Return of Compassionate Conservatism

The GOP should emphasize its solutions to human suffering

By Peyton R. Miller

The Republican Party has an image problem: We are the bad guys. We are portrayed as the party of unjust wars for oil, inhumane treatment of detainees, tax cuts and preferential treatment for wealthy corporations, and intolerance toward gays and minorities. Though we should continue to explain the moral legitimacy and efficacy of our positions on mainstream issues, we should also highlight the philanthropic impact of our platform. Expanding the generic conservative triad—commitment to a free market economy, strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values—to include compassion for all mankind would not only alleviate the Republican image problem but, more importantly, more accurately reflect of our philosophy.

Of course, this approach was pioneered by the most notorious “bad guy” of all: George W. Bush. As former Minneapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith has noted, Bush created the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) out of a desire to combine traditionally conservative policies like tax cuts and investment incentives with efforts specifically designed to empower those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The agency encourages religious charities and community organizations to apply for government grants and allows them to compete on a level playing field with secular organizations. This strategy recognizes the role that religious faith can play in personal recovery and the fact that, as Goldsmith explains, local groups are often more effective in alleviating need because they provide flexible, personalized service superior to the one-size-fits-all character of government programs.

The strategy’s results validate this reasoning. Prisoners who have been linked with federally funded faith based mentoring programs, for example, return to prison at less than half the national average, and over 70,000 children of inmates have received career counseling. Teenage drug use has declined by 25 percent since 2001 thanks in large part to Access to Recovery, which provided nearly 270,000 recovering addicts with vouchers that could be redeemed by faith-based and community health services. Since 2001, grantees have created or expanded over 1,200 community health clinics, increasing the number of low-income individuals with access to these facilities by 4.7 million. Over half a million disadvantaged students now have access to after-school tutoring. The partnership with faith-based and community groups has contributed to a 30 percent reduction in chronic homelessness from 2005 to 2007 as well as a 40 percent reduction in the number of homeless veterans since 2001. Though some continue to question the constitutionality of a program that funds religious organizations, it is hard to argue with these results.

Bush also made an unprecedented effort to lessen suffering abroad. The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), for example, is the largest commitment ever by a single nation towards an international health initiative and has provided life-saving treatment for 2.1 million people worldwide as of September 2008. Incidentally, 87 percent of the subsidiaries of PEPFAR are local groups, most of which are faith-based and community organizations. And public opinion of America in the program’s target countries is enormously positive.

Bush’s humanitarian achievements are rarely mentioned, and usually as a half-hearted attempt to defend his legacy. This must change. These efforts have been successful by any standards, and, although they entail government expansion, they are distinctly conservative. Government support for religious organizations is very much a conservative idea, as is the notion that a subsidized private sector is superior to a government program in reducing poverty and addiction. Unlike liberal policies like foreign aid or cancellation of foreign debt that often strengthen incompetent or malevolent governments, the conservative approach uses primarily local organizations to target a specific humanitarian crisis. Successes like these should be touted as effective—and conservative—ways of relieving human suffering, and Republicans would do well to expand on these ideas and make them a centerpiece of the party platform.

Apart from this more proactive strategy, many conservative policies advance humanitarian goals but are seldom marketed in this way. The most obvious example is the human trafficking, which is almost never mentioned in the media. Approximately 27 million people are enslaved worldwide, more than at any time during the Transatlantic slave trade, and they are most often forced to perform manual labor or prostitution in abhorrent conditions.

Human trafficking persists in many countries because the government either does nothing to stop it or actually cooperates with the traffickers. The State Department’s trafficking watch list reveals that this tends to occur in totalitarian countries, such as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Syria.

Despite the Thirteenth Amendment, the CIA estimates that between 14,500 and 17,500 people, largely women and girls from Third World countries, are trafficked into the “land of the free” each year to serve against their will in the commercial sex industry. One reason traffickers succeed is the lack of security on the southern border. It is no coincidence that Las Vegas, one of the few U.S. cities where prostitution is legal, is the epicenter of human trafficking in North America. Slavery is also incentivized by the American tax code: traffickers, as well as other criminals, pay no federal income tax since their source of income is illegal in the first place.

Once Republicans have educated people about the problem of slavery, we can explain why our platform is most capable of solving it. Promoting democracy abroad, a key tenet of conservative foreign policy, would increase governmental transparency and reduce slavery worldwide. Securing the border would prevent traffickers from smuggling their human cargo into the United States. Banning or regulating prostitution and heavily enforcing such policies would make it costly for domestic traffickers to operate, as would switching from an income tax to a consumption tax, which would require traffickers to pay federal taxes every time they purchase a good or service.

The Republican agenda on foreign, economic, and social policy, therefore, is positioned to eliminate human trafficking. We should continue to explain why policies like democratization, border security, anti-prostitution laws, and tax reform are good for the country as a whole, but the platform becomes much more difficult to criticize when it is marketed as the antidote to slavery. It would obviously be ridiculous to suggest that Democrats are apathetic about human trafficking, but calling attention to an evil that everyone agrees must be eliminated at virtually any cost requires Democrats to either refute the notion that conservative policies would reduce slavery or explain why theirs would do a better job, neither of which is convenient.

Eliminating problems like poverty, drug addiction, and human trafficking are good policies for obvious reasons, but bringing them to the forefront of the national debate is also smart political strategy. Though some might argue that it is unfortunate to politicize issues like AIDS and slavery, democratic leaders have one motivation to solve problems of any kind: public opinion. The government will only take action if the public demands it, and the public will demand action only if they realize action is needed. We therefore have every right, and perhaps an obligation, to call attention to humanitarian problems, and solving them with smart government policies when possible is entirely consistent with our philosophy. National security, economic freedom, and traditional values must continue to play a dominant role in defining our party’s agenda, but Republicans would be well served politically and ethically to include compassion for society’s downtrodden as an essential component of our professed ideology.