Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (10 page)

The War on Poverty—supposedly one of the great achievements of postwar liberalism—has left behind a
bloated, ineffective, and often destructive social welfare state. At the local level, cities like Washington and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, have suffered terrible financial and social problems after years of applying this ideology under Democratic rule. Yet some Republicans think that poverty and the struggles of blue collar America are not a “winning” issue for our party. They should look at what the British Conservative Party has done in recent years. On the issue of poverty, the
Tories
, of all people, put the Labor Party on the defensive. We can do that here.

In the mid-2000s, Iain Duncan Smith, a Conservative member of Parliament, established a think tank called the Centre for Social Justice to study social breakdown in Great Britain and the poverty that followed.
⁶
After traveling around to many troubled communities, he wrote that he saw “levels of social breakdown which appalled me. In the fourth largest economy in the world, too many people lived in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children were leaving school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities were blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality, many of them with stunningly low levels of life expectancy.”
⁷
Sound familiar? Mr. Duncan Smith was struck by how many people in those broken-down towns felt that politicians had given up on them and the political process had become irrelevant. Again, a familiar ring for Americans.

The goals of the Centre for Social Justice are remarkably similar to those affirmed in the American Declaration of Independence—that “each person, family and community is given every possible opportunity to reach their full potential.” And they sought to achieve those goals by combining government policy making with the efforts of local volunteer organizations that are in the best position to provide direct and effective support.

The project identified five “pathways to poverty”—family breakdown (illegitimacy and divorce), educational failure, unemployment, addiction, and indebtedness. All the same root causes are at work here. The center’s report,
Breakdown Britain
, formed the basis of Prime Minister David Cameron’s social policy (Duncan Smith became the works and pensions secretary in Cameron’s government) and produced new policies and mindsets. The report was followed by a set of proposals,
Breakthrough Britain
. The work of Duncan Smith is a great model for conservatives here in the United States.

While well-intentioned but corrosive welfare programs have taken their toll, the government is not entirely to blame for the deterioration of the American Dream. The mass entertainment industry—movies, television and radio, music, books and magazines, and now the internet, everything we commonly call “popular culture”—promotes with chilling
effectiveness behavior, beliefs, and attitudes that are virtually guaranteed to produce unhappiness in individuals and families. That is why I took the position as CEO of EchoLight Studios, a faith and family movie production and distribution company. We need to fight back by producing and promoting high-quality films that present the good, the true, and the beautiful. And if we are going to give the average American a chance to succeed, we must win.

We all have learned in our history classes the influence of popular culture. In the 1700s, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense
pushed Americans toward revolution.
Uncle Tom
’
s Cabin
so stirred the conscience of the nation that it endured a civil war in order to extirpate slavery. From our earliest days, books and plays have helped define America. In words attributed to the seventeenth-century Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher, “If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”
⁸

The cultural toxins are brewed not only in Hollywood but also on Madison Avenue, which is perverting the American Dream of a prosperous life into a materialist nightmare. The pitchmen inflame our appetites with a degraded vision of the good life, usually sold with sex.

This American nightmare is a prescription for disillusionment, emptiness, and despair. The advertisers show you what you must have or must look like to be happy or beautiful. It’s a lie, and the lie leads to bankruptcy and anorexia. Show me
a single and sexually inactive man or woman in a movie, and I show you an unhappy, ridiculed loser. Show me the opposite extreme in real life, and I’ll show you a lonely, vacuous predator or a willing victim who will likely struggle with meaningful romantic relationships, even within his or her marriage.

This egocentric pursuit of pleasure, material wealth, sex without consequences, and fame is the new morality. It may provide temporary thrills and moments of satisfaction, but it will not lead to happiness. The little band of patriots who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in Philadelphia had something very different in mind when they declared that all men have a God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. They weren’t talking about the pleasure of a contented animal. Noah Webster’s first dictionary, published in 1828, defined happiness as “The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good.”
⁹
“Good,” in turn, was defined as “having moral qualities best adapted to its design and use, or the qualities which God’s law requires; virtuous; pious; religious.”
¹⁰
Happiness means living in conformity with God’s intention for your life. We are endowed by our Creator with the other two “unalienable rights” of life and liberty so that we may pursue his will for our life—to be good.

The root of the confused new morality is a grossly distorted understanding of freedom. We Americans like to talk
about freedom, but we rarely examine what we mean by the word. In recent decades, it has become popular, particularly among many libertarians, to think of freedom as being allowed to do as we please. But there are two aspects of freedom: freedom
from
(we’ve got that one down) and freedom
for
. In other words, the exercise of freedom must be oriented to choosing what is true and good, always keeping in mind our obligations to one another and the common good. Otherwise, freedom degenerates into license, which ignores others and pursues self-interest alone. So smoking marijuana, hiring prostitutes, aborting your child, ignoring the poor, and doing whatever else gives you momentary pleasure, as long as no one else gets hurt, are mistaken for freedom. This is how many young people—bamboozled by Madison Avenue, movies, and television—now define the American Dream. When freedom is thus distorted, the good itself is obscured. It is confused with choice, and choice, irrespective of what is chosen, reigns supreme.

The cultural elites tell these lies about freedom to the rest of us, and the people who suffer the most from these lies are the ones who can’t buy their way out of the neighborhoods that are ravaged by the resulting dysfunction. The music producers, Hollywood moguls, advertising executives, and politicians who subscribe to these lies will not be there to bail them out of jail, pay for rehab, help their children stay in school, or
give them a job when their lives fall apart. They are too busy exercising their narrow, destructive view of freedom.

Achieving our dreams and building a better life for our family require tremendous work and commitment, but that is what makes them so worthwhile. The result most likely is good health, freedom from want, a strong and thriving family, and spiritual well-being. Not bad. We are the stewards of this. It’s up to us to maintain this ideal and reject the unhealthy distortions our culture too often forces upon us.

The Harrisons know this. They never had illusions about wealth and fame, and they’ve taught their boys that success in life is not defined by how much disposable wealth you have and how famous you are. Those things are mirages, and they’re dangerous for the people who pursue them. What the Harrisons want for their children are good jobs that allow them to live comfortably, strong families, and healthy values that include faith and giving back to the community. That’s their American Dream.

Thinking about the problems we face—the economic and cultural threats to the American Dream—it’s easy to become gloomy. Especially if, like the Harrisons and like me, you’ve got children who are going to inherit a nation whose promise
seems dimmer than the one we inherited. That’s a temptation we’ve got to resist. I like to recall the three greatest leaders on the world stage when I started my family and my career—Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II—the president, prime minister, and pope who, against all expectations, brought down the evil empire of Soviet communism. No one saw the world’s problems more clearly or appreciated their gravity more thoroughly than those three extraordinary people. Their personalities and temperaments were very different, but none of them ever gave in to discouragement. It was not a matter of mere optimism, of a naturally sunny disposition, but of a deep faith in divine Providence. With the same faith, we will be equal to the challenges of our own time.