Arthur Brooks: ‘I’m going to stay at it’

Next summer, he’ll leave AEI, one of the most influential conservative institutions in the country. This was announced last month at an all-hands meeting.

His planned departure isn’t a huge surprise to colleagues familiar with his academic work. In his research as a professor of public administration, Brooks concluded that organizations work best when the head doesn’t stick around for longer than a decade.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner in his office in downtown Washington, Brooks says he hasn’t figured out his next step. It could be returning to academia, or going into business. It could be something as different as his first two careers were from his third, although he wants to stay in the world of ideas. “We’ll see what the market will bear,” he said. “I don’t know.”

His successor, he says, should be someone not exactly like him, because another pitfall for organizations is making the mistake of trying to recreate success — which he’s had.

Under Brooks, AEI has grown significantly and moved into a large new home on Massachusetts Avenue, a renovated 1917 Beaux Art building that was once the home of Andrew Mellon, the billionaire businessman of the early 20th century.

AEI has also risen to the top among think tanks, according to Brooks, on the metrics that he uses as proxies for influence, including op-eds published at major newspapers and the frequency at which its scholars are invited to testify before Congress.

He himself has risen to prominence on the Right. He’s a guru to movement conservatives, as well as to many high-ranking Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Brooks has written best-selling books that aspiring D.C. conservatives use as guides and the latest of which GOP presidential candidates, most of them at least, had no choice but to read.

He has one more, a 12th, in the works for before he leaves office. “Unity: A Manifesto” will come out early next year.

“The biggest problem that we have in America today is disunity,” Brooks said.

Partisans are blowing small ideological differences out of proportion, he says, and fixating on them at the expense of agreeing on common ground.

‘I’m going to stay at it’

Disunity and partisan anger, in a way, represents a failing by Brooks.

His ambitions for his and AEI’s work transcended the institution. He sought to change the country and the world. In his 2015 book, The Conservative Heart, he envisioned an American transformation. He called for conservatives and the Tea Party movement to move beyond angry opposition to President Barack Obama and to build a governing agenda that would bring the benefits of the free market to more people, and for liberals to see the empathy in conservatism and embrace it.

But the Republican Party chose a different vision that same year, coalescing behind Donald Trump and signing up for his program of nationalism, populism, and protectionism.

Far from showing conservative heart, Trump, during a presidential debate, claimed the “mantle of anger,” Brooks said.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he announced his planned resignation, Brooks expressed the fear that anger on both sides threatens to make dialogue impossible.

Brooks acknowledges that his brand of free-market, pluralist, optimistic, and inviting conservatism didn’t win the “idea sweepstakes,” but he remains committed to it.

“The matrix of ideas, which rotates constantly, hasn’t turned to that yet,” he said.

“I’m going to stay at it,” he added. “I’m going to stay at it as long as I’m at AEI. And whatever I do next, I’m going to stay at it then, too.”

Brooks says the divisiveness and populism of the Trump era hasn’t sapped his energy for the job and is not part of his decision to leave. But he acknowledges that the current environment does not suit him well.

“Politics, when it’s not about ideas, when it’s only about tribes, is unbelievably boring,” he said. “That’s like watching a hockey game when you don’t like hockey and don’t know either team.”

Some of Brooks’ players are on the ice and in the game. One of AEI’s donors, Betsy DeVos, is President Trump’s education secretary. Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, was an AEI scholar, as was Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. Last month, the Trump administration announced that the think tank’s media manager, Judy Mayka Stecker, will be joining the Department of Health and Human Services.

Yet, others in the institution are solidly “Never Trump,” or just liberal.

Brooks has tried to keep AEI above the fractionalization of right-of-center institutions in Washington.

Charles Murray, the famous AEI social scientist reviled by the Left and a declared Never-Trumper, praised Brooks for not attaching the think tank to one group or another, and particularly for not aligning with Trump as others have.

“There has been not an iota of growing respect for the ethos represented by Donald Trump,” Murray said. “Arthur has not accommodated himself to Trumpism in any way philosophically. That’s my view.”

