American Dreams (20 page)

Along with this loss of faith in our government's ability to ensure the national defense is a devastating—but deserved—distrust in the capacity and competence of government to ensure our domestic tranquillity. Americans' trust in our institutions has been waning for decades, but the past year or so has been a particularly painful reckoning. A truly mind-boggling list of failures and betrayals covers virtually every part of government—the disastrous rollout and subsequent failure of Obamacare, the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS, the broken promise to our veterans by a dysfunctional Veterans Affairs, the State Department cover-up of Benghazi, the Secret Service's failure to adequately protect the president, the incompetence of our public health system in the initial stages of the Ebola crisis . . . All of these lapses have brought Americans' trust in government to all-time lows. The fact that these failures were so often accompanied by dogmatic assertions to the contrary by government officials has only deepened this distrust.

I began writing this book knowing that the American Dream is threatened by the extreme stresses our schools, our businesses and even our families face today. As I write these words almost a year later, it is more clear than ever that the governmental institutions that are supposed to help Americans succeed—to help educate our kids, ensure a fair playing field for businesses and support American families—are less capable and less trusted than at any time in our nation's history. Part of the reason is a lack of leadership in Washington. But a related and more significant reason—the one that I've attempted to address with a reform agenda outlined in these pages—is that our institutions are outdated and outmoded. They represent a twentieth-century big-government command-and-control approach that, if it was ever successful, is destined to fail in a globalized, technology-driven, twenty-first-century America. We simply can't solve today's problems with yesterday's answers.

When I became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2007, I gave a speech laying out a plan to confront the challenges Floridians faced. I said: “To tackle the big and relevant issues of our day with bold and innovative ideas is without question the most rewarding way to serve. What will it take to fully capitalize on the opportunities before us? It will take what it has always taken: leadership.”

I believe that is true at every level of politics. And I believe that the measure of our politicians is not in how good they look on TV or how popular they are with the media; it's in their ideas to help everyday people: the single mom desperate to give her kids a better shot in life, the college graduate with crippling student debt and no job, the working parents struggling against a rising tide of bills and payments.

So before I became speaker, I toured the state to talk with people in difficult circumstances just like those, and I put together a book titled
100 Innovative Ideas for Florida's Future
. We conducted “idearaisers” throughout the state and created a Web site to invite Floridians to submit their own ideas. We came up with an agenda that included innovations like a requirement that school districts create career academies for vocational training, an investment pool for businesses and infrastructure projects, and a Web site that allows consumers to compare Florida doctors, hospitals and health insurance plans—these were just three ideas along with ninety-seven others. Through this book, Floridians knew exactly what my goals would be in office, and I stuck to those goals and am proud of what we achieved as a result.

This method of leadership—powered by ideas and sustained by an open communication of those ideas to the people they impact—is certainly not one that I invented myself. Others have taken a similar approach, often with great success. One of the most notable instances was an initiative announced twenty years ago last fall: the Contract with America.

The Contract with America was led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, then minority whip and future speaker of the House. He partnered with other Republican leaders, including Texas Congressman Dick Armey and policy leaders at the Heritage Foundation, to craft a revolutionary collection of ideas for restoring the promise of America. Every Republican candidate signed the contract—and that November, the American people gave it their stamp of approval by giving Republicans the majority in the U.S. Congress.

Today, the American Dream faces enormous challenges. These have been brought on by dramatic changes to the nature of our economy, and made worse by the failure of our policies and institutions to adapt. In the last elections, the voters made clear their dissatisfaction with the status quo. But we must do more—much more—than separate ourselves from the failed ideas of our current leaders. The temptation for Republicans after these elections will be to look for ways to keep the majority in 2016, to pursue small ideas that poll well but will do little to address the massive economic changes we are facing. But my hope is that we will use our new majority in the Senate and our larger majority in the House to offer and implement a twenty-first-century agenda to restore and expand the American Dream. After all, protest elections—even ones that (temporarily) benefit my party—will not save the American Dream.

