The Conservative Heart Read online

  DEDICATION

  In memory of James Q. Wilson

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction The Conservative Heart: How We Have Changed the World—But Can’t Seem to Get Our Footing

  Chapter 1 America’s Pursuit of Happiness: Why It Is the Central Expression of the Conservative Heart

  Chapter 2 Why America Hasn’t Won the War on Poverty: Spending Trillions Without Moving the Needle Where It Matters Most

  Chapter 3 Pushing the Bucket: How Honest Work Ennobles and Elevates Us

  Chapter 4 Lessons from an Indian Slum and an Austrian Ghost Town: Inspiration from a Society on the Make and a Cautionary Tale from One That Disappeared

  Chapter 5 A Conservative Social Justice Agenda: A Better Way to Fight Poverty

  Chapter 6 From Protest Movement to Social Movement: A Road Map for the New Right

  Chapter 7 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Conservatives: How to Talk So Americans Will Listen

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Arthur C. Brooks

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  THE CONSERVATIVE HEART:

  How We Have Changed the World—But Can’t Seem to Get Our Footing

  I remember the first time I saw real poverty. It was the early 1970s, so I would have been seven or eight years old. Flipping through a copy of National Geographic magazine, I found a heartbreaking photo. It showed a malnourished African boy, about my own age, with flies on his face and a distended belly.

  I had never seen poverty like that before. True, by today’s standards, my childhood neighborhood in Seattle would be considered pretty austere. As far as I know, my parents were the only ones in our working-class neighborhood with a college education. Some of our neighbors relied on food stamps. Most of the families were headed by a single parent. But compared to that photo in National Geographic, my neighborhood seemed like Beverly Hills.

  The tragic image provoked two sensations in me. The first was helplessness. There was really nothing I could do for the boy, besides offering up some prayers or maybe sending my allowance to UNICEF. Even as a little kid, I grasped that anything I could personally do would be inadequate.

  After helplessness came indignation. It was not fair that I was well fed and loved in my home in Seattle while that boy was starving to death in Africa through absolutely no fault of his own.

  Of course, poverty didn’t just affect children in Africa. I was born on May 21, 1964, one day before President Lyndon B. Johnson gave his famous speech announcing the Great Society. As I would learn later, it was a time of growing awareness of the crushing poverty that existed in places like Appalachia and Mississippi, as well as America’s cities. We were recognizing that the poverty in our midst was an affront to our sense of fairness, and to the principle that everyone in America deserves a fair shot and a square deal. Was our domestic poverty less severe than that in Africa and India? Sure. But any poverty in a great nation like ours was a problem we had to solve.

  I grew up, went to school, found a job, and started a family. But that image of the boy from National Geographic stayed with me. Not infrequently, I would look back and wonder, what happened to that boy? Of course, there is no way to know his specific fate. But more generally, I wondered, what happened to desperately poor people like him? Was life better or worse?

  We know the answer. Poverty still exists around the world, of course. But on the whole, it has fallen dramatically since I was a kid. Consider the circumstances of the world’s poorest people—those who live on a dollar a day or less, which is a traditional measure of starvation-level poverty. This percentage has fallen by 80 percent since 1970, adjusted for inflation.1 When I was a child, more than one in four people around the world lived on that amount or less. Today, only about one in twenty live on that little. This is the greatest antipoverty achievement in world history.

  So how did this remarkable transformation come to pass? Was it the fabulous success of the United Nations? The generosity of U.S. foreign aid? The brilliant policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank? Stimulus spending and government redistribution?

  No, it was primarily none of those things. Billions of souls around the world have been able to pull themselves out of poverty thanks to five incredible innovations: globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship. And by the way, in places like East Asia, these five things were all made possible by the historic peace after World War II that resulted from America’s global diplomatic and military presence.

  Back when I was a kid, when we Americans saw the world’s poor, they saw us, too. We saw their poverty; they saw our freedom and our prosperity. They threw off the chains of poverty and tyranny by copying our American ways. It was the free enterprise system that not only attracted millions of the world’s poor to our shores and gave them lives of dignity, but also empowered billions more worldwide to pull themselves out of poverty.

  The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars. This remarkable progress has been America’s gift to the world.

  But what about poverty right here at home? Paradoxically, here we have less reason to celebrate. To be sure, poor Americans have made material advances since I was a boy, like the rest of society. And in absolute terms, the American poor live more comfortably than poor people in the developing world. But relatively speaking, our progress in defeating poverty has been utterly substandard. While our values have been beating back poverty around the globe, the poverty rate here in America remains virtually unchanged since Lyndon Johnson’s day. While American-style free enterprise has radically reduced poverty around the world, our own progress against domestic poverty has ground to a halt.

