Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works Page 2
I went to Butler Catholic Grade School and then Butler High School. Like other kids, I played (but not well) both baseball and basketball, and I saw my first major league game, between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds, at Forbes Field. As in most small towns in America back then, families kept their doors unlocked. Kids roamed neighborhoods freely, but there was always a parent nearby, and they didn’t hesitate to enforce the values of the community. And though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, this world was possible in part because Butler made stuff. While my dad didn’t work in the mill, almost all of my friends’ dads did. That and numerous school field trips to local plants drove home the importance of manufacturing to our community. We had thriving manufacturers like the Pullman-Standard Company, which made railroad cars (it was shuttered in the 1980s and demolished in 2005), and an Armco steel plant, which is now AK Steel. There was a job for virtually anyone out of high school who was willing to work an honest day. And those jobs carried benefits and security that formed the core of the community. Looking back, it’s not a very complicated equation.
Those field trips and conversations with my friends’ dads were extra motivation for me, and many others, to hit the books in school. It was clear then that change was afoot with automation and global competition, so I headed off to Penn State University, where I fell in love with Penn State Nittany Lions football, drank my share of Rolling Rock beer (after I turned twenty-one, of course), and found my vocation in politics and public service. I worked on campaigns and ended up founding the College Republicans club on campus.
After Penn State, I got an MBA degree from the University of Pittsburgh, worked for a couple of years, went back to law school, and became an attorney in Pittsburgh. Three years later, I met my future wife, Karen Garver, who was a neonatal nurse and law student. In 1990, at age thirty-one, I left my law firm to run for Congress, serving two terms in the House of Representatives before running for the U.S. Senate. In all, I represented Pennsylvania in Congress for sixteen years, from 1991 to 2007. And during those years, Karen and I had eight children. We gave them the basics: the security of a good marriage, our time schooling them at home, and faith in our Lord and Savior.
I’ve gone pretty far on the steel-town values of education, working hard, loving your family, and living your faith. That doesn’t mean that we’ve never had problems. We’ve had more than our share, but my family, and our neighbors, schoolmates, teammates, and church members, has shared a common belief that we needed to look out for one another and be there when we were needed. Getting help from the government wasn’t something you wanted—or wanted anyone to know that you had—and you took it only when you absolutely needed it. And even then, you didn’t take it for very long.
There are remnants of that America in some small towns and tight-knit neighborhoods. But my travels during the presidential campaign have sadly reminded me that many of the jobs that were once the basis of those communities for the 70 percent of Americans who don’t have college degrees are all but gone. Over the past few decades, bad corporate and labor leadership, a growing regulatory burden, and competition from low-wage countries have made America less competitive and jobs harder to come by. Economists turn this reality into statistics and tell us that we’re moving from a manufacturing to a service economy and that while the old jobs are gone, new ones will come. But with those old jobs gone, the toll has been more than economic; its effect on families and communities has been devastating.
Much has been made of a January 2014 study by a group of distinguished economists from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley that appears to refute the common perception that it’s harder to get ahead in America than it used to be.1 Examining forty years of data on economic mobility and inequality, the Equality of Opportunity Project found that “[c]hildren entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.”2 Republicans, however, should resist the temptation to dismiss all the talk about declining mobility as another hyped-up crisis—like global warming—and settle back to our old economic policies. For one thing, upward mobility varies greatly from community to community in America. Not surprisingly, it’s the lowest in rural and depressed areas. The poorest kids in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City, for example, are more than twice as likely to reach the highest income percentiles as those in Dayton, St. Louis, and Charlotte. And while our economic mobility rate has not changed substantially over time, it is lower than in other developed countries. Think about that—in upward mobility, the Land of Opportunity is falling behind the rest of world.
Digging a little deeper, the study reveals that globalization and automation in manufacturing and the breakdown of families and communities—circumstances that contribute to economic inequality—have been counterbalanced by a healthier environment, technological advancements that produce better living standards, and more opportunities for women and minorities. But ever-increasing automation and the additional loss of jobs to global competition are without question steepening the incline for lower-educated and lower-skilled workers, particularly men, and their families.
When I campaigned for president in 2012, I was pigeonholed by the media as the “social conservative” candidate who only talked about abortion, marriage, and, of all things, contraception. Anyone who actually bothered to show up to one of those 381 town hall meetings in Iowa or any of my hundreds of other talks around the country would know what an inaccurate characterization that was. But my coming out of nowhere with no money to win the Iowa caucuses, where social conservatives make up a large percentage of the vote, reinforced that caricature. What the uninformed “experts” sitting in New York and Washington didn’t realize was that my stance on moral issues didn’t differentiate me from the field. It was how I integrated those issues into the central discussion of improving our economy.
