The Conservative Heart

by Arthur C. Brooks

  MADD, on the other hand, did not fizzle out. It became a mass social movement that changed America forever. So what did MADD do differently?

  After its initial rebellion, MADD deliberately claimed majoritarian values. Every parent in America wants to protect her children from danger. Keeping kids safe is a majoritarian value. Mothers Against Drunk Driving challenged the country by saying: “When we don’t take this problem seriously, we are not keeping our kids safe. That is contrary to what all of us agree are our priorities.”

  Like a true majority, MADD went from fighting against drunk drivers to fighting for children. Its rhetoric and its proposals all focused on protecting innocent victims. Consider how it led to the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, a bill that reduced a state’s share of federal highway dollars if it failed to raise the drinking age to twenty-one. President Reagan was listening to objections that it violated his support for states’ rights. But then he asked, “Well, wait a minute. Doesn’t this help save kids’ lives?” His transportation secretary told him it did. “Well, then I support it,” Reagan told her.13 MADD had won over the president of the United States by fighting for kids. At a Rose Garden ceremony on July 17, 1984, Reagan signed the bill into law. Candace Lightner pinned a “MADD” button on his lapel.

  MADD wasn’t done yet. In the years that followed, it got states to increase penalties for driving under the influence. It pressed state legislatures to pass laws reducing the legal blood alcohol limit—always on behalf of kids, as the majority of Americans would want. It successfully lobbied states across the country to enact and enforce seat belt laws. It pressed communities across the country to institute public sobriety checkpoints.

  MADD successfully claimed the moral high ground. Drunk driving kills kids. Therefore, drunk driving isn’t just unfortunate, it’s morally wrong. We take it for granted today, but MADD transformed America’s view of drunk driving. The same nation that once saw drunk drivers as mildly foolish now viewed them as people who did something bad, and viewed people who did it repeatedly as personally immoral. We want them locked up.

  Finally, MADD united the country behind its crusade. By 1994, MADD was the most popular charity in America.14 Celebrities and politicians jostled to be publicly associated with such a noble cause. Want to see unity? Get twenty people who agree on nothing else into a room, and ask how many think the penalties for drunk driving are too lax.

  Reflect for a moment on this remarkable trajectory. First, MADD rebelled against a culture that turned a blind eye to drunk driving. Second, it identified the perpetrators as a minority who were trampling all over the values of a silent majority. Third, it claimed the moral high ground by insisting drunk driving was not foolish but rather ethically wrong and shifted from fighting against villains to championing kids. And finally, after passing a series of measures to penalize and discourage drunk driving, MADD united the country behind the new majoritarian view and turned its immediate momentum into enduring cultural change.

  This is how a rebellion becomes a social movement.

  THE NEXT STEP FOR THE TEA PARTY

  The Tea Party needs to replicate this process. And now we hold in our hands the blueprint. Tea Partiers need to follow the same steps as the civil rights movement, MADD, and the many other social movements, large and small, that started out as impassioned protests.

  It has already accomplished the first step—sparking a popular rebellion. The Tea Party tapped into the frustrations of millions of ordinary Americans, inspiring many to get involved politically, brush up on the U.S. Constitution, and organize demonstrations. It enlisted the activism or sympathy of nearly one in five Americans for this protest. It restored a focus on fiscal discipline on Capitol Hill, ended the practice of special interest earmarks, and stiffened the spines of the GOP establishment. Now the Tea Party has to go after the persuadable majority, who, polls show, remain open to its message.

  That’s why stage two is proclaiming majoritarian values. Today, everyone knows what the Tea Party is against—big government, taxes, regulation, spending, deficits, debt, and Obamacare. But only minority movements define themselves by what they’re against. Majorities define themselves by the values and people they are for. What is the Tea Party for? What is its moral purpose? What is its governing agenda?

  The Tea Party must dedicate itself to the positive fruits of its principles. The power of free enterprise will help Americans escape poverty and dependency by creating good-paying jobs, restoring upward mobility, and creating a new culture of opportunity. Work, mobility, and opportunity are majoritarian values. These are the values that animate the conservative heart. The Tea Party can show the conservative heart to America.

  Americans need to see the Tea Party as the vanguard of a new right that fights for the whole country. The grass roots should consider themselves heroes on behalf of those left behind in the Obama economy—whether they support Tea Party leaders or not. The conservative social movement can’t dismiss as moochers people who can’t find jobs and have to take government help. On the contrary, these are precisely the people who need our help. It isn’t ordinary citizens who are to blame, but the architects of disastrous economic policies that have destroyed opportunities for independence. The Tea Party can fight for all the people in this country.

  The third step is to seize the moral high ground in this fight by asserting moral rightness. It is not an economic error but a moral failure that so many Americans have been marginalized and left behind. As we have discussed already, the two moral imperatives that illuminate this are fairness and compassion. It is neither fair nor compassionate to content ourselves with an economic recovery that only accrues to top earners. It is neither fair nor compassionate to threaten the solvency of the core safety net by extending it boundlessly upward into the middle class. And it is neither fair nor compassionate to saddle future generations with ruinous debt. Fairness and compassion are the words that should appear in every speech and article.

  And finally, the Tea Party needs to unite the country around a vision for a better America. That requires storytelling. Tea Partiers need to craft an optimistic vision of what a better America looks like ten years from now. We envision an America that is rising, in which everyone can earn their success, and where government empowers rather than restrains people who seek to strike out on their own.

  Imagine an America where a kid graduating from high school who does not go on to college does not face a life of unemployment and social assistance. Instead, he has his choice of jobs where he can align his skills with his talents—whether he gets rich or not—and earn his success on the basis of hard work and personal responsibility. Imagine an America where struggling people’s prospects of escaping poverty through work are better than they are today. Imagine a country where the safety net is solid, secure, and used sparingly—only by those who are truly indigent, and always with work requirements in place.

  Imagine an America that is a beacon of hope for the world, a place to which every immigrant from all around the world wants to come. Imagine an America that can truly lift up the world—whether through the force of our example, trade, diplomacy, or even military might when necessary.

  When the Tea Party unites the country behind this kind of moral, majoritarian vision and fights to make it a reality for everyone, it will cease to be a conservative rebellion. It will become the new moral majority.

  FIGHTING FOR PEOPLE

  At this point, some conservative readers might feel skeptical. Am I saying we should abandon our objections to Obamacare, excessive spending, and debt?

  Not at all. I’m simply asking you to remember why Tea Party conservatives oppose Obamacare. We dislike the health law because Obamacare is hurting people. It has caused millions to lose their doctors and their health plans. By shifting employers’ incentives, it is stripping valuable work hours away from people who are already underemployed. It is raising the premiums and deductibles of people who cannot afford to pay more.

  This is
not to say America doesn’t need health-care reform—God knows we do, and conservatives believe in finding ways to expand access to health care for people who do not have it. But Obamacare is the wrong way, and we have better solutions—from Health Savings Accounts to association health plans that allow small businesses to band together and negotiate the same kinds of discounts big corporations do. Yes, we need to repeal Obamacare, but Americans also need to see us championing conservative reforms like these that will improve people’s lives.

  The same goes for spending and debt. We are against growing the national debt not because ordinary Americans care about negative fiscal balances, but because irresponsibility hurts real people. As we saw in detail in the last chapter, we need only look to Europe for a prime example of how unsustainable debt leads to insolvency, and how insolvency yields austerity cuts that fall the hardest on vulnerable people. Anyone who believes in a social safety net for the truly indigent must demand that we avoid austerity by reining in spending in a thoughtful way while we can easily do so. If you love the poor, you must be a fiscal conservative. There’s no other way.

  The same goes for education. Why do we want education reform? It’s not because we hate teachers’ unions. It’s because we love kids. It’s because the abuses of the bureaucracies and unions are eating up all of the public school money while resisting accountability and innovation, which hurts kids—especially poor kids. We believe in school choice because it will unleash innovation and allow poor families to escape failing schools. We believe in collective bargaining reform because it frees school districts from the stranglehold of collective bargaining rules—allowing them to save money, add more teachers, and hire and fire based on merit instead of seniority. It is common decency to put the interests of children ahead of the interests of employees.

  Making the transition from a rebellion to a social movement does not mean we cease opposition to bad things. It means that we stop leading with what we are against. We lead with the people we are fighting for.

  This is something our Founding Fathers understood. When Samuel Adams and the rest of our founding generation made the transition from rebellion to social movement, they had a long list of grievances. The bulk of the Declaration of Independence—about 65 percent of it—is actually a bill of attainder against King George III, detailing his “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

  But that bill of attainder is not what our Founding Fathers led with when they wrote the Declaration. They led with an appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” They opened with an audacious, universal moral claim: “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 to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Talk about fighting for people!

  Everything in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence is a claim to majority values. “All men are created equal” is a majoritarian statement. Our Founders were declaring that independence was inevitable, that they were the majority, and anyone whose eyes were open would think like them.

  They took the moral high ground. They were not declaring independence on their own authority, just to stick a thorn in the monarch’s side. They were doing so because that’s what the moral law of “Nature’s God” demanded. They were doing so because our “Creator” has endowed all men with unalienable rights. This was a deeply reverential claim. When people believed that God Himself wanted the colonies to be free of King George, King George had a big problem on his hands.

  There was no appeal to economic efficiency in their argument at all. In May 1776, just a few weeks before they met in Philadelphia, George Mason had written the Virginia Declaration of Rights. In it, he announced that all men have inherent rights to “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Thomas Jefferson deliberately dropped “property” and “safety” in favor of “the pursuit of happiness.” He knew he could not take the moral high ground with materialistic arguments. The pursuit of property was an economic claim. The pursuit of happiness was a moral statement. Moreover, happiness is ineluctably personal. It is something each person defines for him or herself. In short, it is a promise that each of us should have the freedom to determine our own ends.

  By the way, just as with Martin Luther King, it was not clear that the Constitution’s Framers constituted an actual majority when they adopted their majoritarian outlook. According to historian Robert Calhoon, “The patriots received active support from perhaps 40 to 45 percent of the white populace, and at most no more than a bare majority.” Another 15 to 20 percent were loyalists, and the rest “tried to avoid involvement in the struggle—some of them deliberate pacifists, others recent immigrants, and many more simple apolitical folk.”15

  After all we grew up hearing and reading, it’s hard to imagine Americans not knowing or caring about the revolution. But it makes sense. As it happens, my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, John Brooks, married his wife, Abigail Richardson, on the Fourth of July, 1776, in Boston. There is zero evidence that they knew or cared a whit about what was going on in Philadelphia that very day.

  Only after Jefferson had claimed majoritarian values and staked a moral claim to independence—then and only then—did his Declaration finally offer the “what” of the revolution. That was the list of charges against George III. That bill of attainder was important in its time but retains little meaning today. What is transcendent, what is permanent, is not the “what” of the American Revolution but the “why.” It is the declaration of the inalienable rights that our children still memorize to this day. That is what endures. That is what transformed a tax revolt into a social movement—the social movement that is still the United States of America.

  If decades from now people won’t remember the Tea Party’s grievances with President Obama, that will actually be a signal of our success. If the Tea Party succeeds, it will be because the “why” of the movement—who we fought for, not what or who we fought against—has endured.

  The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. There is a reason why we celebrate the “Spirit of ’76” not the “Spirit of ’73.” To be sure, the American Revolution could not have happened without the antitax revolt that began in Boston Harbor that day. But we take a day off each year to celebrate the social movement that began in Independence Hall three years later. That is what transformed our nation and the world. That is what should serve as the model for the conservative movement today.

  But if we are to transform the Tea Party revolt into a majoritarian social movement that changes America forever, we need to learn to talk differently. We need to find ways to open the hearts and minds of the persuadable majority. We need to adopt the language of compassion and fairness, and show Americans that conservatives are happy warriors with a moral mission—to fight for the people who need us most, whether they vote for us or not.

  How to do that is the subject of the next chapter.

  Chapter 7

  THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE CONSERVATIVES:

  How to Talk So Americans Will Listen

  It’s time to return to the brutal truth that motivated this whole book: Conservatives have the right stuff to lift up the poor and vulnerable—but have been generally terrible at winning people’s hearts.

  We are the fiscally responsible grown-ups, the stern authority figures, the ones the people usually trust to run a tight economic ship. But that is not primarily what the country wants. Voters want leaders who care about people like them. They yearn for leaders who feel their pain and respond in tangible ways. And that has just not been us.

  Some
think that responsible voters should be less emotional and more logical. I myself have wished this sometimes. But the truth is, deep down we all know that we wouldn’t vote for someone who doesn’t care about us, and even less for someone who doesn’t even like us.

  Over the past five years, I have asked hundreds of conservatives a simple question: What is the biggest thing that bothers you about President Obama? And I started to notice a trend. Conservatives start by naming some specific policy complaint—their opposition to Obamacare or to his foreign policies. But these responses never quite ring complete. Of course conservatives disagree with President Obama on policy grounds. But that is true for virtually every progressive politician, and many of them receive more grudging respect from conservatives—think Bill Clinton—than President Obama does.

  It’s clear these substantive disagreements are only scratching the surface. Everyone can sense that a deeper, latent problem lies beneath them. Some pundits try to slander half the country by calling that latent force racism. This is unfounded, as studies showing equal conservative support for black and white conservative candidates make clear.1