With Donald Trump emerging as the last man standing in the Republican race for president, the divided party has left many – particularly staunch conservatives and the GOP’s younger faction – wondering what can rise from the ashes of the 2016 campaign. Where should the party, or conservatism more broadly, go?
Given that neither the Democratic nor Republican presumptive nominees have an ounce of inclination toward limiting government, is a call for “limited government” really what people want in a time when things feel fragile? In a world where people feel powerless, rather than simply slashing government, the path forward for conservatism must involve empathy instead of just ideology, and focus on shifting power out of centralized and bureaucratic institutions, back into the realms where humans are most genuinely connected.
Two books — one by a former adviser to the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, another by a leader of the American “reformicon” movement – shed light on exactly what that might look like. Steve Hilton’s More Human, drawn from his experiences working with government during his time advising Britain’s prime minister, focuses on addressing the ways that people have become less empowered as more and more problems are being “solved” badly by large, unwieldy bureaucracies.
“Empathy is not a word you hear very much in government. But to understand a problem and imagine a solution requires an understanding of the people affected,” writes Hilton, noting that good design starts with an end user of a product or system in mind. Too often, government “solutions” focus on preserving systems or are not built to serve people and are not constructed with human observation and understanding at the core.
Hilton tackles everything from creating a more “human-centered” healthcare system to the education system. Not all of Hilton’s ideas would necessarily be warmly welcomed by the GOP or even the “reformicons”; he is critical of the Earned Income Tax Credit as a means to help the working poor, for instance. But Hilton’s outside-the-box thinking is a refreshing counter to the idea-free zone of our current political climate.
The core of Hilton’s argument indeed aligns with the overall goal of those “reformicons,” especially in his focus on family and civic institutions. “The single-most valuable thing we can do in government and outside of it to make the world a better place for all … is to invest in the infrastructure that matters most: the human infrastructure of the family,” writes Hilton.
The “scale and distance” of government make it poorly equipped to serve families, and “large bureaucracies end up putting their own systems and procedures first – often in the name of ‘efficiency’ – and the individual circumstances of real people a distant second,” he notes, extolling the benefits that thoughtful and human-centered nonprofits like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone have provided in communities where families need help to thrive.
Sounding a similar alarm, Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic notes that many institutions that purport to serve Americans “have not kept pace with our changing society,” and laments that political debates too often focus on preserving and expanding poorly performing programs or rolling back programs altogether. “Conservatives, in particular, have too rarely seen that moving forward from the liberal welfare state (toward a set of leaner, decentralized, market-oriented safety net programs better suited to our deconsolidated society) could well advance our causes better than moving backward from it,” says Levin.
Levin’s core argument is that there is more to American life than disconnected individuals bundled together by a singular federal government, but rather that institutions in the middle – local and state governments, communities, churches, families – should be empowered to be creative and adaptive in addressing problems, noting “public policy in America needs to be more diverse, dispersed, and diffuse.”
For Levin, like Hilton, this is not just a matter of limited government ideological purity but a desire to move problem-solving to a more human-centered level.
“Honing an inclination to subsidiarity would offer us a way of thinking about solving problems together that begins in the neighborhood, in the church, in the school, in the community, and builds up,” writes Levin. “It would mean a political system and government better suited to meeting Americans where they are, better adapted to the range and variety of problems our country now confronts, better positioned to help us try solutions that arise in places as close to the problems as possible.”
For Republicans looking for a vision of what they should stand for, both today and after the dust of this election settles, focusing on bottom-up problem solving and empowering people to help one another is a worthy start. Both Levin and Hilton have written thoughtful and provocative books that should especially encourage those on the right to reconsider how their worldview can move beyond calling for cutting government and focus on solving the problems of an anxious public at a genuinely human level.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and author of “The Selfie Vote.”
