I think my main problem with this Arthur Brooks article is that it gets the emphasis backwards. The main Republican problem isn’t that they seem uncaring. More skilled campaigning would be nice, but better emoting about the plight of the poor with the same message of tax cuts for high earners isn’t going to help much. Romney was behind in the polls before his forty-seven percent crack. People with worries of their own will not be satisfied with stories about how the free market has lifted people out of poverty. People want specifics about how free market policies will make their lives better. Some answers would be nice. If you vote for us, then we will try to implement this, which will result in that. And no, I’m not talking about cutting Mitt Romney’s taxes to unleash job creators to build that.
And Republican activists have to be careful to avoid a kind of anti-policy orientation that masquerades as small government principle. We want small government so the government shouldn’t focus on policy areas A, B, and C. Well, the government is heavily involved in these areas and the state of public opinion is such that a full extrication is politically impossible and everybody knows it. So the answer for much of the center-right is to largely ignore these areas of policy until it is time to fight the next Democratic advance. This “small government” orientation becomes, in practice, a defense of a statist status quo and guarantees that liberals can’t lose (though they don’t always win.)
The Republicans aren’t going to get the votes of the most disorganized and troubled of the poor. Probably nobody is going to get their votes. I do think that a seeming lack of Republican interest in anybody except high earners hurts Republicans across the income distribution. The answer isn’t to learn to talk about entrepreneurs and capitalism differently. It is to focus on how their policies will directly impact people. Assemble those policies. Focus on them. All this trying to find just the right way to talk about entrepreneurs who built that to get people out of poverty so that people will wake up from socialism is a waste of time. Everybody already knows Republicans heart entrepreneurs. It is about the only thing they know about Republicans. Telling them more clearly is only accentuating the monomania.
The Romney team didn’t mess up a good plan with a few linguistic missteps. They did an okay job with a lousy plan. Get a better plan. Build that.
March 6th, 2013 | 12:31 am
[...] be nice, but better emoting about the plight of the poor with the same message of tax cuts for …read more Source: Postmodern [...]
March 6th, 2013 | 6:17 am
I don’t think people know Republicans heart all entrepreneurs, but think they heart only the successful ones. Part of that problem is that people do not understand economics very well, and I am not just talking about the poor. Local, state and federal government set up barriers to entry into markets in the form of regulations and permits so that only those with substantial capital can afford to start a business. That hits the poor and middle class entrepreneur. From their point of view, government protects big business, and it does.
March 6th, 2013 | 2:50 pm
This is just about right. In the ascendency of the conservative movement, it was obvious that a pro- enterpreneur and “small government” (although I prefer the use of “limited government” to “small government”) philosophy would need to to be explained. But as that philosophy began to win, as it saturated political debate, the explaining was set aside under the assumption that people would naturally prefer conservative goals to progressive ones. After all, hadn’t they seen the increased prosperity brought by a more liberal fiscal policy? Hadn’t they seen an evil empire brought down by muscular foreign policy? Didn’t they like safer neighborhoods, where they could raise their families according to their principles?
But things change, and discourse has to change with them even if the underlying ideas don’t need to change. Conservative leaders who were part of the ascendancy became practitioners of a “normal politics” (perhaps stretching Kuhn a bit thin here), failing to recognize that the rhetoric they used as oppositional figures needed to be modified once in power, and that a further modification would be needed in the event of a decline. We had the “conservative moment” of the 80′s and 90′s, but we moved into a “post-conservative” period in the 00′s in which both proponents and opponents of conservatism began to forget the substance behind the well-practiced slogans. Once certain “paradigms” were established, conservative leaders forgot that political truths needed to be re-established with each generation to avoid the appearance of being stale.
This is especially true today, when the concrete advantages of conservative policy and philosophy have been obscured by economic and foreign crisis, and when the chattering class isn’t willing to say much good about it either. It behoves any conservative with a platform to go beyond just talking about “freedom,” and “tax cuts,” and “free markets,” and “family values” to actual policies reflecting those facets of the philosophy. In some cases, those words shouldn’t even be mentioned. The policy can speak for itself. I think Bob McDonnell, to some extent, did that in his campaign for Governor of Virginia. Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal are capable of doing that, even if they sometimes veer off into right-think- land.
Someone who follows your advice, however conservative they are, would probably find themselves labeled a moderate in deep red states. Unfortunately the reactive climate, which you mentioned, is so dominated by the shrillest voices that you will have to pay lip-service to a certain kind of unsophisticated rhetoric in order to be elected in some places. As you’ve also pointed out, though, a conservative focused on knowing what their policies mean for their constituents should also be able to articulate the policies’ true conservatism to the base. But I suppose my main concern would be the confusion by the base of a moderate tone with actually being a moderate/ squish.
March 6th, 2013 | 8:11 pm
“Someone who follows your advice, however conservative they are, would probably find themselves labeled a moderate in deep red states.” Maybe, the Robert Stein-tax reform I’m for would raise marginal tax rates some high earners (though the top marginal rate would be set at 35% – it would hit some people currently at 28% and would eliminate some deductions.) I still think it is winnable in a Republican primary as parents and growth plan against a just cut taxes for high earners plan.
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