The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 January 2016
• Author: Pilon, Roger

The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

Arthur C. Brooks

New York: Broadside Books, 2015, 246 pp.

Conservatives and libertarians have the answers for many of America's problems today, says Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), especially the problems of poverty. So why is our message so unpopular with so many? It's because, Brooks argues, we lead with our heads, not with our hearts--we do a terrible job packaging our message. He's right. We need to take people as they are, not as the purely rational creatures we'd like them to be.

After tracing his own idiosyncratic odyssey before he reached AEI--among other things, a college dropout, an itinerant French hornist with the City Orchestra of Barcelona, and a chaired Syracuse University professor of economics--Brooks begins his argument by noting the paradox his travels have brought before him: In recent decades the free market has lifted millions out of poverty in the developing world, yet poverty persists in America despite a half-century War on Poverty. Worse still, since the Great Recession, even the American middle class feels left behind.

So with the failure of die liberal solutions that have dominated our politics for decades, Brooks asks: "Why aren't Americans turning to conservatives for better...