  Even more paradoxically, it is precisely the loudest champions of free enterprise—the heroes of poverty relief in the developing world—who the public trusts the least to fight for struggling people here at home. Conservatives have the most effective solutions for human flourishing in our intellectual DNA. Our ideas have lifted up people all over the world. But the American people do not trust us to put those principles into practice to help those who need help right here.

  MY WINDING PATH TO THE RIGHT

  I didn’t start out as a conservative. First I was a musician, and a liberal bohemian one at that. My hometown of Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in America. And my early path made me exactly the sort of slacker that right-wingers love to make fun of. I dropped out of college at nineteen to pursue my dream of making my living in classical music. During what my parents referred to as my “gap decade,” I traveled the world playing concerts, barely making my rent every month, and having a blast.

  What was I pursuing? Happiness, of course. By my late twenties, I had a steady gig in the French horn section of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. I had moved to Spain to convince a girl named Ester to marry me—which she did. Every night in Barcelona, I got to play the greatest music ever written. On paper, I had achieved exactly what I had hoped for. I had defined happiness as the freedom to pursue my dreams to make music and travel the world, and I’d attained exactly that.

  As the years went by, though, I realized that life wasn’t really for me. I found myself enjoying my career less and less. Looking out a decade or two, I didn’t see a lot of professional happiness in store. I figured I needed to find a new line of work before I got too much older. Unfortunately, there weren’t very many options for someone without an
education. This dawned on me one day as I was walking down a Barcelona street after a rehearsal. I got to thinking, What if I quit music and found a “Real Job”? (That’s what we musicians called nonmusic work.) I started to do calculations in my head, based on what a guy without a college education and no practical skills could probably earn. The numbers were so grim that I started to think about going back to college.

  Easier said than done, though: This was the early 1990s, well into the explosion of college costs. And for a twenty-something dropout like me, scholarship offers weren’t exactly pouring in. That led me back to America, to a job teaching French horn at a small conservatory, and to Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, New Jersey, where I signed up to do an inexpensive BA entirely by correspondence.

  I enrolled in courses in math, anthropology, and literature. To my utter shock, I fell in love with economics. I didn’t know the first thing about the topic beforehand. In fact, I remembered having been forced to take one of those dumb aptitude tests in high school, which proclaimed that economics was the field to which I was least suited.

  But as I studied it at age twenty-eight, it blew my mind at every turn. I learned that market forces tend to win out even when we don’t want them to, and that good intentions are no guarantee of good results. I learned that we can’t change behavior just by passing a law against something we don’t like. I learned that people are complex and respond to different incentives, which is why so many social problems are not fixable through government programs. But most of all, I learned that American-style democratic capitalism was changing the world and helping billions of poor people to build their lives.

  To my shock, I also learned—when sharing this newfound knowledge with my musician friends—that this outlook made me a “conservative.”

  That was a foreign label for me, especially because I was feeling more idealistic than ever. The more I read and learned, the more I believed that everyone—poor, rich, minority, immigrant, everyone—should be able to earn their success. I realized that free enterprise could build a better, more humane world on a mass scale, so long as the United States had the moral confidence to live its own values and share them with the world.

  If all that made me a conservative, I decided, then so be it.

  Little by little, I turned my career toward an exploration of these progressive “conservative” ideals. While teaching music I completed my bachelor’s degree in economics. A master’s degree and PhD in public policy followed, and then ten years of teaching economics and social entrepreneurship, most of them at Syracuse University. (In academia, contrary to what some readers might imagine, I never received a wedgie in the faculty lounge on account of my conservative views. My colleagues treated me with unfailing kindness and respect.)

  At Syracuse I taught one or two classes a semester and spent the balance of my time on research. My research was fun, but some of it was, well, esoteric. One of my articles, published in the Journal of Public Economic Theory (you don’t subscribe?), was titled “Genetic Algorithms and Public Economics.” Another one that didn’t exactly go onto the bestseller list was “Contingent Valuation and the Winner’s Curse in Internet Art Auctions.”

  But the main part of my research was dedicated to two things that almost everyone cares about: charity and happiness. In both cases, I found a startling correlation with political ideology. First, I found that conservatives give more to charity than liberals do, even after correcting for income differences. Much of this difference is due to the fact that conservatives are more religious than liberals, on average, but it still struck me as surprising. Second, I found in self-reported survey data that conservatives are—on average—happier than liberals.

  This finding generated a lot of attention. The notion that political conservatives had a happiness edge on their rivals proved to be controversial, especially given the stereotype that conservatives are hard-hearted disciplinarians who disdain anything touchy-feely. This was not the result I’d expected to find. But the data defied my expectations.

