‘Room To Grow: A Series’: Reinvigorating the conservative agenda

On July 28^th, the Conservative Reform Network launched “Room To Grow: A Series.” The original “Room to Grow” was published last year with a number of policy ideas for the areas of health care, education, tax reform, and more. Now CRN has put together a series of 18 policy essays, covering everything from immigration to cronyism to poverty, and just released the first three essays on higher education, the environment and entrepreneurship.

At the launch (watch the video below), Kate O’Beirne sat down with Neil Bradley, Yuval Levin, and AEI’s Ramesh Ponnuru to discuss the series. When asked about the impetus for the series, Bradley and Ponnuru noted that lately there has been a kind of exhaustion with the conservative program. Conservatives had developed a very successful program  in the late 1970s to meet the challenges of that time, but it hasn’t been updated even though the circumstances have changed (and have changed in part because the program worked). It’s time for conservatives to come up with “a set of new proposals rooted in conservative principles to address today’s challenges,” Ponnuru said. Enter “Room To Grow: A Series.”

The thrust of the series’ policy proposals is perhaps best summed up with Levin’s remarks:

[Conservatives and liberals] differ about how to solve problems. … Conservatives think that it’s unlikely that the kind of immense body of knowledge that would be necessary to address some of the large national problems we have would be found in the hands of a few technical experts gathered together in Washington, however benign and well-meaning their motives are. It’s not likely they’re going to be able to solve the problem in a centralized way.

It’s more likely that problems like that are going to be addressed in a bottom-up way, by letting people on the ground try different ways of addressing the problems as they confront them. See what ways are working, let consumers choose, let beneficiaries choose, let citizens choose, and keep what’s working and drop what’s not working. The structure of many federal programs doesn’t allow for any of that to happen – doesn’t allow for experimentation with different solutions, doesn’t allow for people to make choices for what’s working for them, doesn’t allow failures to go away.

A lot of the solutions you find in these proposals involve moving away from those kinds of centralized programs to the other model – the model that lets people make choices and lets those choices matter. A lot of the more familiar conservative policy ideas look like this. That’s what school choice is, as opposed to our existing K-12 system, that’s what conservatives want to do in health care, it’s what we want to do in welfare and you’ll find in a lot of these proposals that’s what conservatives want to do across the board: let people make choices that matter. Not because we have some kind of fetish for choice but because we think that that is ultimately more likely to arrive at solutions to genuinely serious and difficult problems than thinking that if we just get the right people in a room in Washington they’ll come at it.

These are actually difficult problems, the answers are not obvious. And the question is how do you address these kinds of challenging problems. We tend to think that experimenting, letting different kinds of solutions get worked out and tried is just more likely to succeed. And I think that’s a much more aggressive way of trying to transform the way the federal government works than cutting some money off the top.