In people who want to go out and become entrepreneurship some day to do that. Even if you havent found that job yet, it is possible and i encourage them to get involved in politics. I want to get young people fired up about politics. We can really focus on that. This is book tv on cspan2. Thanks for being here. Is there a Nonfiction Author that you would like to see on tv . Send us an email at book tv at cspan. Com. Or. Or visit us on facebook and twitter. Now a book tv, Arthur Brooks discusses his book the conservative heart. For which he said it is time for a new kind of conservatism. Arthur brooks, while you have written and exciting, important new book, the conservative heart. How to build a fair, happier and more for spiritus america. I have read this book and you can tell ive started tabbing and making notes. You seem to have struck a chord here that i think is going to be an important one for the Republican Party at large. Specifically how to deal with some of the internal changes that are occurring within the party. You talk about the party becoming again a party of aspiration. What was that about . What do you mean by that and what brought you to that conclusion . People talk about republicans and conservatives as being angry all the time. You hear constantly. You guys are so angry all the time. If you look at television and you watch whats happening with the candidates, especially people like donald trump who right out of the gate sound really angry. You actually do sound like that. If do something that. If you dont know any conservatives, most liberals dont have that many conservatives in their family and they just know what they see on tv. They see these guys yelling and screaming and it makes it looks like they hate these people. When ice darted studying economics, i was was brought up in a liberal family, but i realized that conservative ideas are the best ideas for lifting people out of poverty. Weve lifted many people out of poverty since the 1970. If the conservatives themselves cant think to shout this from the rooftop, how else are we can get the word out . So the idea of putting on it different face, showing who we are in expressing ourselves in a manner that is welcoming and inviting. What are some of the steps that we can begin to take to do that . Youve got people out of the gate falling into these camps of this or that whether its donald trump or ted cruz or someone who has had strong things to say at the beginning of this cycle. How do you begin to change that within the body of the gop . We have to remember our purpose. Not just as republicans, im an independent, it doesnt matter. We need to remember our. We need to remember our purpose as people. Its never to fight against policies but as a person in a leadership position its not to fight against policies, its to fight for people. This is what all people have in common and all ethical people have in common. Who are you going to fight for . Who, not billionaires. How can we get a Better Capital gain for billionaires, that doesnt come up. What can we do to create greater opportunities for people who are being left behind. Thats thats what we actually talk about. Number one is remembering our purpose in fighting for people. Remembering the faces of those people and telling the stories of those people. In this book i have dozens of stories about people. That was fascinating. In one section, i made, i made a note of it, you talk about going, let me put up. It was an indian slum and austrian ghost town. You give these examples of how people live with their lives, deal with these issues and problems and you talk about it from a very human aspect, not political not calculating. Theres a section where you talk about grandma europe. I particularly enjoyed where you said it might start with monetary and fiscal policy plus a healthy dose of market labor. Then you talk about how the world is changing and how do you adapt to that change and what do you do to make that work . How do you explain that and how do you express that with these examples of peoples lives in the story . How do we as a party, as an institution, how does that relate to those individual lives and stories in this changing environment . To begin with we have to remember each one of us is in fact our brothers keeper. If we can remember that we can make Real Progress. The moral consensus is that we are supposed to be Good Samaritans in fighting for other people and the people we are supposed to be fighting for our those with less power than us. Then we can have ideas where liberals might talk about Less Government solutions and we on the other side can say i agree with you, but we need to serve these people with respect. There are ideas about the dignity of work. All the things that we do because we are trying to serve the poor better and thats where we start. I want to put a little checkpoint there because i want to get back to this idea that you lay out about the dignity of work and how all of that balances out in terms of lifting people up. You lay out lessons that we can begin to learn from and implement. To see this new party of aspiration and you talk about being a moralist, fighting for people and not against things, which youve touched on, get happy, which i loved and i always said thats a key part of it, and and you make the point, get happy and mean it. Its not just be happy for the sake of being happy but mean it. Still all all the best arguments which is something ive learned over the years. Go where you are not welcome which to me is a very important part because when i was chairman of the committee, i said every time we met you have to be where youre not wanted and not expected. We can talk about a couple guys doing that now. Say and 30 seconds and break your bad habits. I think those are pretty good lessons. Of those seven, not necessarily which is the most important, but what is the most important drop off point for you . The one that i think the biggest mistake that we make on the conservative side a lot, the one that trips people are up the most is the one that should be the easiest which is to get happy. Its astonishing when im walking, its appalling. Think about it. This