In the interview, Brooks minimizes Trump talk. It’s not hard to guess his presumptions, though, based on his public statements and writings. For example, in 2016, he wrote in the New York Times that Trump has “an apparent cruel streak toward weaker people that goes beyond the rough-and-tumble of normal politics” and faulted him for “the policy-light, insult-comedy entertainment.”

That is a contrast with Brooks’ self-description as a Matthew 25:40 conservative: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Yet, Brooks claims he’s not distracted by the politics of the Trump era.

Instead, he compares himself to the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at a time when its scientists are being asked to go on TV to talk about the weather of the week when they should be modeling the climate.

“Weather is politics, climate is ideas,” he said. “My job is to keep us out of the weather.”

The climate, Brooks has concluded, is that part of the nation was left behind in the economic recovery and felt disrespected, and that Trump spoke to them.

He believes there is little overlap between the rise of the Tea Party and the ascent of Trump. The Tea Party was a response to perceived overreach by Obama. Trump is about a part of the country despairing.

In response to the rise of right-wing populism, AEI has launched a project on human dignity that features studies geared toward the needs of people who are suffering through economic stagnation, and involves work on career training, opioids, family structure, and other issues.

It’s a way to get back to the business Brooks was in when he published The Conservative Heart, which is promoting capitalism.

“There are days when I look at what’s going on in the conservative environment and I say, ‘Argh,’” he said. “But then again, the reason I wrote the book is not because I was already there but because we weren’t.”

In fact, Brooks was trying to stave off populism before it began, said Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a friend. “He could see a natural trend in the other direction, and so he took steps to lay the framework for a more enlightened approach,” the Republican said.

The pain in Spain

One current that runs throughout Brooks’ work is the idea that he doesn’t want America to become like Europe. Instead, he wants to export American-style capitalism, and Americans’ unique, religiously-motivated charitable ways, to the rest of the world.

Specifically, he wants to keep the U.S. from becoming Spain.

Spain is Brooks’ adopted country. His wife is Spanish, and Spain is where he spent his formative years trying to win her over. He lectures there every spring. His family often speaks Spanish at home.

“Barcelona is beautiful, and the food is great, and the architecture is interesting, and the weather is nice, and the place is completely screwed up,” he said. “And it’s screwed up because of all the things we’re trying to do in America today. And that’s the problem.”

In The Conservative Heart, Brooks compares Spain unfavorably with an Indian slum he visited. In the slum, he notes, the residents all worked and gained meaning and optimism from their work even if they were destitute. In Spain, work is not a priority.

“This is like your brother in law,” he said of Spain. “You just love him. He’s just irresistible, and fun, and great. He’s great with your kids, right? But he’s a drunk!”

In his academic life, Brooks researched happiness and its determinants, including government policies that lead to happiness.

That research suggests to him that Americans have the answer. Earned success, gained through work, is critical to happiness. So is family. So is giving. A safety net to help the poor can also help, but not if the government can’t maintain it because it’s facing a fiscal crisis.

Dependency, on the other hand, brings misery. It could also be self-fulfilling. In his 2010 book, The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future, Brooks warned that the number of people who rely on government benefits could form too large a constituency for America’s system to survive. That’s what Mitt Romney was talking about so clumsily in the 2012 election when he was caught on audio dismissing 47 percent of voters.

“Freedom causes happiness,” Brooks wrote in his 2008 book Gross National Happiness.

The foreboding that America could slip into dependency and become terribly unhappy sits uncomfortably alongside Brooks’ recent campaign to make conservatism more inviting and friendly.

“There’s a tension there,” said E.J. Dionne, the liberal Washington Post columnist and Brookings Institution fellow who maintains a friendship with Brooks, a fellow parishioner at a Catholic church in Potomac, Md.

Dionne wishes that Brooks’ more recent writings, and his calls for conservative winsomeness, could be a part of a resuscitation of Bush-era moderate “compassionate conservatism.”

