AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE THE CONSERVATIVE HEART: ARTHUR BROOKS ON BUILDING A FAIRER, HAPPIER, AND MORE PROSPEROUS AMERICA INTRODUCTION BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS REMARKS ARTHUR C. BROOKS, AEI 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2015 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/the-conservative-heart-arthur-brooks- on-building-a-fairer-happier-and-more-prosperous-america/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM BRIT HUME: (In progress) – political analyst at Fox News, although some of my colleagues think the way things are going, I should be known as senior-moment political analyst. (Laughter.) I’m very pleased and honored to be among you here to do this, this evening, for a couple of reasons. The principal one being that I have thought for some time that Arthur Brooks is probably the most interesting man in Washington, certainly one of them. And given the colleagues with whom he shares the facilities here at AEI, that’s saying quite a lot. So thank you for having me. I’m pleased to be here. (Applause.) My wife asked me as I was heading out the door where I was going tonight and I said I was headed downtown to try to have a meeting with a former French horn player whom I hope would give me some diet tips. (Laughter.) So I do reserve the right to ask a question about that if the opportunity presents itself. I don’t think I really need to say very much more about Arthur since all of you obviously know who he is. So without having said anything further, let me introduce Arthur Brooks. (Applause.) ARTHUR BROOKS: Thank you, Brit. What an honor to have you with us here tonight, and I’m looking forward to our conversation. And thank you, to you, all of you for coming out tonight to discuss “The Conservative Heart,” the review of this new book that I think is supposed to be emblematic of the moral case that we’re making here at AEI, for the work that we’re doing not just in the conservative movement, the work for human freedom. I’m humbled to see so many of you here tonight and I have so many thank-yous that I’ll sort of intersperse throughout my remarks this evening. Notably, the people who helped me with the book, Marc Thiessen, who’s here, Andy Quinn, who’s here as well, my colleagues at AEI, Adam Bellow, my fantastic editor. He is the most storied editor of serious conservative nonfiction, responsible for more New York Times best-sellers than any other editor that I know in the conservative movement. And with a little luck, it will include the book I’m talking about here tonight; who knows? Judy Mayka Stecker, who runs our media and is responsible with her team for getting the word out about this book as well. So thank you to all of you and thank you for coming tonight. I want to give you a few remarks about why I wrote the book before we get into the main content with Brit a little bit later. This is a book about purpose, about the purpose of our work, and so it’s something I feel really deeply about. There’s something – here in Washington– the day-to-day politics get in the way of everything. It’s as if politics matters more than human purpose sometimes. And there’s a story about two Republican congressmen who have just come out of the Capitol after a vote, close friends. They’re walking down the street, making small talk. One says to the other, what are you going to do this weekend, you know, that sort of thing. And without looking where they’re going, they wind up walking right in front of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. So you know, the heart of darkness to these guys, right? (Laughter.) And they notice there’s a sign in the front window and the sign says, become a Democrat today, earn $1,000. And one turns to the other and he says, you don’t think they’re that desperate, do you? They’re not paying people to join the Democratic Party. His friend says, I don’t know. So he says, I tell you what, go in and pretend you want to join and see what happens. So he says, fine, I’ll do it. He goes in and his friend is waiting for him outside for five, 10 minutes, and turns into 15 minutes, and after an hour and a half he’s still waiting there, until finally his friend comes out. So he goes running up to him and says, so what happened? And his friend says, well, I joined. (Laughter.) He says, well, what do you mean you joined? He says, yeah, I’m a Democrat now. I’m a liberal Democrat. He said, they made some very compelling points about economics and foreign policy and social policy, so yeah, I’m a Democrat. He said, wow, no kidding, huh? Did they give you the $1,000? And his new liberal Democrat friend looks at him with pity and says, is that all you people care about? (Laughter.) Purpose. What is the purpose of our movement? This is not an entirely partisan point. All of us who work in public policy, what’s the purpose of what you do? I grew up in a liberal Democratic home in Seattle, Washington, which is redundant because there’re like eight Republicans there. And nobody I knew voted for Ronald Reagan, who was elected when I was 16 years old for the first time. No family, no friends, it was weird that he got elected president. It seemed impossible, as a matter of fact, because nobody voted for him. How could that be? I learned from a very young age that conservatives are heartless, that conservatives may be good with money, but they don’t care about the poor. That’s the reason that it was morally appropriate not to be a conservative. Well, two things happened. The first was that I immigrated to my own country. And therein lies a story. I’m not going to give you all the details. But I don’t mean I left Seattle and went to America, although that’s a – (laughter) – the same could be said of leaving Washington and going to America, by the way. It went more or less like this. When I was 19, I dropped out of college. Dropped out, kicked out – splitting hairs. (Laughter.) And I went on the road as a musician because that was my lifelong dream. I just wanted to be a French horn player. And that’s a weird dream. It seems weird that when you’re eight years old to say, mommy, when I grow up, I want to be a professional French horn player. Weirder would be to say, when I grow up, mommy, I want to be the president of a right wing think tank, right? (Laughter.) So look, everybody ends up someplace and I wanted to play the horn and I dropped out of college, which just wasn’t working out. And I wound up, after a few years, chasing a girl to Spain. Now, why else would you go to Spain? Because you meet a girl. And to make sufficient commitment to the girl, I had to quit my job and – she wasn’t going to marry me unless I moved to Spain and found a job there and learned the language. That’s what people do. That’s what romance is all about. Now, turns out this is my 24th wedding anniversary this year and she’s sitting in the front row. Amazing, isn’t it, how things work out. (Applause.) The bad news is that we have three teenagers. (Laughter.) When we were in our late 20s – by the way, when we first met, I remember – we had a language barrier. She didn’t speak any English and I didn’t speak any Spanish. Yeah, but we got – I got across the point. It was kind of a confession. You know, I had to confess I never finished college. And she starts laughing and I said, why are you laughing at me? Why are you mocking me? And she said because I dropped out of high school. (Laughter.) And so why is that relevant? Because when we moved back to the States when we’re in our late 20s so I could go to college, so I could study a little bit and change my life – I was playing in the Barcelona Symphony in those days, but I wanted to do something different – we knew we were going to have trouble with money. And we knew that my wife, Esther, was going to have to work. Now, this is tricky, right? Her English wasn’t great. She didn’t have a high school diploma. Her job skills amounted mostly to singing in a rock band, which turns out there’s not a huge market for that, at least one that pays very well (laughter). We didn’t know how it was going to go, but we needed the money. When we got to the States, we moved to America, she had four job offers in her first month. And she said something to me that was the most – in retrospect, the most conservative thing that anybody had ever said, which was, this is the greatest country in the world for people who want to work.