The Conservative Heart Read online

  This is a crisis of confidence in American exceptionalism—and in American conservatism.

  When my mother’s grandparents first came steaming into New York Harbor from Denmark in 1890, they were risking everything to get to a country where everyone—even uneducated and poor people like them—could earn success. And earn their success they did. After a few years, they owned their own farm in South Dakota. They never made much money, but they built their own lives, raised twelve kids, worshipped God freely, and lived to a ripe old age.

  Most people have a similar family story. Virtually none of us come from landed gentry; we’re basically a country of outcasts. Even the descendants of the Mayflower and the Daughters of the American Revolution come from a line of European riffraff with nowhere to go but up.

  That’s why mobility is such a big part of the American Dream. Other countries have castes, peasant classes, permanent haves and have-nots. By contrast, America’s culture is supposed to be one of abundant opportunity. As far as I know, my great-grandfather didn’t arrive here, look around, and say with a sigh, “Well, I guess I’ll be low man on the totem pole from now on.” But neither did he proclaim, “Sure is great to be in America, where I can get a fairer system of forced income redistribution!” He was here for freedom and opportunity. He was here to be measured by his merit and hard work.

  People still want this. But the shadow of pessimism is growing. Many ordinary Americans are convinced that our unique culture of opportunity and mobility is disappearing—that one of our country’s unique strengths is evaporating.

  Every year, Gallup asks a large sample of Americans, “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?”3 In December 2000, 46 percent said they were dissatisfied—already depressingly high. By December 2014, six years into the Obama administration’s plan to create a fairer and more compassionate nation, the percentage had shot up to 76 percent.

  You read that right. Three in four Americans are dissatisfied with the United States.

  What happened? It’s not that there’s more crime. There isn’t. It’s not that people are dying younger. In fact, they’re living longer and with better health.

  The problem is that Americans have come to think the game is rigged and the American Dream isn’t available to everyone. The basic bargain in America is supposed to be that no matter where you start out, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can make out all right. Maybe you won’t get rich, but you can “pursue your happiness,” in the formulation of the Founders, and build a life of independence and dignity.

  But people look around today, and what do they see? Poor Americans may be better off than poor Africans, but they are staying poor. In the wake of the Great Recession, an asymmetric recovery has cleaved the country into winners and losers like never before. Work has disappeared for those at the bottom; government dependency has grown; mobility has fallen. Meanwhile, the rich have gotten richer, with most of the income growth of the past seven years flowing to the wealthiest Americans.

  Even the middle class feels left out. People see corporate cronies getting rich because of their cozy relationship with the government. They see bailouts for huge banks but small businesses going bust. They see government loan guarantees for big companies with friends in high places, but hear “No loans for you” from their local bank.

  Here is a perfect summation of our national pessimism, uttered in December 2013:

  The American people’s frustration . . . is rooted in their own daily battles to make ends meet . . . the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them . . . the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were . . . and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle class America’s basic bargain: that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.

  Who do you think said this? A right-wing critic of the current administration? A political aspirant for president, scoring layups against the mediocre performance of the economy during President Obama’s tenure?

  No, it comes from President Obama himself.

  How ironic. While branding itself the protector of the little guy—the “99 percent”—the administration has not helped the most vulnerable. America has effectively been split in two, with poor people falling farther and farther behind.

  I will back this up with plenty of evidence in the coming chapters. But for now, suffice it to say that the administration’s ostensibly pro-poor, tough-on-the-wealthy agenda has actually made things worse. Today, there is unprecedented opportunity and prosperity for those at the top. But at the bottom, the chance to work, rise, and earn success is disappearing.

  But if the American Dream is fading for millions under the current administration, why aren’t Americans turning to conservatives for better solutions?

  Simple: People don’t think conservatives care. One recent poll found that 56 percent of Americans say they believe the word compassionate describes the Republican Party “not at all well,” versus 5 percent who say it describes the party “very well.”4 If you take elected Republicans, paid staff, and blood relatives out of that last number, it probably rounds to about zero.

  Where did Americans get this idea? From their own ears, that’s where.

  When Americans listen to the right, they hear us talk endlessly about debt, deficits, taxes, spending, and fiscal responsibility—and conclude that all we care about is money. They hear conservative politicians declare that the only thing you need to get ahead in America is a willingness to work hard—and they conclude we are out of touch. They hear some Republican leaders characterize people at the bottom as moochers—and conclude we do not care about their struggles. They hear us rail against “big government”—and conclude we just want to lower tax rates for billionaires.

  The political left has failed in its fight for the poor, and not just during this administration. The failure goes back many decades. But truthfully, there has been little alternative coming from the political right. Too often, the right has failed even to acknowledge the problems of poverty and unequal opportunity. And so, when the president utters words that effectively indict his own policies, there’s no real reaction.