Brooks’ entire public career, from his academic studies tying happiness to conservative policies to his help editing Murray’s controversial work, has consistently made the case for free-market economics.

“He thinks and tried to prove through his research that most Americans care about others and do not need to be forced to take care of the poor and needy, but will do so willingly,” explained Nick Bailey, an assistant professor of management at the University of Northern Iowa who served as Brooks’ research assistant when he was a professor at Syracuse. “So, he is very driven by core Christian values.”

Personal story

Brooks, though, is nothing like the stereotype of a conservative Christian.

The most readily available details of Brooks’ life and public image run counter to expectations, starting with his oft-noted friendship and partnership with the Dalai Lama, who he’s visited in India this year.

Next, the fact that he began his adult life as a musician, putting off college to play the French horn in the U.S. and in Europe. And that he earned his college degree via correspondence course and went on to get a PhD from the Rand Corp., soon becoming a tenured professor.

He also is known for wearing unusually fashion-forward suits and maintaining a more defined sense of personal style than is typical for Washington.

Brooks’ unusual friendships, his style, his own reinventions and improbable successes — they’re not just his personality, but also the proposition he’s offering. He’s willing to draw on anyone to make the case for his worldview. And, in turn, his worldview is the reason that he’s cultivated those aspects of his personality.

His friendship with the Dalai Lama is based partly on their shared appreciation for the value of work, one of his core tenets. His sartorial display is partly to keep up with his wife, he says, but is also an example of being less bound to conventionalism. His shifting vocations reflect his belief in self-improvement and entrepreneurialism.

“You’re doing policy work when you’re explaining yourself,” he explained.

Explanation is Brooks’ role. His popular books and writings follow an explanatory template. There’s an anecdote, either from Brooks’ own travels or from someone he’s found who exemplifies some policy issue, an anti-homelessness crusader in New York, for example. There’s a quick explication of a related social science study that casts the episode as part of a broader point. Less frequently, there’s a reference to evolutionary psychology, history, or philosophy. Add a dash of self-deprecating humor, and then, it’s on to easily digestible, carefully-phrased conclusions, often but not always relevant for federal policy. At the last second, it might be wrapped into an explanation for why conservatives think the way they do.

It’s easy to read. It’s also the way Brooks speaks, complete with frequent extemporaneous research citations. Conservative Republicans love it.

“Arthur Brooks was, and is, one of the most compelling storytellers this movement has,” said Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who is close with Brooks.

Not only does Brooks believe what he says about the message of conservatism, Sasse said, but he is also “willing to get in the grill of lawmakers, who are just crappy storytellers.”

Brooks’ message, fundamentally, is that the case for free enterprise is a moral one, and that conservatives should make it in those terms. Free-market policies that generate growth and jobs also create happiness, and it would be wrong to deprive people of those.

It’s not a surprise that conservatives and Republicans would appreciate that message.

But liberals also give him credit. Obama chose Brooks to appear on a poverty panel with him in 2015. “He’s very gifted, Arthur, at winning over liberal audiences,” Dionne said.

If it’s just smooth talk from Brooks, though, it’s a long con. Everything he says is consistent with his research. And that, in turn, is consistent with his management of AEI.

After all, half of the job is fundraising. And who better to do that than the researcher who studied administration and found evidence that charitable giving makes you happier?

“The thing that made Arthur such a perfect fit was that a chunk of his academic work was studying fundraising. So, it was kind of like letting Bill James run a baseball team,” said Hassett, Trump’s economic adviser, referencing the father of sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball, who now advises the Boston Red Sox.

“The medium and the message and the marketing and the ideology itself, even the policy itself, can’t be de-linked,” Brooks said. That is why he is, for the next year at least, the evangelist for free markets.

At a recent lunch with GOP senators, Lee said, the group agreed that “if we ever wanted to form a cult, we’d want Arthur Brooks to be the guy we’d follow.”

“Every time we hear Arthur Brooks’ speeches, he says something incredibly profound,” he said. “So profound, that he has a very loyal following.”