The right starts talking about the crisis in middle America

Ryan Streeter

Middle America is struggling, and in the past week, conservatives have been paying some attention to the problem. See snippets below from Rich Lowry, David Frum, Mike Gerson, and David Brooks. In different ways they bring color to “the conservative mind” as it wrestles with the issue of the middle class.

Tomorrow, ConservativeHome will feature a mini-symposium by some leading authors and thinkers on what conservatives should be doing to help the middle class.

Why are we focusing on this?  Because, despite a lot of debate about the “middle class” (mainly through Democrat demagoguery about the tax rate extensions), the problem in middle America is starker than either party wants to admit. At least on the right, we shouldn’t tolerate our own complacency about the American middle even if Democrats end up alienating themselves from the middle American by misunderstanding it.

The real picture of middle America shows a problem much deeper and wider than a 2 year extension of the current tax rates will fix. That much should be clear. What is not clear is what else we should do. But for now, let’s focus on the problem and try to get agreement among conservatives that we need more policy innovation on this front. 

Here is a summary of commentary over the past week that helps cast some light on the issue:

Rich Lowry wrote an important column last week at NRO and in the New York Post:  He writes that divorce and family breakdown in what we usually think of as middle class families, combined with economic strain among people without college degrees, all point to

a slow-motion social and economic evisceration of a swath of Middle America…At the moment, American politics offers two separate, distinct ways not to address these issues: Either the brain-dead populism of the Left that blames it all on trade and the decline of unions, or the brain-dead populism of the Right that extols the working class without taking serious note of its agony. We’ll have to do better: There’s a crisis in the middle.

David Frum replied by challenging Lowry to go farther and get National Review to make this a big issue:

As Rich [Lowry] notes, for the lower two-thirds, we are living through the Great Depression. So question: what is the congressional GOP proposing to do to help them? The answer is: nothing much. If anything, one of the central economic ideas of the Republican mainstream – tighter monetary policy – would substantially hurt them. I notice that the Wall Street Journal today actually opposed the payroll tax cut agreed by President Obama and the congressional Republicans on the explicit grounds that it only cut the employee share, not the employer share.

Frum suggests some policy ideas from infrastructure investment to “the need for anti-recession measures like payroll tax reductions and debt relief via moderate inflation: On the theory that first we stop the bleeding, then we put the patient on a better health regimen.” 

In today’s Washington Post Mike Gerson writes:

Economic inequality can be justified as the reward for greater effort - so long as there is also social mobility. In the absence of mobility, capitalism becomes a caste system. And this is what America, in violation of its self-image, threatens to become. The United States has less upward economic mobility among lower-income families than Canada, Finland or Sweden. Americans who are born into the middle class have a roughly equal chance of ascending or descending the economic ladder. But Americans born poor are likely to stay on its lowest rungs.

He continues:

A mobility agenda might include measures to discourage teen pregnancy; increase the rewards for work; encourage wealth-building and entrepreneurship; reform preschool programs; improve infant and child health; increase teacher quality; and increase high school graduation rates and college attendance among the poor. Children of low-income parents who gain a college degree triple their chance of earning $85,000 a year or more. If America had the same fraction of single-parent families as it had in 1970, the child poverty rate would be about 30 percent lower.

And, finally, David Brooks writes today that a strong middle class may just be the way that America continues to extend its influence as our standing wanes in other areas.  He writes:

Americans could well become the champions of the gospel of middle-class dignity. The U.S. could become the crossroads nation for those who aspire to join the middle and upper-middle class, attracting students, immigrants and entrepreneurs.  To do this, we’d have to do a better job of celebrating and defining middle-class values. We’d have to do a better job of nurturing our own middle class. We’d have to have the American business class doing what it does best: catering to every nook and cranny of the middle-class lifestyle. And we’d have to emphasize that capitalism didn’t create the American bourgeoisie. It was the social context undergirding capitalism — the community clubs, the professional societies, the religious charities and Little Leagues.

So we can summarize these summaries this way:

• The middle of America is in crisis, and we need to wake up (Lowry).
• To say that is good and true, but we also need to wake up to the fact that we don't really have good ideas out there about what we need to do, and the problem is big enough to warrant big ideas (Frum).
• The ideas we need to explore, but aren't presently, should focus not on redistribution or a purely laissez-faire approach to how tax cuts play out, but should focus rigorously on upward mobility so that aspiration rather than class defines who you and I are (Gerson).
• And if we can create more opportunity for the middle class, and make it stronger, it may even become our greatest export and means of transmitting American values around the world (Brooks).

Well, this is a start. Two important conclusions come to mind:

• Conservatives need to agree soon whether they can support non-redistributionist policies that nevertheless allow some very targeted spending (even in significant sums as, say, infrastructure or higher education investments might require) that's most likely to spur innovation and new jobs leading to longer-term private sector growth.
• GOP leaders need to start explaining in clear terms - backed by evidence - how spending reductions and cost-drivers such as "the job-killing health care law," as they like to say, will foster growth. There is a relationship, but it needs to be clear. As Gerson says, a successful GOP candidate in 2012 "will need to speak of opportunity, not just austerity, to a dispirited nation."