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

• Author: Pilon, Roger
• Position: Book review

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 solutions? Simple: People don't think conservatives care." And he has the polls to prove it.

In fact, this book is rich with social science data supporting his central thesis, that if we want to start winning--especially for the poor, the book's particular focus--we've got to learn to speak in a way that persuades rather than turns off so many. And Brooks follows his own advice, offering up a wealth of stories about programs that succeed and those that don't. Our sprawling entitlement programs, he writes, have succeeded only in making poverty marginally less painful, not less permanent: since the time the Great Society's major policy pillars were put in place, the poverty rate had dropped by only 0.2 percent--a rounding error. But when we look to an array of private sector programs, we find the Doe Fund's Harlem Center for Opportunity, for example, established by a husband and wife team dedicated to helping the most difficult cases, homeless ex-cons, get back on their feet through a sustained program dedicated to instilling the dignity of work. Since 1990, the program has helped more than 22,000 people reclaim their...