Mark Rodgers is the Principal of The Clapham Group and Managing Director of Wedgwood Circle – two companies that seek to influence culture upstream of the political arena.
I am a Republican. For six years I was the third-ranking leadership staffer in the United State Senate. I am a conservative. For sixteen years I served as former Senator Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) top staffer. And I am hopeful.
With new leadership in Congress and a new Presidential cycle underway, we have an opportunity for conservative Republicans to articulate a new vision. A vision for the millions of Americans pushed off the plateau of prosperity into the abyss of economic hardship marked by a 9% unemployment rate that has haunted our nation for the past three years. This new vision is one of American greatness, of American opportunity. American opportunity is unique because we believe American prosperity is based on the quality of our character, not our background or our birth.
Yet this vision, this dream, is only true to the extent that it is a reality. And it seems that today American opportunity is a reality for fewer and fewer people. For if opportunity is available to all, those who have the character and the competency to thrive should. Yet indicators of social mobility, which are an important proxy for opportunity, do not show the dream of American opportunity in practice. 42% of Americans born into the bottom fifth of the population stay there, higher than many other Western countries including the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden.[1]
Sadly, the bipartisan silence from Hill and Administration makes you wonder if anyone is paying attention as this dream dissolves into faint echoes. Republicans should take a cue from the British Prime Minister David Cameron and seize the high ground, championing opportunity for all, particularly the least of among us. It is right and it is a winning strategy.
For years on the Hill I was active with Republican efforts to frame the issues of domestic and international poverty and opportunity, as well as human rights from a conservative prism of principles and policies. There is no question that the best poverty fighting and opportunity promoting policy is a job-creation policy, but as my former boss used to say: “a rising tide does lift all boats, unless they have holes in them.” There are systemic issues that need to be addressed, and conservative Republicans are in an important position to articulate a vision and propose policies for those who are sinking while others are rising.
We have done this before, and with great success. Here at home, welfare reform is considered the most consequential social policy of the latter quarter of the 20th century. Welfare roles were cut dramatically and large numbers of people were incentivized to work, breaking generational cycles of dependency and poverty. Abroad, one of President Bush’s (and America’s) lasting legacies has been the remarkably successful effort to arrest global growth of AIDS, reverse the alarming trend and care for the individuals, families and communities devastated by the disease.
“Compassionate Conservatism” was a framework to organize this conversation for conservatives. Yet its definition was both too small and too big. Some saw it as just a hand out to faith-based groups, while for others the term erroneously came to symbolize the growth in government spending and deficits under Republican control of the Congress and White House. Both views are inaccurate, but sadly they have hurt any subsequent efforts to rearticulate a vision for the poor.
It is time for conservatives to again organize and cast a vision for the marginalized, the displaced, the enslaved and for the least of these, based on conservative principles and understandings of government, society and human nature. Why? Because it is in these solutions that the path to opportunity and prosperity lies.
Over the next several weeks, we have organized a conversation to give voice to the voiceless. We will create space for informed and prominent conservative voices to share their thoughts and policy recommendations on a spectrum of issues. We will then finish with a vision, a statement, a framework, and a rallying cry for conservatives who want to show how we love our neighbors as ourselves. For it is precisely because we love them that we are compelled to articulate ways of promoting opportunity for them.
And hopefully, our leaders will listen. Yet if we can’t persuade our colleagues on moral or policy grounds to join us, we hope to at least convince them that there is a voter rich community who cares and is invested in the conversation. Faith-filled Evangelicals and Catholics. Hispanics and African Americans. Generations Y and X. And the growing disenfranchised, many of whom are looking not just for a physical home, but an ideological one with solutions to our social ills that work. They are looking for “solutions of opportunity” that harness the ingenuity and determination of all Americans to achieve prosperity, not a reliance on government bureaucracy that fosters dependency.
[1] Haskins, R & Sawhill, B, Creating an Opportunity Society, Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 66
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