In a debate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I got the chance to take that message to a national audience. I explained that the word “economy” comes from “oikos,” the Greek word for family. The family is the first economy, and healthy marriages lead to financial success and stability in an overwhelming percentage of cases. It’s no coincidence that the Equality of Opportunity Project concluded that family structure was the most important determinant of upward mobility. Children raised in single-parent households are the least likely to climb the ladder of success, followed by children raised in two-parent families who live in communities of mostly single parents.
Today, marriage rates are at a historical low while illegitimacy is at a historical high.3 And just as marriage—an institution older than any government and the foundation of a stable society—has fallen into this crisis, activist courts are redefining it in a way that extinguishes whatever meaning it had left. Let me be clear—I am not blaming the breakdown of marriage and the family on the same-sex marriage movement. The sexual revolution has been taking a jackhammer to that foundation for fifty years. No one would be talking about same-sex marriage if we had not lost the real meaning and purpose of marriage years ago.
Working Americans are now finding fewer and fewer of the opportunities that we once took for granted. Sure, they might find a good job in the lumber department at Home Depot or driving a delivery truck for FedEx, but long-term, steady employment opportunities—the kind that can support a family—appear to be gone for many Americans. In too many towns, the disappearance of quality jobs has brought not only economic hardship but a host of social pathologies, from alcohol and drug abuse to petty crime, obesity, and dependence on welfare. The teenage mother, the drug addict, or the convicted felon who emerges from these circumstances will find few opportunities to escape a life of poverty. It’s a vicious circle that is shattering American communities.
The folks I grew up with deserve better than the choices either party has offered in the past couple of elections. Liberals promise a big, intrusive, and all-providing governm
ent that sucks the life and faith out of families and communities. But conservatives give the impression that they are unconcerned about the millions of hurting and vulnerable Americans. No wonder so many people stayed home on Election Day 2012. Our country needs opportunities for all, not just the financiers on the East Coast or the high-tech tycoons on the West. And that means focusing on what will strengthen the families and communities of ordinary Americans who want to work.
When I ran for president, I noticed that what stuck in people’s minds was not my policy pronouncements but images (not the ones that political consultants contrive, but something as simple as a sweater vest) and stories like the one I told the night I won the Iowa caucuses. I recalled kneeling next to my grandfather’s coffin, where all I could do was look at his hands. They were the powerful hands of a miner, thick and scarred. It struck me then that those hands dug freedom for me.
In the last few years, a lot of us have realized that we can lose that freedom. In fact, we may be perilously close to losing it right now. America should be a land of opportunity and its people full of hope. But I saw firsthand the hopelessness in the eyes of thousands of our countrymen. Who is going to help them? There are things we can do, but we’ll need the resolve of heroes. This country, thank God, has never been short of heroes.
In the chapters to follow, I’ll explore what went wrong and what killed opportunity for so many Americans. And I’ll share my ideas about how we can rebuild this economy and our communities. If running for president teaches you anything, it’s that no one has all the answers. But there’s one thing I know with absolute certainty—we Americans have always met the challenges that history has thrown at us, and we can meet them again.
CHAPTER TWO
RESTORING THE AMERICAN DREAM FOR WORKERS
All of us have a picture in our head of what the American Dream looks like. It probably includes owning your own home, having a family and a good job, being active in your church and community, sending your kids off to college or technical school, and then retiring comfortably and spoiling your grandkids. Whatever variation each of us has of this vision, the American Dream is always the dream of a better life for us and for our children, of leaving our little corner of the world better than we found it.
If you ask people what trait is most characteristically American, many of them will answer “rugged individualism.” It’s true that this country’s respect for the dignity and freedom of the individual is unique in the history of the world, and it’s at the heart of America’s success. From the beginning of our nation, we have believed our rights come from God, not from the state, and God bestows those rights one person at a time. But it’s important to remember that the American Dream has never just been about the individual.
I part company with the libertarians here. They hold that the basic unit of society is the individual. That’s wrong. The basic unit of society is the family. No one comes into this world as a self-sufficient individual. We start out as the helpless child of a mother and a father, who put aside their own desires and interests to care for us. The family, in fact, is the first society—the first government, the first classroom, the first church. And the strength of the family is the strength of “we.”
I first learned the importance of “we” on my seventh-grade basketball team, and I’ve learned it over and over again bringing up seven children with Karen. No one ever raised a barn, cleared a forest, built a company, or won a war by himself. Call it teamwork, cooperation, fellowship, solidarity, or whatever you like—working with and serving others is the secret not only of success but of happiness.
