Today in South Carolina, the American Enterprise Institute is teaming up with the Jack Kemp Foundation, Opportunity Lives, and the Economic Innovation Group to host a special forum for presidential candidates. The subject? Fighting poverty and promoting opportunity.
Throughout the day, seven GOP candidates will showcase their plans to cut poverty and lift up the vulnerable. I’ll have the privilege of introducing the two moderators — my good friends Senator Tim Scott and Speaker Paul Ryan. Both are principled, pragmatic leaders who exemplify the conservative creed of fighting for struggling people. Colleagues from AEI will also be in attendance, including Robert Doar — our Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies — who will be tweeting updates from on the ground at @RobertDoar.
If you had proposed four years ago that 2016 would bring a presidential forum dedicated to the issue of poverty and featuring the conservative candidates, few would have been quick to believe you. Let’s face it: When most people think of the free enterprise movement today, they don’t immediately think of a laser-like focus on fighting poverty and lifting up vulnerable people.
One typical poll found that 56% of Americans believe the word compassionate describes conservatives “not at all well.” A lonely 5% said compassion describes the party “very well.”
It’s easy to blame media bias or ad hominem from the other side, but the hard truth is that free enterprise advocates helped craft this image for themselves. Years of focusing almost entirely on discussions of debt, deficits, and tax rates have made the center-right movement sound materialistic to many Americans’ ears. And fringe rhetoric that describes all our poor neighbors as lazy and unwilling to work isn’t just inaccurate. It also marginalizes the very people whom our economic recovery has left behind.
These mistakes carry a high moral cost. Our current crop of 50-year-old policies has helped make poverty marginally less miserable in material terms. But they have failed in their true goal — to make poverty more escapable. They have failed because they rest on an outdated philosophy. That philosophy treats work as a punishment, not a blessing. It views poor people fundamentally as liabilities to manage, not assets to develop and unleash. It views income inequality, not insufficient opportunity, as the defining challenge of our day.
These are all critical mistakes. Fortunately, free enterprise can correct them. Indeed, it has done just that in the past.
In the 1970s, conservative luminaries at the American Enterprise Institute — like Irving Kristol and James Q. Wilson — showed that conservatism is not antithetical to safety-net policies or concern for the vulnerable. In the 1980s, Jack Kemp pioneered a new message that fused pro-growth fiscal conservatism with a passion for urban renewal and improving public assistance programs. AEI scholar Charles Murray’s decades-long work helped spur major changes in welfare policy in the mid-1990s, reforms that restored work incentives and made earned success more attainable for millions.
But by 2012, only a few conservative politicians and leaders were putting these issues front and center. Talented center-right scholars never stopped researching poverty. But unless free enterprise advocates started showing up in these debates and prioritizing these issues, they were never going to earn the chance to build on the successes of the past.
AEI was determined to help lead this renewal. Two years ago, we hired Robert Doar, a veteran social services reformer who administered New York City’s welfare programs, to help us build a dedicated anti-poverty shop. Today, I count among my colleagues an economist focused on homelessness, a sociologist who studies ways to strengthen the family, and former practitioners who focus on making social services work for children and working people. These experts’ work dovetails with AEI’s other scholarship from economics to education to healthcare, highlighting reforms to help Americans climb into the middle class and beyond. And I work closely with our government relations team to remind leaders in both parties that standing up and fighting for vulnerable people is the purest expression of the values we treasure.
The free enterprise movement’s focus on poverty is growing. This is evident in the work of bold, innovative leaders like Speaker Ryan and Sen. Scott. Both combine authentic conservatism with genuine empathy and deep expertise on the issues. It is evident in the work of other groups leading the charge, like the Kemp Foundation and Opportunity Lives, a fantastic platform that shares real-life stories from the front lines of free enterprise. And it is made manifest in events like today’s.
But these welcome signs are not the culmination of this new movement’s work. They are only the beginning. This burgeoning coalition is just getting started arming policymakers and leaders on both sides of the aisle with new ideas and new thinking. Poor Americans deserve no less.
Again, you can keep up with the candidates’ remarks and today’s coverage by checking out @RobertDoar and @AEI on Twitter, following the hashtag #KempForum16, and livestreaming the proceedings or watching videos after the fact.
But once the day wraps up, keep coming back and reading the latest from AEI. We are just getting started.
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