The blue state model — high taxes, big unions, very high levels of government service — as Walter Russell Mead and others will be happy to tell you, is not doing well. The city of Detroit is exhibit A for this theory, but many cities and states are moving in that direction.
Texas (in everything except climate) out-performs California, and masses of people leave blue states for red ones. Clearly, the conservative model delivers a much better life for most people, but the Republican Party, which believes in its principles, struggles to sell itself to the American people, while those damaged the most by liberal government — non-whites and the poor in the big urban enclaves — give their votes by the boatload to Democratic machines.
This disturbs Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, who hopes to correct this imbalance. Not every ex-liberal who spent his or her 20s playing the French horn in Europe becomes an adviser to leading Republican candidates, but Brooks has written a book —The Conservative Heart — that tells them how they can do it. They and some others should take his advice.
“Conservatives have the right stuff to lift up the poor,” as Brooks tells us, but have been less than artful in winning their hearts. They have been too negative, which is the mark of a minority party. They should talk about helping people, and not fighting things. They also have been much too technical in their approaches:
“We spend … too much time explaining economic policy to people who just want to hear how we can improve their lives.” They should embrace the safety net, and try to improve it: “Instead of cutting the safety net, conservatives should be the guardians who protect it. Limit it to the truly indigent, and infuse it with work.”
Republicans should celebrate not just entrepreneurs, but everyday people “who never get rich, but thrive by … building their lives.” They should not demonize liberals, or question their motives: “Most liberals want to help the poor — they just have the wrong ideas about how to do it … We need to better understand what motivates the other side.” Instead of fire-bombing the left, Brooks urges the right to address the “persuadables,” and urge them to try out a new way of thinking.
“To become a transformational moral majority … we need to become a more magnetic movement,” attracting people who don’t yet side with us completely. As Democrats win when they’re strong, and conservatives win when they seem empathetic (see “Bush, George W.”), he urges his side to “trait-trespass” when possible, using the other side’s weapons against them.
The most beloved presidents this country has had were aspirational optimists who communicated the sense that the country was great, that they were ready to lead it, and that it and they would do great things together. The most successful conservative yet was a Democrat until his late 40s who modeled his style on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, and pulled “Reagan Democrats” across party lines.
On July 8, William McGurn wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “the pet government programs favored by liberal Democrats simply aren’t working,” while the policies put into place by Republican governors are. A recent study by the Center for Opportunity Urbanism found that of the 15 best American cities for minorities, “13 are in states of the Old Confederace … black Americans … are voting with their feet for Republican policies.”
The next step is to get black Americans to vote with their hands for Republican candidates. This book can show us the way.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
