‘The Conservative Heart’: A Q&A with Arthur Brooks

AEI President Arthur Brooks has a new book out, “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier and More Prosperous America.” In it, Brooks offers a fresh vision for conservatism as a movement for social and economic justice — one that fights poverty, promotes equal opportunity, and celebrates earned success. It is an inclusive movement with a positive agenda to help people to lead happier, more hopeful, and more satisfying lives. Here, Brooks answers a few questions on his motivation for writing the book, what we can learn from the War on Poverty, and advice for improving how conservatives communicate:

1.) Why did you write “The Conservative Heart”?

I became a conservative because I care about poverty. Conservative values, like free enterprise and American leadership overseas, are the primary reason why the proportion of desperately poor people in the world has declined by 80% since the 1970s.

But here’s the paradox—even though we have the best solutions, conservatives are the least trusted to fight for poor and vulnerable people right here at home. Our movement, both in style and substance, often neglects the purpose-driven morality that is really written on our hearts. So I wrote this book to provide a blueprint for an aspirational, inclusive, optimistic conservative movement that could reunite the country.

2.) While a professor at Syracuse, you began researching charity. What drew you to that topic in particular?

I made a commitment, when I was in academia, to study the topics that really matter, even if they were difficult to research. One very important topic I found to be greatly understudied yet very important was charity. It’s obvious that charity is a huge part of civil society. Nonprofit organizations take care of the poor, provide education—and even compete in the war of ideas in the case of AEI. Yet there’s a great deal we don’t know about why people give.

3.) Why do you think conservatives tend to use materialistic versus moral language?

Conservatives employ materialistic rhetoric simply because it’s the path of least resistance. Social democratic or statist systems don’t have a strong materialistic case to make, because they consume wealth more than they produce it, focusing on redistribution in a fixed-sum setup. Free enterprise, on the other hand, creates explosive wealth and growth, so that’s what we focus on. But that’s a mistake because the most important products of the free enterprise system are human freedom, dignity, and widespread poverty alleviation. Those are the things to focus on first and foremost.

4.) Forty-eight percent of our happiness is genetic, 40% current events, and 12% is up to us, you write. And the four values that are correlated with happiness are faith, family, community, and meaningful work. Which one of those values is being neglected the most in America today?

Work is neglected the most. Our policies and economic structure are creating less and less employment participation, even as GDP rises. This is catastrophic, because work is the secret to dignity. Study after study shows that for the big majority of people, work (both market work and non-market work) is an intrinsic source of worth, of earned success, and human happiness. We need culture and policy that recognize this better.

5.) Why is the advice, “If it feels good, do it,” problematic, and how does that have anything to do with conservatism?

The great advances of evolutionary biology have shown that our brains are wired to achieve two functions: prosper and mate. As I discuss in my book, Mother Nature’s cruel hoax is the fact that what makes a person more likely to pass on their DNA does not necessarily make them happy. But people often conflate the urge to propagate the species and the urge to pursue happiness. In practice, we end up taking great steps to make ourselves attractive through power and through money, thinking this will make us happy. Yet it doesn’t work. Everyone seems to know this; it’s what our mothers told us when we were kids. This is another example of how many traditionally conservative values aren’t some confining moral code that keeps us down, but a set of principles that can free us to really pursue happiness.

6.) What is the most important lesson we can learn from the War on Poverty?

The War on Poverty is a failure—but a limited one. In fact, there have been some government programs that have alleviated a non-trivial amount of material need. Nobody serious denies this. But the initiative has been a failure ultimately because it didn’t meet its own original aspirations.

Look at the soaring rhetoric of President Lyndon B. Johnson when he launched the Great Society in 1964. You find him talking about dignity, about meaning in people’s lives, about making sure that we were not just relieved for material need, but were delivered to a society where every single person was empowered to fulfill their full potential. We must realize that the War on Poverty did not fail because it had the wrong aspirations.

But the big-government apparatus we’ve set up in the decades since has failed to meet these aspirations. Policymakers couldn’t give people what they need and want—earned success, dignity, and a sense of moral worth. Further, it lowered incentives for employment and family formation. So after at least $15 trillion in spending, we transformed ourselves from a society that had way too much poverty into a society that had less material need but also less work and family. We relieved need but did not increase flourishing—to the contrary. This is why the “War on Poverty” was a failure.

7.) You talk quite a bit about the Doe Fund’s “Ready, Willing, and Able” program in the book. What do you think makes this program successful? 

The Doe Fund is an extraordinary success not just because of its numbers (it has lower criminal recidivism and higher work attachment than virtually any other program for the homeless in New York City) but because it specializes in taking care of some of the most difficult members of society—the hardest cases. You have to understand that all of the Doe Fund’s clients are men, many who have been in prison, and who are homeless. The key reason that the Doe Fund is able to help these men, as I discuss in the book, is that they treat them like assets to develop and not like liabilities to manage. Instead of looking at these guys like the unwanted detritus of a society, the Doe Fund decides that these people are assets and ought to be treated as such.

Does everybody succeed? Of course not. But when you have the moral courage to hold struggling people to the same moral expectations you would apply to anybody else, combined with vocational training and carefully structured assistance, you can create magic.

8.) When I was meeting with the director of a homeless shelter a few years ago, who had been formerly homeless herself, she said something that surprised me. She spoke very strongly against the welfare system saying that as it is designed now, it too often breaks people’s spirits leaving them hopeless, and ends up keeping them down, rather than lifting them up. Would you agree? If so, is there a way to structure the welfare system so that we can help keep people hopeful and more successfully get them back on their feet? 

Sadly, her assessment is spot on. We’ve spent decades constructing welfare programs that relieve material need but do very little to expand access to meaningful work, so people stay desperate and dependent.

In “The Conservative Heart,” I outline three principles that should guide any conservatives approach to repairing and improving social safety net programs. First, conservatives need to declare “peace” on the safety net. The narrative has developed that conservatives don’t believe in the social safety at all—yet this has never been a core principal of conservative thought.

The second principle is that the safety net must be carefully targeted towards the poor and indigent. Currently, our safety net programs have exploded into a web of middle-class entitlements.

The third principle is that the safety net must encourage and require work. Work is the central element of a dignified life, and our safety net must embody this.

9.) What is your most important piece of communication advice for conservatives?

The conservative heart is about fighting for people, not against things. The conservative heart at its core believes that people have equal worth and dignity and should be built up like the invaluable assets they are, not managed at minimal cost. The conservative movement should not be about fighting against liberalism, taxes, or Obamacare. Those fights may be necessary to have—but they’re secondary.

First and foremost, the conservative heart is all about believing in and fighting for the pursuit of happiness of every single person. If we can remember that, we can make America a better place for those with less power than ourselves. And if we remember this truth, we will win the hearts of a big majority of Americans.