is the greatest country in the history of the world. We should wake up every day feeling lucky to be americans. This whole doomsday set of scenarios that everybody is looming under its almost like the zombie apocalypse. If the other guy wins its going to be a knock in the night. No its not. We have better ideas to help people and were happy to be here and delighted to have our values, not as a weapon or to hurt some of the else, but as a gift. We have to presented as a gift and be happy presenting of as a gift. We have a responsibility to this country. This country is a gift. It is ungrateful for us not to do that. How do you do that when youre talking about the back room conversations related to policy and all of the stuff you know goes into making up healthcare reform . How do you talk about these things . The party comes out and they say we want to appeal and replace and that may appeal amplify Big Government intrusion in healthcare but how do you talk about Something Like that and a happy way . You remember the reason for the policy. When you talk about obama care for example, it makes conservatives insane because it seems like such a departure from doing things simple and for themselves. Its bureaucratic and it twists all of these things around like a bureaucratic axle. Those are things conservatives hate so they find themselves fighting against obama care. Remember the thing you dont like and dont fight against it, fight for for the people who are being hurt by this. This is a reagan advantage for all intensive purposes. Reagan was a warrior. He was a warrior on behalf of people who needed him. There are a lot of people who are watching who still dont like reagan. Look nobody in my family voted for reagan. I grew up in seattle so like eight people voted for reagan in seattle. How he got elected, nobody knows. How does that happen . Its mathematically impossible. So they still say his ideas one good, but remember what was written on his heart. You could say the same thing about bill clinton, by the way. He fought against things and he fought for people who fought against things and he fought for people who needed him. He was a happy warrior. Which is why when he went through his travails, his numbers stayed relatively high because people remembered that he was the fighter for them. They saw the context of what was transpiring was truly political. Thats kind of how i look at what happened with benghazi. The seriousness of the matter, the way the party came out talking about it was much more political. We didnt personalize it. We didnt bring the emotion and the feeling of loss, we admittedly went to the political. Even along that spectrum of something thats really important, the loss of life and benghazi, to something thats really political, how you handle it and how you talk about it Still Matters. Lets go back to the bill clinton thing. He was going through a terrible time for sure. Conservatives will sure. Conservatives will say yeah, he brought it on himself which he did but remember the entire impeachment scandal. They were fighting against him and the things he stood for. This distraction he said was making it difficult for me to fight for the american people. In everything we do we have to remember fighting against things is not even interesting. Its not worthy of us as leaders but fighting for people for us that need us is never going to go away and nothing will ever be more important than that. We have to ask ourselves, do i care about the people who are being adversely affected or my using it as an excuse to hit someone or something that i dont like. We have to examine our own conscious at that point and reexamine our energies. Think about education reform. A lot of people care about that and theyre all over the spectrum on that thing. We can all agree we have an Education System that is inadequate to training people, kids, who grow up to be part of a workforce in a productive and meaningful way. Virtually all the kids are adversely affected are the poor kids. Somebody needs to fight for those kids. Choices important for those kids. You want to fight for education reform because children are being denied their civil rights. Thats a noble thing to direct your energies toward. It Still Matters what you say even in that fight. So for example its one thing for me to say i want to fight for you to reform education whether i want to bring Charter Schools or this or that. But then how you begin to express that and explain it and talk about that particularly when the political blowback and he begins to rise matters more than anything else, right . Absolutely. Remember the face of for the person of whom youre fighting. Remember the child, remember the mother who simply wants to send her child to the best school. Remember youre fighting for her. Its more important than your political future. Its more important than how people perceive you in the press. That mom is the most important thing and if you dont think so, you shouldnt be a leader. Let me shift a little bit. We have the broad scope of the book and the areas that you hit but i want to shift and talk about your journey. I think that animates the book and at least for me you can see at various points where a little bit of arthur is here. Theyre sort of relating back and you talk about your journey to the right. You talk about that movement in your 20s and you refer to, at one point the gap decade. Was that the moment of explosive recognition that wow, theres Something Else out there i need to be thinking about . How was that journey for you . How did you end up at the point where youre now telling the story and relating back to that journey . Two important things happen to me. To begin with, i dropped out of college when i was 19. I come from a lower middleclass in seattle. I left college when i was 19. I wasnt interested and i wanted to be a french horn horn player. I was a musician. I went on the road playing. Theres a lot of work for french horn players. [laughter] i played Chamber Music and jazz and then i wound up in the barcelona symphony. I married ago earl in barcelona and she had dropped out of high school. She wanted to sing with her rock band. We