I think Arthur Brooks offers good advice to Republicans although I think he only gets about 75% of the way there. He’s correct that Republicans are focusing on the wrong things. Failing schools need to be fixed not because teachers’ unions are full of thugs, but because poor kids deserve good schools. The problem with the long-term health of our entitlement programs isn’t that they redistribute too much wealth, but that the cost will crowd out other programs that help the needy, and it could imperil the entitlement programs themselves. Promoting family values shouldn’t be so judgmental because the point is that healthy families raise more successful children. Entrepreneurialism shouldn’t be extolled because ‘makers’ are inherently more worthy than ‘takers,’ but because the right and ability to start a business is essential to liberty. By retooling the message and making sure they are focused on how their policies have the potential to help the poor and the vulnerable, the Republicans will be much less off-putting. So, I’ll concede that the Republicans can make a lot of improvements to the pizza box without necessarily making a better pizza.
As I see it, there two main omissions in Brooks’ piece. The first is that the pizza still tastes like dog food to most Americans. In part, this is because some of the Republicans’ policies are based on fantasies and others on lies. And I could spend hours detailing examples of this. But it’s the second omission that concerns me here. Brooks doesn’t address the real motivation of the average Republican. The gorilla in the room is the Grover Norquist pledge most Republican lawmakers have taken to never raise taxes. Norquist famously admitted that his goal in pushing this pledge was to starve the government of funds until it was so anemic that it could be drowned in a bathtub. You have to do a lot of somersaults and backflips to get from that position to a place where you can convince a dispassionate observer that your party cares about the poor.
There are a lot of small businessmen in the Republican caucus. There are auto dealers, ranchers, restauranteurs, plumbers, exterminators, veterinarians, and even a reindeer salesman. A lot of these folks call themselves and think of themselves as “job creators,” or the 53% who contribute to society rather than taking from it. They probably care about the poor to some degree, but their motivation for running for Congress was that they didn’t like what the government was doing as it pertained to them. They didn’t like being taxed to pay for people who have, in their estimation, a poor work ethic. They didn’t like having to comply with regulations that might have been onerous or nonsensical or simply expensive. Many of them are quite religious and think that the proper way to deal with poverty is through church charity and recruitment, and they see the government as a competitor for souls. However, there can be no doubt that hostility to the poor, to the ‘takers,’ is a prime motivator to a significant number of Republican lawmakers.
This is also true, perhaps even more true, about what motivates the voting base of the Republican Party. The Tea Party brigades aren’t bellowing about solving world hunger; they are saying that they’ve been “Taxed Enough Already.” They do not want their money going to the poor (at least, not through the Internal Revenue Service as intermediary). The primary feature of the Tea Party base is anger based in resentment, and this is also tinged with fear. I don’t say this to malign these people, but just as an observational statement of fact. Listen to them, and it is indisputable that they are seething with rage. The Republican Party benefits when they feed that rage and are therefore powerfully, almost irresistibly, motivated to provide their base with a constant stream of outrages (faux, or otherwise) on which they can sustain themselves in a state of readiness for political combat. Needless to say, this group doesn’t like to dine on wonky treatises on education reform or the best way shore up Social Security’s long-term finances. They aren’t braying at the moon because some child in North Philadelphia is going to sleep hungry to the sounds of random gunfire out her window. They are angry that their tax money might go to give that child a free school lunch that her mother should provide for her on her own.
So, the big problem for Brooks’ analysis is that it assumes an intrinsic decency and virtuousness in the conservative movement that is both understrength and underfed. Even if we generously grant that conservatives care about the poor and the needy, they do not want to use the government as the vehicle to help them, and often feel and argue that the government can only make their problems more difficult or even intractable. And if we agree to focus less on the substance than the message, the problem is that the base is the primary audience for the message, and they don’t dine on kindness and concern for the needy.
the GOP doesn’t give two shyts about the less fortunate in our society.
period.
they are a bunch of racist socipaths who never ever should be given any benefit of the doubt
A great post that summarizes well what is at the heart of today’s conservative movement. And this demonstrates, that despite their contentions, it is not the messenger which is the problem. It is the message.
and it’s odd how much effort goes into denying that
I think you touch on something, and then miss it completely which goes to the core of this. Which is that a lot of what they want is based on fantasy.
This is something that many people miss when dealing with Republicans and conservatives in general. Sure, there are plenty of assholes among them who just want to screw people over, but not all of them are like that. One of the major differences between liberals and conservatives (at least in this neck of the woods where we don’t have that many crazies) is how important the process of getting somewhere is vs how important the end result is.
In just about every economic case conservatives view a low tax, low regulation, privatized environment as morally correct and of the highest importance. So whenever you have a goal you want to accomplish, say healthcare or job creation, they always start with how to create it out of that environment. Which leads to a lot of mental gymnastics of how it “could” work provided all sorts of various private actors did xyz. But that never happens. So when the rich sit on their money to have it make more money instead of pouring it into charity and taking risks with it that could create more economic growth they throw up their hands and say “well it’s not the fault of conservative economic policy, it’s that these people failed conservative economic policy”. We see a lot of this going on with austerity now.
This is why their solutions fail and always will. Because their “ideas” and “solutions” don’t actually have policy in them that addresses the problems that need to be fixed, and lack any measures to compel people to behave in a way that would fix it as well. The reality is that many of the problems we face can’t be fixed with the sort of processes that conservatives find agreable.
I consider myself a fairly moderate person over all. To me, markets and government are tools. And at times one is more appropriate for the task at hand, at other times one of them might not be able to deal with the issue at all. The problem with the right remains that for various reasons (and not all of them malicious) they are only willing to use one tool to achieve their goals.
Excellent analysis. What you are describing is an ideological, true-believer approach. Validation of the ideology their constituency believes in comes before anything. Thus, instead of defining problems objectively and figuring out the best ways to solve them, they address ideologically forefronted, predefined problems and hypothetical solutions that always “save the text” of their ideology. If the problem doesn’t exist, they will create it, either by lying or even, as we’re seeing lately, literally creating the problem they need. As you point out, the result is fake solutions to fake problems.
I didn’t miss it. I deliberately chose not to focus on it.
They do not want their money going to the poor (at least, not through the Internal Revenue Service as intermediary).
So they say, but I’d be willing to bet, without a tax deduction, they wouldn’t give away one red cent.
Excellent thoughts and analysis!
To broaden the Rep’s definition of “poor” to include reality might write out something like “Poor” in need of government assistance…
In that regard my community has ‘poor’ roads! And my roads aren’t there just to assist our ‘poor’ children from accessing their ‘poor’ schoolrooms.
But there’s also a blind side that we talk about alot here that can’t be repeated enough and that is that the broad ‘bathtub’ strokes that are so feel good to the Rep’s never translate into elements of a healthy economy where the shovel hits the dirt.
The Sequester is nothing more than a first chapter in what Ryan proposed to do and yet when March 1 came the Rep’s were up in arms at how govt cuts were going to cut and slash the goodness of America. This is why we asked endless times of Romney to specifiy what cuts he favored and March 1 demonstrated why he never did.
Boo, I admire the way you lay this all out, but frankly, if the Republicans handled things the way you suggest, they’d be the Democrats.
It’s not that people who identify as Republicans don’t espouse some values I share. It’s that they make the preservation of these values hostage to the full, unprotected blast of modern hyper-corporatism, anti-environmentalism, racism, sexism, media-induced paranoia, etc. — the most destructive forces that exist in the world. As somewhat that values tradition I will never support the forces that are making meaningless the genuine American tradition and destroying all tradition everywhere. It is a complete delusion.