I was having a conversation with a good-hearted conservative Catholic woman, and wondering how she could square hard-hearted conservative policies with the teachings of Jesus to feed the poor, heal the sick, and lift up the downtrodden. She said, “oh, we’re working on that”, and suggested I read “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, More Prosperous America” by Arthur Brooks. I picked it up, worried that perhaps it was something real that Ted Cruz might assimilate and use to sound human, assuming he spent enough time in the formation chamber to form a heart. Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan (who supplied a blurb) perhaps; Ted Cruz, not likely.
In some ways, this is a surprising book. Written in 2015, it touches none of the themes that have driven the 2016 elections: no terrorism, immigration, trade, abortion, or guns. There is a chapter about how to bring the Tea Party into the conservative mainstream (“fairness and compassion”, “seize the moral high ground”) that is notable for how misguided and simply wrong it sounds given what we have learned from the 2016 Republican presidential election swamp walk. The book is, instead, about poverty in America. While I disagree with much in this book, I applaud Mr. Brooks for taking on this problem.
This is a rather simple book. The thesis is that conservative principles of capitalism, free trade, globalization, property laws, etc. are the reasons global poverty has declined by 80 per cent since 1980. Our nation is leaving the vulnerable behind, and Americans rightly find this unacceptable. Liberal, big government approaches, and President Obama – all have failed to alleviate poverty in America, in fact, they have made things worse. Americans know this and are rightly skeptical of big-government welfare policies. If we just apply conservative principles to the United States, we will see the same results. (No surprise with this prescription, given that the author is the Director of the American Enterprise Institute.) This hasn’t happened because Americans think conservatives don’t care, don’t have a heart. So, the problem isn’t with conservative policies; the problem is about how conservatives are perceived by the majority of Americans. The answer? Conservatives need to show that they are the ones with values, show that they really do care about poor people, because “compassion and fairness are majoritarian values.” (As we are about to prove in this election.) So fix the education system, with school choice and busting teacher unions, and fix the economy. Unfortunately, noting about how to do the latter; perhaps that will be the follow-on book. The take-away for conservatives reading the book is in the last chapter’s seven talking points: show your values of compassion and fairness, and message conservative policies better.
The centerpiece of this book is the notion that all work is noble. (You could easily retitle the book “Work Solves Everything”) Not just good work, or meaningful work, but, in fact, all work, any work is noble, because work gives us pride and teaches us the right values. So there are no “dead end” jobs. And because “work not money is the fundamental source of our dignity” it doesn’t matter what the work pays, because “work is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.” Would that it were so. And paying attention to people’s unique or brutal circumstances is a “misguided attempt at compassion”; instead, we need to hold everyone, regardless of circumstances, to the same “high standards.” Because, if you have the proper values, it doesn’t matter what circumstances you came from and are living in. Generational poverty? Broken home? Broken community? No education? No skills? Racism? No jobs? Nope, they don’t matter if you have the proper personal values. But these “secrets to real human happiness” have been denied to America by “misbegotten government policies and misdirected culture.” So, conservatives “aim to give every American a shot at the blessing of work, to rescue our fellow citizens from the misery of idleness. “ And “[W]e need to remind every American that it can be done and that they can do it - and we need to build an economy that lives up to that promise.” I suspect many of us could get behind this, and I hope we build an economy that works for everyone, but I doubt it will happen in the ways the author imagines.
There is much in this book that seems like the kinds of things you would say in order to support conservative, capitalist solutions to problems, so it feels very much like a tail-wagging-the-dog story. And much of the critique of exiting government anti-poverty programs is rehashed conservative talking points, although without the nasty edge we have come to expect. Now, I happen to believe that poverty is a terrible, grinding problem in the United States, and I think we desperately need an honest conversation that begins with everything on the table. But this book isn’t that conversation, and it is a shame that “honesty” wasn’t one of the author’s seven prescriptions.
And I believe that most people want to work, and I believe that we gain a lot of personal satisfaction from work well done. We have a crisis in this country around work, both the work that so many people do and the work we don’t have. I think these are the result of systemic problems, and they won’t be solved by unleashing more of the same that has gotten us to where we are now. Again, we need an honest conversation with all the alternatives on the table; again, that isn’t this book. Luckily, there are many folks working on new ways of organizing work, including theoretical work by The New System Project and people creating real alternatives profiled by The New Economy Coalition. Both are worth our support and attention.
As for The Conservative Heart, I have no doubt that Mr. Brooks is a compassionate fellow, but until the conservative heart shows up in real-world policies that actually help people, we can consider it a mythical being, lost in its own delusions.