  During these years, I wasn’t just a student of happiness. I did my best to walk the walk in my own life. Every year on my birthday, I resolved to examine my life and intentionally try to sketch the next ten years of my pursuit of happiness. When I turned forty, I couldn’t deny that most things were going great. I had a terrific marriage, three kids, and an academic career I adored. But something was missing: impact. I remembered the kid in the National Geographic, and I saw the people right here in America who were still missing the blessings of the free enterprise system in their lives. I wondered how I could use my newfound skills and passions in the service of these people. I realized that my own pursuit of happiness required that I join the fight to make the pursuit of happiness possible for more of my fellow citizens.

  So I set a goal for myself. By the time I turned fifty, I wanted to be a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the highest temple of the conservative intellectual movement. AEI is a Washington, D.C., think tank started in 1938. It houses some of America’s finest scholars and serves the needs of the nation’s policymakers. Imagine an idea laboratory full of mad public policy scientists and you get a rough picture. If I wanted to do work that really helped people, I figured, that’s where I’d be best able to do it.

  Turns out I only had to wait until I was forty-four. Proving that the free enterprise system makes almost anything possible, this onetime college dropout and footloose musician became AEI’s eleventh president on January 1, 2009, three weeks before the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

  Just a few months earlier, the near collapse of the economy had sent America into an economic tailspin and ensured that issues of poverty, social mobility, and rising economic inequality would be the defining issues of our time. It also led to widespread denunciation of capitalism itself. A populist movement arose that demanded greater regulation of the economy, higher taxes, more redistributive spending—all the things that we conservatives opposed.

  As longtime defenders of capitalism, conservatives had been put on the defensive. For the past 20 years, our movement had basked in the glow of capitalism’s victory over the socialist alternative. But now, it seemed to many that the weaknesses in our economic status quo had finally come home to roost.

  How would conservatives respond to the crisis of American free enterprise? The answer would in large part be determined by our work at AEI.

  THE CONSERVATIVE PARADOX

  Taking the helm at AEI, I spent most of my time fund-raising. The institute has a policy of accepting zero funding from the government and receives all its support from private donations. But I was also thrust into the middle of the hottest political debates in Washington. In addition to voluminous research, events, and media appearances, AEI works directly with top policymakers on a regular basis. For example, we host regular debate training and messaging seminars for members of Congress, an activity in which I became deeply involved. I saw up close exactly how their minds work and how they argued their policies. At the beginning, I would go home and excitedly tell Ester whom I had met that day. Like a little kid, I’d report, “I actually had lunch with Senator So-and-So!”

  “That’s great,” she would reply with typical Spanish sarcasm. “Is he dreamy?”

  Sometimes I’m asked whether my faith in our leaders went up or down when I started working closely with the politicians we all see on TV. Readers might be surprised to learn that my estimation of these men and women actually went up—a lot. It is easy to be cynical about politicians. We live in an age in which tearing down the high and mighty has become a twisted type of public sport. But being a member of Congress (or running for president) is a crushing job. The cognitive demands are intense, the travel is punitive, and the personal attacks are relentless. It’s hard to understand why someone would seek these jobs. Yet they do, and not for exorbitant pay, either. Some just love the perks and power, I suppose. But I can say after getting to know many quite well that most do it because
they truly love their country.

  By the time the novelty of working with politicians wore off, I was able to focus on the problems they were facing, especially those of the conservatives. They faced what I came to call the “Conservative Paradox.”

  If conservative ideals have done so much to lift up the poor around the world, you would think the conservative movement would be gaining strength every single day. And not just gaining strength among wealthy people or Americans with traditional moral values, but also among young idealists, immigrants, minorities, and advocates for the poor—all embracing a new conservative movement and unleashing its power on behalf of America’s most vulnerable!

  Unless you have been living in a cave, you know that this is not what has happened. To the contrary, the conservative movement is struggling to attract new followers, and indeed some believe it will ultimately go the way of social democratic Europe’s conservative remnant.

  What explains this discrepancy between the incredible results of free enterprise in the developing world, the continued stagnation of poor communities in America, and the political unpopularity of conservatives in so many quarters? One answer is simple: The defenders of free enterprise have done a terrible job of telling people how much good the system has done around the world. According to a 2013 survey, 84 percent of Americans are unaware that worldwide deprivation has fallen as dramatically as it has over the past three decades. Indeed, more than two-thirds actually think global hunger has actually gotten worse, in direct contradiction of all the facts.2 Capitalism has saved a couple of billion people and we have treated this miracle like a state secret.

  But there’s more to it than just ignorance. Millions of Americans believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach and that conservatives don’t care. Millions of Americans don’t see the benefits of democratic capitalism extending to them, their families, and the poor. Millions of Americans no longer believe that their children will be better off than they had been. And millions of Americans see conservatives as oblivious to these problems.