  Progressives in America have always insisted that we focus our attention on the plight of the poor and vulnerable. I admire them for speaking up. However, as I will show in the chapters that follow, they have failed in that fight because they misdiagnose the problem struggling Americans face. They often treat work as a punishment, view struggling people as liabilities to manage, and focus on unequal distribution of incomes instead of unequal and insufficient opportunity. As a result, progressive politicians try to help the poor with government redistribution programs that frequently exacerbate the problem. These intrusions lower opportunity, reduce our ability to create actual private-sector work, leave more people dependent on the state, and effectively split the country into two Americas even more quickly.

  If we conservatives were as smart as we think we are, our movement would have already seized on this as a tremendous moral and political opportunity. “Look,” we might say, “the other guys have made the poor worse off. That’s immoral!” Stunningly, however, we don’t do that.

  Instead, most voices on the American right have failed to acknowledge that there is a crisis of poverty and insufficient opportunity—that we are, in some respects, two Americas. And even when conservatives do acknowledge this, many often discuss the problem in ways that alienate the American people by implying that those who are struggling just don’t want to work hard.

  When people find out that I run AEI, they often begin venting their frustrations with Washington. I cannot count how many conversations have boiled down to the same basic conclusion. When many people assess the political landscape, they see two choices: a heartless, pragmatic party on the right and an imprudent but compassionate party on the left. Americans are good people, so given that rotten choice, compassion almost always wins. That’s especially t
rue in times of hardship. So the political right loses—and, more importantly, vulnerable Americans are left with almost no one in Washington who both projects empathy for their struggles and proposes policies that will actually attack the root causes of those struggles.

  Conservatives are in possession of the best solutions to the problems of poverty and economic mobility. Yet because we don’t speak in a way that reflects our hearts, many Americans simply don’t trust us and are unwilling to give us the chance to implement those solutions. They know instinctively that outmoded redistributionist arguments generally yield lousy results, but they feel they have no palatable alternative. And so the poor might not starve, but they are staying poor. That is simply unacceptable.

  I believe that poverty and opportunity are moral issues and must be addressed as such.

  Some of my fellow conservatives are hesitant to accept this. I hear pretty frequently that we should focus on economics and not morality. That is dead wrong and a false choice besides. Economic issues are moral issues. Americans are not materialists. The vast majority of Americans want public policies that are not merely economically efficient, but also morally just. Lifting vulnerable people up and giving everyone a chance to earn success is primarily a matter of compassion and fairness. And approximately 100 percent of Americans care about these things. As New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, virtually everybody—right and left, young and old, religious and nonreligious—has “moral taste buds” that crave the universal values of compassion and fairness.5

  So when conservatives fail to invoke compassion and fairness in our bid to solve society’s problems, we preemptively surrender arguments with near-total support from the public. That’s insane. If conservatives want to become a true majority movement and unite the nation in a way that lifts up everyone, then we need to build our message around majoritarian values. Compassion and fairness are majoritarian values.

  We need to learn from self-identified liberals, who encompass just a quarter of the population but boldly claim to fight for the “99 percent.” Progressives understand that minorities fight against things while majorities fight for people. Even though they are the political minority, they see themselves as a majoritarian social movement that aims to fundamentally transform America. And they are succeeding, because conservatives have ceded the moral high ground and contented themselves with railing against the terrible things the left is doing to America.

  That needs to change. The time has come for the American right to reclaim the moral high ground and transform itself from a protest movement into a social movement. We need to stop focusing just on what we are against and boldly proclaim what we stand for. We need to put forward a hopeful, optimistic governing agenda—one that focuses on improving the lives of all people, especially the most vulnerable, through authentically conservative policies. And if we want to win elections so we can do all this, we must remember how to speak in a way that reflects the moral bedrock of our cause.

  We must build a social movement that is dedicated to ensuring every citizen’s opportunity, regardless of his or her station in life, to pursue happiness and earn success. We must deputize every American as a hero on behalf of others who are being left behind. We must make our coalition the undisputed moral champion of fairness and compassion in American politics.

  This absolutely does not mean that we must shift leftward or soften our convictions. To the contrary, we must show the American people a new vision of compassion and fairness that is written on the conservative heart.

  WHAT IS WRITTEN ON THE CONSERVATIVE HEART?

  The sad truth is that millions of Americans today think conservatives are oblivious to the struggles of their everyday lives. That has to change if we want to see our movement truly ascendant. But before we explore how to do that, let’s spend a moment reflecting on what most conservatives truly believe about helping others. Forget how we are portrayed in the media; forget how we clumsily cast ourselves in public debates. Here’s what my experience as a social scientist, my years at the helm of AEI, and my daily interaction with all sorts of Americans tell me is written on the conservative heart.

  There is a common misconception that conservatives are materialistic. We are not, and this confusion is a central political irony of our time. Progressives truly want to help the poor but have tried to solve poverty primarily with government money, relegating talk of culture to the past and focusing more and more on income inequality. The obsession with redistribution for its own sake comes skillfully wrapped in the moral language of fairness and compassion. This is materialism tarted up to look like moralism.

  On the other hand, though conservatives often wrap our arguments in lackluster materialistic language about tax rates and GDP growth, our philosophy takes a uniquely holistic view of human dignity, the conditions of earned success and human flourishing. The conservative heart rebels against the modern world’s siren song that instructs us to love things and use people. We know that human dignity has deeper roots than the financial resources someone commands. We may wear the rhetorical uniform of materialists, but conservatives at heart are moralists.

  Moral hope, not lust for wealth, is the reason conservatives delight in entrepreneurialism and classic American success stories. President Obama, of course, spoke extensively of “hope” in 2008. But many Americans believe this turned out to be a hollow promise—little more than a chimera wrapped in government help for people struggling to get by.

  It is conservatives who stand for true hope, a hope that returns power and agency back into the hands of ordinary people. We extol free enterprise, self-reliance, and ethical living—the foundations of a good life, no matter how much money someone makes.

  And what about the role of government in helping the needy? Contrary to what we often hear, the vast majority of conservatives agree with the great libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek and President Ronald Reagan that the social safety net for truly indigent people is a great achievement of modern civilization.

  Ironically, one key reason we so often fight to limit government is that fiscal profligacy actually poses a massive threat to the social safety net. Conservatives know that only a return to fiscal conservatism can guarantee the solvency of the safety net, and ensure that full-blown austerity will never inflict massive pain on those who can least afford to bear it. Because we believe in a true safety net, we must protect it with fiscal discipline. There is no other way.

  What is more, traditional conservatism is the only way to make the safety net unnecessary for the most people. Only a culture of opportunity, fueled with a policy agenda of education reform, private job creation, and entrepreneurship, can truly set people up to flourish.

  So why do conservatives so often complain about the safety net? Because as it is currently administered, it does not equip citizens to build meaningful dignified lives of their own making. The conservative heart demands more for the poor than subsistence and dependence. As a result, conservatives define success by how few people need help from government programs, not how many we can enroll for government help. We have seen how the number of Americans on federal nutritional assistance (“food stamps”) has skyrocketed in recent years. Some look at those figures and see great success. They say, “Hey, look! We helped all these people! Isn’t that fantastic?” But conservatives in touch with their hearts will reply with incredulity: “We have sixty-some percent more people on food stamps five years after the end of the recession than we had at the beginning? That isn’t success. It is failure.”

  Conservatives understand that there is nothing soft about true compassion. Real compassion is steely-edged, hard-core stuff. True compassion means telling a friend, “I can’t help you if you don’t stop using drugs,” or, “I can’t help you if you won’t pay child support.” It means only helping people who are ready to help themselves. And when they are ready, it means providing genuine support that effectively addresses the whole person.

  While we sometimes exp
ress ourselves poorly, ours is not a worldview that sees poor people as liabilities to be managed. Conservatives fundamentally view poor people as dormant assets to be enlivened. The poor are not a burden on society in need only of charity. They are an untapped source of strength and growth, so long as we have the optimism and confidence to help them as they build their lives. Charity is important, but what poor men and women really need is investment. That’s why conservatives insist on work as the central solution to poverty, and why work is so central to this book. As I will explain in depth, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think work is a punishment and those who see work as a blessing.

  The conservative heart is emphatically in the second camp. That is why we admire hard work, admonish people who slack off, and support policies such as work requirements for welfare. We understand that when society empowers people to work for social assistance, we help those people twice. First, through welfare, we are helping meet their immediate material needs. And second, through work, we are helping them earn success—the key to a fulfilling and dignified life.

  Earned success, by the way, is also what we believe people want. People naturally feel dissatisfied with simply having things given to them for free. It is the mission of the conservative movement—the very reason of our existence—to make it possible for every single American to earn his or her own way.

  But the blessings of work go far beyond the alleviation of poverty. Conservatives know—and must argue tirelessly—that meaningful work is not limited to jobs that pay a lot and require college degrees. Everyone who creates value, from venture capitalists to landscapers to stay-at-home moms, is engaged in meaningful work of transcendent value. Conservatives know this, and contrary to caricatures, most grasp that most people who are falling behind are not doing so on purpose. The core problem is not that too many people are “taking” public support, but that too many lack a real opportunity to “make” a living. The changing structure of the American economy, the Great Recession, and the policies of recent years have all conspired to keep these people down. Our job as conservatives is to champion them.