Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works Page 3
The American Dream is ingrained in us. It is the reason people risk their lives every day to come here. It is why parents scrimp and save to get their kids through college. Everyone knows the American Dream takes work—we take fewer days of vacation than almost any other people in the world—but many are willing to pay the price to reach their dream.5
Many Americans, however, are losing their grip on the dream. A Marist-McClatchy poll taken in February 2014 found that only 31 percent of Americans believe that someone who works hard has a good chance of improving his standard of living, while 68 percent think that someone who works hard has a difficult time even maintaining his standard of living. Eighty percent of Americans think it’s harder now to get ahead than in previous generations, and 78 percent expect it to be even harder for the next generation.6 Those numbers should be a punch in the gut to every American leader, starting with the president.
To put a face on these statistics about the American Dream, I’d like to introduce you to a family I’ll call the Harrisons. They are a composite of the many hundreds of families I met and the thousands of stories I collected during my campaign. James and Susan Harrison live in northeastern Ohio and have two teenage boys. A generation ago, the Harrisons’ parents were relatively well-off, enjoying comfortable, happy lives. James’s father worked for a company that manufactured aluminum tubes. It was a secure job with good wages. Susan grew up five blocks away, and her father was the football coach at the high school. James and Susan went to good public schools, participated in sports and the Key Club, and were faithful parishioners at their Roman Catholic church. James spent his high school summers working for the aluminum company and had a job waiting there for him when he graduated. He and Susan got married several years after that, and within a few years they had two boys. They never thought much about becoming rich in a material sense, but they saw a clear path to a life rich in family and community, coaching Little League and raising their children in a safe, hardworking neighborhood.
Life started pretty well for the Harrisons, but then things changed. Business at the aluminum company peaked about thirty years ago and has steadily declined ever since. James’s wages flattened, and then his benefits started to get cut back. Ten years ago, the company filed for bankruptcy and everyone lost his job. Since then, James has worked at a big-box home improvement store thirty miles away. With fewer hours and no benefits, he is earning about three-quarters of his old wage and spending more money on gas for his commute.
Susan Harrison works part-time as a school nurse. Her hours have been cut back, and the family’s finances are tight. Their kids are now in high school, but those once-proud public schools are a shadow of their former selves. The Little League continues on, but the fields are weedier and the rosters smaller.
The Harrisons feel they are too old for new training and education, and with teenage boys and elderly parents, they can’t easily pick up and move. College for their kids looks unaffordable, and at the same time, they don’t want the boys loading up on debt. They have little hope for a better future or to regain the pride and comfort their family once enjoyed. All around them they see neighbors slipping into poverty. They see drug and alcohol abuse and young girls getting pregnant without husbands, relying on the state for their welfare. Their once-safe neighborhood now has vacant homes and crime.
What hope does our country offer the Harrisons? Is there still a path to prosperity for all Americans? After talking to people across the United States, my sense is that they want to believe in the American Dream, but it’s getting harder. Too many shuttered factories and abandoned homes stand as ghostly reminders of the prosperity and stability that working Americans once enjoyed. Crime, despair, and social breakdown have taken their place.
These are not sudden developments—many of these communities have been in decline for decades—but the Great Recession knocked away their last struts. Not only were eight million jobs lost, and more than half of all household wealth, but the local manufacturing plants and supporting businesses are not there anymore for young people starting their careers.
For the most part, people like the Harrisons have traditional, conservative values; they believe in family and faith; they are willing to work hard; they are patriotic, with a patriotism that ties them to their community. And what have we Republicans offered them? Mostly macroeconomic arguments about tax policies that won’t affect them directly. The Harrisons can be forgiven if they feel like Republicans have no idea what is happening to average Americans today.
Give President Obama credit—his campaign focused relentlessly on stories about people who were suffering, and he was able to convince most voters that he cared. He deemphasized work as a path to prosperity by gutting the welfare reforms that were a bipartisan achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then he dramatically expanded relief programs with no work requirement—programs like food stamps, school lunches, and unemployment insurance. Burdened with an atrocious economic record, Obama’s campaign developed an astonishingly effective strategy: let voters continue to blame President Bush for the problems, wage a rhetorical war on the wealthy, emphasize the redistribution of wealth, and play on people’s fear that “millionaires and billionaires” were trying to pull the rug out from under them.
That strategy succeeded in getting Obama reelected, but it has done nothing to improve the economy or help the people who are hurting. In 2008, Obama promised “hope and change.” He delivered the change—above all, the disastrous and unpopular Obamacare—but hope was replaced in 2012 by fear. The people who supported Obama most strongly were those who felt economically vulnerable—ethnic minorities and single women. To be sure, the president made other appeals to this base (the shamefully divisive “war on women” comes to mind), but fear of losing the government safety net, even if you’re not currently relying on it yourself, proved to be a decisive issue.
We have an obligation to deal with people’s legitimate fear during this time of great hardship, change, and uncertainty. The answer to every problem can’t be “Quit whining and buck up.” (See how that would work in your marriage!) We must articulate a reassuring vision for those who are struggling, and it must focus on the importance of work and personal dignity.
The fear and anxiety bred by the weak economy and the breakdown of the family are bad enough, but lately they have given rise to a disturbingly un-American malady—hopelessness. The monthly unemployment report in this anemic recovery results in a partisan sparring match between Left and Right with both sides using statistics to bolster their political narratives. One number has been the most telling over the past five years—the percentage of people who have simply given up looking for work is at or near all-time highs.
People believe the American Dream is fading. It’s no surprise that people are dissatisfied with our country’s economic situation. But most people no longer expect things to get better. Indeed, in some ways—paying for college tuition, affording retirement, finding good jobs—they expect things to get worse. Are they wrong? Maybe not. Not only is our economy in a recession, but economic mobility is lagging behind many other countries.7 According to a Brookings Institution report, you are about two times more likely to rise up the economic ladder in Canada or Australia than you are in America.8
The one area of the country where upward mobility is comparable to these countries is the place with the strongest families and an ethic of community support—the Salt Lake City area. Thanks to the Mormon Church, marriage and family are paramount there, and the church fosters an impressive network of private-sector relief for families in economic distress.
When social scientists study the ability of people to rise out of poverty, one of their findings is so consistent that it cannot be denied or ignored: children from two-parent families who live in communities where the two-parent family is the norm have a much higher chance of succeeding.9 That doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of heroic single mothers doing everything they can for their children. But our appreciation for those women must not distract us from the fact that, as a rule, children do better when their mom and dad are married and living at home.
Perhaps the most troubling news about the state of the American Dream is how we define success. A 2012 survey found that “fame and fortune” are replacing “faith and family” as the central components of the American Dream.10 If the character of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life once embodied Americans’ idea of true success, he has been replaced by the latest winner of American Idol. Yet the greatest reward in life is not becoming a rich celebrity; it is having a family—which happens to be a much more democratic ideal. Barbara Walters, who has been a cheerleader for liberalism for decades, has admitted that her greatest regret in life is that she didn’t have more children.11 Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, also recognizes the hollowness of Hollywood ideals. When a student asked him how he defined success, the brilliant investor dismissed almost out of hand his fame and financial achievements and said what matters most is “whether the people you care about most love you.”12
It may be that many young people are turning their backs on the traditional American Dream in part because it seems unattainable. They make up what economists are calling a “lost generation”—millions of twenty-something college graduates who are deep in student debt, can’t find a good job, and might never get a foot on the ladder of career, family, and homeownership. As many as six and a half million Americans between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four are neither in school nor in the workforce.13 They may never recover, and their children will face even gloomier prospects.
Bigger and fatter federal entitlement programs will not bring hope to the Harrisons and their children. They don’t want food stamps. They want the dignity of a decent job
and a fair shot at a better life for their kids. Hope lies in a vision of families and communities in which human beings thrive, and in policies based on that vision. I’ll have more to say later about incentives for manufacturers and small businesses, a tax system that encourages marriage and strong families, and education that is affordable and practical.
In the meantime, the Ohio town where the Harrison family lives sits on the Utica Shale, which promises well-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry for James and his sons and thousands of others. There are also powerful political forces that want to strangle that industry, and they have the sympathetic ear of the president and his party. Yet Republicans have somehow ended up as the bad guys in this story. I’m going to show you in this book how we can change that.
Ultimately, the American Dream has never really been about the dreamer. My grandfather, like millions of others, came to America seeking a better life. But the better life he was after was for his children. In this exceptional country, he was able to nourish in his children the values of faith, family, work, freedom, service, and patriotism. He prospered here, and I thank God for the economic blessings. But my grandfather built something more important than wealth. He built a family, a spiritual legacy, and he built it to last. Over a million immigrants a year come to this country in search of the same dream, because they still believe that dream is within their grasp.
We need to remember, as we debate about policies and fight our political battles, what’s really at stake. The American Dream is about a country of prosperous communities, strong families, a decent life today, and a realistic hope for a better tomorrow. Blue collar conservatives understand that, and it’s time Republicans let them know that we do too.
CHAPTER THREE
A GOP THAT STANDS UP FOR EVERYONE
Americans are more pessimistic than ever. Washington is a mess. The economy has been sputtering along for years. The culture is getting even coarser. It is harder to find a good job, much less climb the ladder of success. For a working young man or woman who wants to raise a family, the search for a good spouse feels like finding a needle in a haystack, and the odds against a lasting marriage are sobering.
Though some of today’s problems are new, Americans have faced serious challenges before, and we have always prevailed. Sometimes in the hour of crisis, we have been blessed with a great leader. Abraham Lincoln guided us through the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt inspired us with the determination to defeat Nazism and fascism in World War II. Ronald Reagan restored our confidence after the economic, military, and political crises of the 1970s and led us to victory in the Cold War.
There is no such leader in the Oval Office now, no one who can appeal to the values that make this country great because he believes in them himself. President Obama doesn’t understand America. Maybe that’s because he was raised in a radical family, much of the time overseas, and educated by people who saw only the worst in this country. He abandoned the slogan of “hope” a long time ago. When Obama appeals to Americans, his themes are envy, resentment, and fear. He can mobilize his base on the Left with that talk, but it falls flat with everyone else.
Borrowing a page from the unhappier chapters of European history, Obama promises that the government will take care of every want and need. All the public has to do is cede control of their lives to the benevolent functionaries of the omnicompetent state. Uttering the world’s stalest political pickup line, he woos an anxious electorate: “Trust me, your leader, with more power and control because I really do care for you, and of course I know what is best.” In tough times, people who feel economically vulnerable—the poor, minorities, and single women—have decided to stay with their date.
For Obama, there’s no such thing as the “loyal opposition,” only the enemy that must be identified and “punished.” Call them conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians, or the religious Right, this president has them in his crosshairs in virtually every speech he gives. And his administration doesn’t shrink from using the coercive power of the federal government to make the point.
Americans are beginning to see how brutally the Democrats are willing to exercise their power, whether it’s the use of the Internal Revenue Service to harass political opponents, the subversion of the Senate filibuster as a check on majoritarian tyranny, or the abuse of executive orders to thwart the constitutional role of Congress. Yet as scandal follows scandal, Republicans fail to persuade the American people that they are more trustworthy than the Democrats, and the federal government settles deeper into dysfunction.
Americans have had it, and they want real leadership that understands them and what it will take to get America going again.
All they got from the election of 2012 was a clinic in the divide-and-conquer politics of the Left. President Obama was reelected because he rallied his base of minorities, single women, and youth by painting a picture of Mitt Romney as a heartless rich guy who had made millions by putting everyday Americans out of work. That coalition might not seem big enough to win a national election, and if this were 1980 that would be true. Had Romney received the same percentage of the vote of every ethnic group that Ronald Reagan received in 1980 (when the Gipper carried forty-eight states against Jimmy Carter), Romney probably would have suffered an even bigger loss to Obama.
The Democrats are masters of demography, and with the eager help of the media they bombard the public with the message of the Republican war against women, the young, the poor, and immigrants. Republicans, they say, represent only the rich; they don’t care about the folks trying to climb out of poverty. So far, it has worked—in spite of a miserable economy that hurts those very groups more than any other, the Democrats have managed to solidify their base.
This message is ceaseless, overhyped, and cynical, but is any of it true? Let’s hit the hanging curve ball first. Do Republicans really care less about the person at the bottom of the ladder than Democrats do? To be painfully honest, I would have to say in some ways “yes.” There are some in my party who have taken the ideal of individualism to such an extreme that they have forgotten the obligation to look out for our fellow man. The rhetoric is often harsh and gives the all-too-willing media an opportunity to tar all Republicans with the same brush. That is not my Republican Party. In fact, in 2005 I wrote a book titled It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. We must not cede the moral high ground on promoting the common good or the issue of caring for the less fortunate to a party whose own misguided policies have trapped so many in a life of poverty and despair.
We Republicans have neglected to focus our policies and our rhetoric on the plight of lower-income Americans. For thirty years our theme has been that the Reagan tax cuts transformed the American economy and further tax cuts will make it even better. While I believe that’s true, our critics on the Left have a couple of valid points.
First, when Reagan cut rates in the early 1980s, the top rate was 70 percent; today it is slightly under 40 percent.1 The impact on the economy of further cuts will therefore not be as dramatic. At the same time, the drag on the economy of the current rate of taxation is not as severe as it was in 1980. Reagan’s economic policy responded to the problems confronting America at the time: high inflation and stagnant growth—a toxic mix we called “stagflation.” Growth is anemic today not primarily because of high individual tax rates but because of excessive government regulation of businesses. Our focus on tax cuts for individuals not only leaves us open to the “tax breaks for the rich” sloganeering of the Left but seems irrelevant to the nearly 50 percent of the population who don’t pay federal income taxes today.
The second point that we need to address is that while the technological revolution has increased the material wealth of our society as a whole and improved the quality of life for all Americans, it has also left our society more polarized. The new economy bestows a larger share of its rewards on the educated than the industrial economy did.
Ronald Reagan offered a remedy for what ailed America in 1980. He would be the last person to offer exactly the same prescription more than three decades later under quite different circumstances. We need a different game plan to achieve economic growth with an eye toward those whom the new economy has left behind. If we only promise more growth without addressing the 70 percent of young Americans who will not earn a bachelor’s degree, we will be shirking our responsibility to them and handing the Democrats an electoral club to beat us with.2