people, something that he is now in a position to do at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. Salam describes himself as a not particularly observant Muslim. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife (a magazine editor) and their 6-month-old daughter.
His hope, he says, is that his growth-oriented vision of urban conservatism will “draw in a new generation of people who feel frustrated by the debate we have now.” As his own family’s trajectory shows, newcomers to the U.S. have always arrived and forged their identities in places like New York. “A conservatism that does not speak to the cities,” he says, “is going to be marginalized.”
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal