Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (6 page)

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.
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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.
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So our critics are right—the American economy has changed dramatically since 1980, and our policies must reflect that change. But something else has changed as well—the American household—and it’s liberals who ignore this change. In 1980, 55 percent of black children were born out of wedlock, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the population as a whole was 18 percent. Today, almost three out of four black children are born without a father in the home, and over 40 percent of all American children will grow up fatherless.
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Democrats can talk all day long about the “War on Poverty,” but the most effective antipoverty tool is a combination of work, education, and marriage. America created the new economy, but a fatherless America cannot produce the skilled and functional workers, particularly men, who will thrive in that
economy. The liberal programs of the last fifty years are no solution to the problem of family breakdown, and neither are tax cuts. The severity of this problem grows exponentially with each new generation. If we don’t address it now, it won’t be long before our economy reaches the “do not resuscitate” stage.

Republicans need to remember the old adage that “people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

After losing the election, Mitt Romney acknowledged the party’s problem. Talking to a reporter while volunteering at a homeless shelter, he remarked that the men and women there “are used to being ignored, I guess. Mostly by people like me.”
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I admire his willingness to shoulder some of the responsibility for the problem, but as a matter of fact, Romney has a splendid record of helping people in all walks of life. A leader in his church, he has been fully engaged in its philanthropic efforts over the years. As an employer, he showed his concern for even the most junior employee, and he has given millions of dollars to help those who are less fortunate. Mitt Romney is a model of compassion for those less fortunate than himself, but how many people know about it? He has lived the American Dream not only by succeeding in business and raising a beautiful family but also—and just as importantly—by serving those in need.

It should come as no surprise that Americans are the most generous people in the world. Study after study shows that
Americans give more than anyone else to help their fellow man. We rank number one in the annual World Giving Index.
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In 2013, Germany ranked twenty-second, India ninety-third, and China came in next to last, ahead of only bankrupt Greece. But what about American conservatives? Surely they are stingier with the poor than their liberal neighbors.

Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, has studied how America’s giving breaks down by political ideology and other factors, and he finds that conservatives, especially religious conservatives, are actually the most generous with their own money. Liberals are terribly generous, too—with other people’s money. To be fair, religious liberals (those who attend church once a week or more) are also quite generous, but there aren’t many of them.
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Compare the charitable giving of Mitt Romney, a well-to-do empty nester, to the other wealthy empty nester on the national ticket, Joe Biden. Romney gave 29 percent of his money to charity in the past few years, whereas Joe Biden gave only 0.5 percent.
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But Romney is the uncaring, wealthy Scrooge, and Biden the common, compassionate Bob Cratchit simply because Biden wants to use the force of the government to take even more money away from high earners and give it to those he chooses. The liberal media promote this as caring, but it’s not. It is not about giving and helping, it is about power, and it doesn’t reflect the true spirit of America.

If conservatives are so generous, why does the GOP have the reputation as the party of Scrooge? It might be because
we spend so much time talking to and about the “job creator” and business owner. Economic growth and the role of the job creator should continue to be at the heart of our economic policy, but we need to think about, listen to, and talk about the
jobholder
as well. If conservatives got the vote of every job creator in the country, we’d still lose. We must earn a large portion of the votes of jobholders, because there are far more of them.

Two incidents from the 2012 campaign illustrate this truth. When President Obama told an audience of business owners, “You didn’t build that,” he appeared to denigrate the role of entrepreneurship in the economy, and Republicans thought he had made a disastrous misstep. We even made it the theme of our national convention. The president’s statement was revealing and galling, but it didn’t matter. What percentage of Americans have built a business? The disastrous misstep of the campaign turned out to be Governor Romney’s surreptitiously recorded comment about the “47 percent” of the population that collects payments from the government. It’s basic math that you can’t insult half of the voters and expect to win.

The Republican Party hasn’t always had this problem with those who are trying to rise in America. We have an impressive history of speaking for all Americans, and we can reach them again. From its birth, our party was on the side of the struggling, for it was formed to combat slavery. The 1856 platform
pledged to abolish the barbarism of slavery. Under the leadership of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, it was. When Democrats attempted to derail the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans helped push it through with the support of over 80 percent of their members.
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The party that now supposedly wages a “war on women” led the fight for women’s right to vote. The first vote in Congress on women’s suffrage occurred in 1878 on a constitutional amendment offered by a Republican, A. A. Sargent. A Democratic majority defeated it. It would be over thirty years before another vote was taken, and it was not until after the Republican landslide of 1918 that the Nineteenth Amendment, sponsored by another Republican, was taken up and passed.
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One of the greatest champions of the working man ever to occupy the White House was the “trust buster” Theodore Roosevelt, who took on corporate monopolies and pushed for landmark reforms of working conditions.

In recent years, Republicans have led the way on welfare reform, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and educational initiatives like charter schools and vouchers (opportunities that Democrats have fought ferociously to deny to children from poor families). We have created tax policies to help create jobs in urban areas, lowered taxes, and put money back in the pockets of families. And, of course, we have always stood for marriage and responsible fatherhood. We rarely get
credit for that record, in part because we don’t bother to talk much about it.

Like the Democrats, today’s Republican Party is a coalition of different interests, each with its own priorities. Those interests include Tea Party constitutionalists, small and medium-sized business owners, believers in the free market, those in favor of a strong defense and tough foreign policy, and social conservatives who put faith, family, and protecting the innocent and unborn first. We have our disagreements and vigorous debates, and we’ll have them again in 2016, but we’re all under the “big tent” of the GOP, and we respect and help each other.

I believe that in recent years, the interests of the “talk only about deficits and growth” wing of the party have received too much emphasis, and it has come at the expense of working families. Our party’s “you built that” convention in 2012 didn’t have much to say about the struggles of our working families. We weren’t speaking to them. It hasn’t just been our rhetoric—we have lacked ideas and policies. People like the Harrisons can’t be blamed if they thought we Republicans “didn’t care,” and the media were happy to support this narrative.

Broadening our party’s message will involve many political challenges, but everyone in our “big tent” wants a country where people have an opportunity to achieve the American
Dream: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We believe that now it’s time to say and
do
something about it.