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.
