Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (4 page)

We’re at risk, though, of slipping into the same vicious economic cycles caused by cronyism that have plagued Europe. Our system is increasingly littered with bailouts, tax loopholes, and subsidies that corporations exploit using high-priced lobbyists. Unfortunately, cronyism has been the order of the day in the Obama administration. When big government arbitrarily decides how it will enforce the new healthcare laws and against whom, and when it rewards its favorite
“green” industries with taxpayer subsidies, the demons of crony capitalism are set loose.

The cronyism is extending into the boardroom with politicians and corporate executives scratching each other’s backs. Look at the maddening unfairness behind the “too big to fail” financial crises in 2008–2009. Although his bank was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and complete failure, the chairman of Citigroup earned more than $126 million during his two-year tenure there, made possible by a bailout paid for by you, the taxpayer!
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I’m a sports nut, and I like to compare capitalism to a football game. The competition is intense and the stakes are high. There are winners and losers, and everyone is in it to win. Capitalism, like the NFL, has a rulebook and officials who enforce those rules.

Some libertarian-leaning capitalists have become so frustrated with government that they want to eliminate federal agencies and officials responsible for enforcing the law. Every football fan complains about the officials, particularly when it seems like they are throwing flags on every other play, but without the refs there would be chaos. For example, a holding penalty could be called on every play, but it isn’t. The officials generally call only penalties that affect the play. So if a left tackle holds on a wide receiver screen to the right, the official lets it go. Yes, rules are rules, but there is the larger picture to keep in mind—football succeeds when the players have an
opportunity to perform at their best individually and as a team. The NFL knows that no one comes to the game to see officials perform. It wants them to avoid unnecessary calls that interfere with the game and to work with the players to keep this intense, violent sport from getting out of hand.

President Obama, by contrast, believes that the game of capitalism is fundamentally flawed. He directs his officials not only to call more penalties but to change the rules in the middle of the game to reflect what he thinks is “fair.” Imagine a game in which the rules change depending on whom the commissioner is rooting for or in which officials call penalties on only one team. In some areas of the economy today, the government referees have not only swallowed their whistles, they’ve put on jerseys and joined one of the teams!

The American economy transformed human history because of freedom—free markets, free workers, free entrepreneurs. That freedom is endangered, and with it the American Dream.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That’s where the American Dream started. The term itself was coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931 in a
book titled
The Epic of America
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Writing at the onset of the Great Depression, he described that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.

It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to appreciate, and too many of us Americans have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not just a dream of motor cars and high wages, but a dream of a social order in which each person can develop his or her gifts and talents to the fullest degree and enjoy the recognition to which he or she is entitled, regardless of the accident of birth or position.

That’s why I don’t like to talk about the “middle class,” a term favored, unfortunately, by politicians of both parties. I refuse to accept the premise of that term, “middle class.” As conservatives, we don’t believe there are social or economic classes in America. Unlike the Left, we believe in the dignity of every human life and seek to create a country that maximizes his or her God-given potential. We shouldn’t assign people to categories or divide them artificially, pitting one group against another. That’s a specialty of this president and the Left, and we should reject it by eliminating this divisive rhetoric from our lexicon.

Another reason I don’t talk about the “middle class” is that the term has no real meaning in the United States. In a 2012 Pew Research survey, only 7 percent of respondents identified themselves as lower class, and 2 percent as upper class.
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A
wonderful characteristic of Americans is that almost everyone sees himself as the average person. Let’s stick to a term that describes the people who are working and doing the best they can to be good citizens but are falling behind—working Americans.

The American Dream is ingrained in us. It is the reason people risk their lives every day to come here. It is why parents scrimp and save to get their kids through college. Everyone knows the American Dream takes work—we take fewer days of vacation than almost any other people in the world—but many are willing to pay the price to reach their dream.
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Many Americans, however, are losing their grip on the dream. A Marist-McClatchy poll taken in February 2014 found that only 31 percent of Americans believe that someone who works hard has a good chance of improving his standard of living, while 68 percent think that someone who works hard has a difficult time even maintaining his standard of living. Eighty percent of Americans think it’s harder now to get ahead than in previous generations, and 78 percent expect it to be even harder for the next generation.
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Those numbers should be a punch in the gut to every American leader, starting with the president.

