Reihan Salam

Reihan Morshed Salam (/ˈraɪhɑːn səˈlɑːm/; born 29 December 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 appeared on a number of radio and television shows, including NPR's Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Tell Me More, on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, NBCUniversal'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.

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 an A.B. degree in Social Studies.

In 2008 Salam 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.

Salam and Douthat argued that the Republican party had lost touch with its own base and that its Bush-era, big-government policies were "an evolutionary dead end." They 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."

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" figures like Canadian Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen and Reagan adviser and neoclassical economist Martin Feldstein.

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 US tax code, and the fostering of a more competitive and diverse marketplace of educational providers. He supports illegal drug decriminalization in the US.

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, Salam argued that white flight and unsustainable urban 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 the US.

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 by higher alcohol taxes.

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

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

In April 2014, he suggested that nonparents to be taxed more and parents taxed less so that the parenting burden would be shared by society.