Two and a half centuries of history have proved that the American Dream is real. Our dynamic free-market system built a ladder of wealth and opportunity that millions have climbed from poverty to prosperity. In America, you’re not limited by who your parents were or which side of the tracks you were born on. What economists like to call “upward economic mobility” the rest of us just call the American Dream.
Ask an American what the keys to success are, and he’ll tell you hard work, education, creativity, perseverance, and some good fortune. In Europe you get a very different answer. A recent survey found that many Europeans believe the keys to success are whom you know, what family you come from, and what connections you have in the government. That’s the attitude you’ll find in a country where government picks winners and losers. It’s not capitalism but crony capitalism. In much of the world, of course, the corruption goes far deeper. Don’t get me wrong—connections help in this country too, but in America there are too many people who have earned their success for us to be as cynical as people in other countries.1
We’re at risk, though, of slipping into the same vicious economic cycles caused by cronyism that have plagued Europe. Our system is increasingly littered with bailouts, tax loopholes, and subsidies that corporations exploit using high-priced lobbyists. Unfortunately, cronyism has been the order of the day in the Obama administration. When big government arbitrarily decides how it will enforce the new healthcare laws and against whom, and when it rewards its favorite “green” industries with taxpayer subsidies, the demons of crony capitalism are set loose.
The cronyism is extending into the boardroom with politicians and corporate executives scratching each other’s backs. Look at the maddening unfairness behind the “too big to fail” financial crises in 2008–2009. Although his bank was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and complete failure, the chairman of Citigroup earned more than $126 million during his two-year tenure there, made possible by a bailout paid for by you, the taxpayer!2
I’m a sports nut, and I like to compare capitalism to a football game. The competition is intense and the stakes are high. There are winners and losers, and everyone is in it to win. Capitalism, like the NFL, has a rulebook and officials who enforce those rules.
Some libertarian-leaning capitalists have become so frustrated with government that they want to eliminate federal agencies and officials responsible for enforcing the law. Every football fan complains about the officials, particularly when it seems like they are throwing flags on every other play, but without the refs there would be chaos. For example, a holding penalty could be called on every play, but it isn’t. The officials generally call only penalties that affect the play. So if a left tackle holds on a wide receiver screen to the right, the official lets it go. Yes, rules are rules, but there is the larger picture to keep in mind—football succeeds when the players have an opportunity to perform at their best individually and as a team. The NFL knows that no one comes to the game to see officials perform. It wants them to avoid unnecessary calls that interfere with the game and to work with the players to keep this intense, violent sport from getting out of hand.
President Obama, by contrast, believes that the game of capitalism is fundamentally flawed. He directs his officials not only to call more penalties but to change the rules in the middle of the game to reflect what he thinks is “fair.” Imagine a game in which the rules change depending on whom the commissioner is rooting for or in which officials call penalties on only one team. In some areas of the economy today, the government referees have not only swallowed their whistles, they’ve put on jerseys and joined one of the teams!
The American economy transformed human history because of freedom—free markets, free workers, free entrepreneurs. That freedom is endangered, and with it the American Dream.
The Declaration of Independence proclaims: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That’s where the American Dream started. The term itself was coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931 in a book titled The Epic of America.3 Writing at the onset of the Great Depression, he described that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.
It is a diff
icult dream for the European upper classes to appreciate, and too many of us Americans have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not just a dream of motor cars and high wages, but a dream of a social order in which each person can develop his or her gifts and talents to the fullest degree and enjoy the recognition to which he or she is entitled, regardless of the accident of birth or position.
That’s why I don’t like to talk about the “middle class,” a term favored, unfortunately, by politicians of both parties. I refuse to accept the premise of that term, “middle class.” As conservatives, we don’t believe there are social or economic classes in America. Unlike the Left, we believe in the dignity of every human life and seek to create a country that maximizes his or her God-given potential. We shouldn’t assign people to categories or divide them artificially, pitting one group against another. That’s a specialty of this president and the Left, and we should reject it by eliminating this divisive rhetoric from our lexicon.
Another reason I don’t talk about the “middle class” is that the term has no real meaning in the United States. In a 2012 Pew Research survey, only 7 percent of respondents identified themselves as lower class, and 2 percent as upper class.4 A wonderful characteristic of Americans is that almost everyone sees himself as the average person. Let’s stick to a term that describes the people who are working and doing the best they can to be good citizens but are falling behind—working Americans.