To put a face on these statistics about the American Dream, I’d like to introduce you to a family I’ll call the Harrisons.
They are a composite of the many hundreds of families I met and the thousands of stories I collected during my campaign. James and Susan Harrison live in northeastern Ohio and have two teenage boys. A generation ago, the Harrisons’ parents were relatively well-off, enjoying comfortable, happy lives. James’s father worked for a company that manufactured aluminum tubes. It was a secure job with good wages. Susan grew up five blocks away, and her father was the football coach at the high school. James and Susan went to good public schools, participated in sports and the Key Club, and were faithful parishioners at their Roman Catholic church. James spent his high school summers working for the aluminum company and had a job waiting there for him when he graduated. He and Susan got married several years after that, and within a few years they had two boys. They never thought much about becoming rich in a material sense, but they saw a clear path to a life rich in family and community, coaching Little League and raising their children in a safe, hardworking neighborhood.

Life started pretty well for the Harrisons, but then things changed. Business at the aluminum company peaked about thirty years ago and has steadily declined ever since. James’s wages flattened, and then his benefits started to get cut back. Ten years ago, the company filed for bankruptcy and everyone lost his job. Since then, James has worked at a big-box home improvement store thirty miles away. With fewer hours and
no benefits, he is earning about three-quarters of his old wage and spending more money on gas for his commute.

Susan Harrison works part-time as a school nurse. Her hours have been cut back, and the family’s finances are tight. Their kids are now in high school, but those once-proud public schools are a shadow of their former selves. The Little League continues on, but the fields are weedier and the rosters smaller.

The Harrisons feel they are too old for new training and education, and with teenage boys and elderly parents, they can’t easily pick up and move. College for their kids looks unaffordable, and at the same time, they don’t want the boys loading up on debt. They have little hope for a better future or to regain the pride and comfort their family once enjoyed. All around them they see neighbors slipping into poverty. They see drug and alcohol abuse and young girls getting pregnant without husbands, relying on the state for their welfare. Their once-safe neighborhood now has vacant homes and crime.

What hope does our country offer the Harrisons? Is there still a path to prosperity for all Americans? After talking to people across the United States, my sense is that they want to believe in the American Dream, but it’s getting harder. Too many shuttered factories and abandoned homes stand as
ghostly reminders of the prosperity and stability that working Americans once enjoyed. Crime, despair, and social breakdown have taken their place.

These are not sudden developments—many of these communities have been in decline for decades—but the Great Recession knocked away their last struts. Not only were eight million jobs lost, and more than half of all household wealth, but the local manufacturing plants and supporting businesses are not there anymore for young people starting their careers.

For the most part, people like the Harrisons have traditional, conservative values; they believe in family and faith; they are willing to work hard; they are patriotic, with a patriotism that ties them to their community. And what have we Republicans offered them? Mostly macroeconomic arguments about tax policies that won’t affect them directly. The Harrisons can be forgiven if they feel like Republicans have no idea what is happening to average Americans today.

Give President Obama credit—his campaign focused relentlessly on stories about people who were suffering, and he was able to convince most voters that he cared. He deemphasized work as a path to prosperity by gutting the welfare reforms that were a bipartisan achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then he dramatically expanded relief programs with no work requirement—programs like food stamps, school lunches, and unemployment insurance. Burdened with an atrocious economic record, Obama’s campaign developed an astonishingly effective strategy: let voters continue to blame
President Bush for the problems, wage a rhetorical war on the wealthy, emphasize the redistribution of wealth, and play on people’s fear that “millionaires and billionaires” were trying to pull the rug out from under them.

That strategy succeeded in getting Obama reelected, but it has done nothing to improve the economy or help the people who are hurting. In 2008, Obama promised “hope and change.” He delivered the change—above all, the disastrous and unpopular Obamacare—but hope was replaced in 2012 by fear. The people who supported Obama most strongly were those who felt economically vulnerable—ethnic minorities and single women. To be sure, the president made other appeals to this base (the shamefully divisive “war on women” comes to mind), but fear of losing the government safety net, even if you’re not currently relying on it yourself, proved to be a decisive issue.