The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America
by Arthur C. Brooks
Broadside Books, 2015
(256 pages, $27.99, hardcover)

reviewed by John Murdock

"They won't care what you know," the cliché goes, "until they know that you care." Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (an institution not normally known as a hotbed of bleeding hearts) is on a mission to convince the nation that fiscal conservatives really do care about the poor. The Conservative Heart is Brooks's latest effort in a multi-year crusade that has included everything from launching a "Values & Capitalism" initiative to inviting the Dalai Lama over for a visit to going on an odd-couple speaking tour with Sojourners head Jim Wallis.

While a cheerleader for "the five incredible innovations" of "globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship," which he credits with slashing poverty worldwide, Brooks spends most of his time talking about the "happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work." Actually, while dutifully tossing in that "nothing has given [his] life more meaning and satisfaction than [his] Catholic faith and the love of [his] family," Brooks's primary focus is on the transformative value of work. Amid a fair amount of statistics—which one would expect from a man who "fell in love with economics" in his late twenties after leading a tuxedoed troubadour's life as a classical French horn player—Brooks takes the reader on anecdotal journeys to places like a despondent Austrian town with wealth but no work and an Indian slum with dirt floors but a can-do attitude.

Born the day before President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly declared "war on poverty," Brooks walks us through the stagnating effects of the trillions spent during his lifetime, and seeks to reclaim the mantle of "social justice" for a conservative agenda built on education reform and "happy warrior" rhetoric that accentuates the positive and tries to reclaim the moral high ground. (Don't be against raising the minimum wage; be for the 500,000 people who would lose their first foothold into the world of work, and offer an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit instead.)

In his drive for mainstream readability, Brooks can unfortunately swing from breezy to breathless, but he tells tales that deserve to be heard. His biggest heroes are the "men in blue" who have worked their way off the streets with the help of the Doe Fund, a private initiative in New York City founded by George and Harriet McDonald, longtime advocates for the homeless who shifted their focus from handing out sandwiches to building a multi-rung ladder out of the gutter.

Any role for religion seems a bit short-changed, though, as Brooks embraces an up with people attitude that skates over the problem of human evil, and his works righteousness model softly suggests that one can effectively pursue happiness without any real need for God—though Brooks is quite willing to offer pro-work quotes from religious figures like Pope Francis.

Brooks, whose rise to the top of one of D.C.'s biggest think tanks came not via a trust fund and an Ivy League pedigree but through a working-class neighborhood and a delayed higher education that featured a bachelor's degree by correspondence from Thomas Edison State College, is a believable evangelist for the gospel of work. While by no means the definitive volume on the dynamics of poverty alleviation, The Conservative Heart effectively demonstrates that someone well to the right of center can indeed have one. •