had a similar parallel pack. We plodded to move to the United States and she was gonna study and i was gonna get a job. We moved to the u. S. When i was in my 20s. Neither of us had skills, she didnt speak much english. She got three job offers in her first month. She said something to me, we were nonpolitical, and she said this is the greatest country in the world for people who want to work. It just hit me. She was inning immigrant in my own country. I didnt know anything about the u. S. Except for my preconceived notion. These were minimum what wage jobs by the way. She worked a minimum wage job for three years and we needed that money while we were trying to get on our feet. That had a profound impact on me because it was the optimism of the interim immigrant that i saw it my wife. I was seeing it through the eyes of someone who just came to the country. I started studying and im studying at night, and im working during the day teaching music. Im studying music. Im studying economics. The main question i had forever was about poverty. That is the most important thing to me. Ive always been keenly interested in it. I remember as a little kid, and you had this experience to probably, i grew up lower middleclass, none of us grew up rich but when you first saw real property. I saw a picture in National Grid geographic of a little boy who was starving. I thought how does is happen in this world . It was haunting to me. When i was studying economics i learned what was happening to that boy. I couldnt know for sure, but i could guess. I learned that 80 of starvation poverty had been eradicated since i was a child. I had no idea. Nobody knows. Its like this big secret. 80 of secret. 80 of the number of People Living on 1 dollar a day or less has gone away since i was a kid. I learned why. It was not United Nations or the world bank, it was globalization, free trade, Property Rights and entrepreneurship. It it was americanstyle Free Enterprise spreading around the world. It was american conservative ideas that pulled 2 billion people out of poverty since i was a child. To come to my country and experience real opportunity with no education effectively and then discovered the ideas of american conservatives lift up the world and then i listened and conservatives werent even saying it. They talked that all they cared about was money. I went on a quest. I became a political conservative and it led me where i am today which is to work with leaders and try to get this message out because you know what, we have a moral obligation to save the next 2 billion people and bring in a wave of immigrants to help. We currently have a problem with immigration. As i articulated today, you, you go back to what the bush administration, at least in a framework, laid out. That was in his state of the union which unfortunately dissipated and fell apart consequently. Then it was picked up again by the gang of eight in the house and senate to get to some compromise on Immigration Reform that all fell away. We seem to be in the space where the immigrant story is not one of aspirational entrepreneurialism and taking advantage of the opportunities this country offers but its from the opportunity of taking advantage of the country. Plotting the rule of law, avoiding avoiding your responsibility to come in the right way and follow the rules, trying to get welfare. How do you create a counter narrative of an aspirational story . The gop, were talking about the gop, once articulated itself as the party of aspiration. Given the trajectory we are currently on, how do you make that turn, that pivot in light of the narrative you just described that i think in the book, that speaks to this aspirational story that your wife had about america. There were a couple things. One is specific and one is general. At the general level the gop will be able to get its mind around how we think about immigration a lot better once it makes the turn from the party of anger to the party of aspiration. That will take a visionary leader who talks about aspiration as opposed to anger. Anger is easier than aspiration. Aspiration means you have to have hope and hope means are trying to make new friends. Anger is all about fear and fear is about firing up your base. Its its very easy and very lazy. Aspiration is the late way to go. An aspirational candidate will feed to my leader and that will feed through all sorts of different thing. Thats. Thats a systemic remedy that is necessary. We also have to have policies. The second thing is that republicans, and by the way democrats too, need to stop thinking about immigration as if it was one thing. Its not. Its 30 things. We needed incremental approach toward progress. They want to poison the well on immigration so we can pull the bandaid off all at once and all will go down the drain. Think about the 30 things we need to do over the five years. Lets do the easy important things first. High skill immigration, creates five jobs for nativeborn americans. The guest worker programs are important so the others will stop being exploited. We can make Real Progress going down the list understanding that it will take several years. This is a good way back from your personal journey and how that works in the book to the point where you talk about practical hope. You referenced hope just now. What is that . What is that for you . What does that mean . I had flashbacks to yes we can, keep hope alive, hope and change. We talk politicians, we talk in the political system that hope is almost just a . 10 word they threw around. You give it a new emphasis for the gop. You talk about it in terms of being a practical hope. What you mean by that . Hope as we come to understand, like hope and change from the obama campaign, it was all about i hope the government will help me is what it came down to. [laughter] thats very well put. Like i hope i hit the lottery. I hope i dont get hit by a car car today. You can hope all you want about events that are outside of your control. Thats not the traditional understanding of hope. Hope is empowering. There are good psychological studies that say when you talk about hope that are things that are out of your contro