Americans are anxious. The institutions that used to work—like our educational system—no longer work. The wages of the working class no longer keep pace with the modern cost of living. And so we veer back and forth with each election cycle, looking for the party that promises to take us back to the good old days. But the twentieth century is over, and it is never coming back. What we are facing now are massive structural economic changes, not just the aftermath of a cyclical downturn. And until we accept that, we won't get it right. Until we accept that we live in a world in which jobs, investment, talent, contagions and threats are no longer confined by national borders—that we have to restore American strength and leadership in order to restore the American Dream—no party will provide the solutions we seek. And until we understand that we need to move our economic, educational, health care, retirement and poverty-fighting institutions into the twenty-first century—not simply pour more money into them—we won't restore our hope and greatness.

The duty of Republicans who serve or aspire to serve in public office today is much as it was twenty-one years ago: We must stand for ideas that are modern, relevant, bold and innovative. Just as I did in the Florida House, I have spent this year developing the reform solutions described in this book. On some, I've partnered with leaders from both parties, such as Senators Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Wyden (Oregon), Chris Coons (Delaware) and Cory Booker (New Jersey), as well as Representatives Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) and Aaron Schock (Illinois). I've learned a great deal from the innovative conservative thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute. I've admired and borrowed liberally from the conservative reform ideas of Yuval Levin, Peter Wehner and others in
Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class.
There is an impressive number of conservative intellectuals and public policy experts coming up with ideas to save the American Dream today.

The proposals that I have developed with the help of other conservatives will reach all Americans, regardless of party. They will make higher education accessible to everyone, help struggling single mothers rise above poverty, spur the transformative innovation that can create new industries and millions of jobs, open America to the possibilities and realities of our increasingly globalized economy, save our crucial retirement programs from self-destruction and encourage rather than punish marriage and parenthood. I place no copyright on these ideas. I encourage and welcome any candidate for office today, in either party, to adopt these policies to their own platform—and, if elected, to help me improve them. Because I truly believe that despite our challenges, we Americans have good reason to be hopeful.

The most exciting moment in human history is upon us. And no nation is better positioned to access the full promise of the twenty-first century than the United States. But first, we need leaders who will offer hope and ideas—the hope of ushering in the most prosperous era in human history, and the ideas required to make it a reality. Our current administration and many of its allies were elected by offering exactly that. They promised “hope” and assured our people their ideas would move us “forward.” They have failed on both counts. Instead of hope and ideas, they have clung to hopeless ideas. Instead of moving us forward, they have moved us backward.

Yet despite this failure, most Democrats today are running on the same stale and failed ideas. Instead of looking at the modern needs of our people, they suggest pumping today's money into yesterday's policies and programs, many of which have been failing for decades. They somehow believe that these programs are the source of our jobs and prosperity. For proof, look no further than Hillary Clinton's astonishing statement while campaigning in Boston last fall. “Don't let anyone tell you it's businesses and corporations that create jobs,” she said. Mrs. Clinton's statement echoes the president's infamous declaration, “If you've got a business, you didn't build that.”

There's no other way to put it: Both of these statements are just wrong. They're wrong in economic terms, and they're wrong in their assumptions about the American character. Government can help—and government can certainly hinder—but it's the entrepreneurs, the strivers and the risk takers who create jobs. Government's role is to make our nation the easiest and best place in the world to create those jobs. If we lose sight of that fact, we will have driven the final nail in the coffin of the American Dream.

Not long ago, ours was still largely a national economy. But now the world is shrinking. And our economy is more connected and less insulated than ever before from events half a world away. As a result, today foreign policy
is
domestic policy. So much of what happens here at home is directly related to what happens abroad. When liberty and economic freedom spread, they create markets for our products, visitors to our tourist destinations, partners for our businesses, investors for our ideas and jobs for our people. But when liberty is denied and economic desperation takes root, it affects us here at home too. It breeds radicalism and terrorism, drives illegal immigration and leads to humanitarian crises we are compelled to address.

The same fluidity of global investment and talent, the same connections of people and ideas that are erasing the distinctions between life in America and events abroad, are also changing our wages, our jobs, the skills we need to succeed in the twenty-first century and the options of those with investment and talent to offer. Our great challenge—our unavoidable task if we are to remain a great nation—is to change our policies and our government to adapt to this changing world. It is no longer a question of if we will adapt, but how we will change: whether we will build a new American Century or consign ourselves to becoming merely one nation among many.

Because flickering on this shrinking globe is the promise of the American Dream. It was a bright flame when it attracted my parents to America. And even though it is guttering today, it still burns. This generation has the opportunity to ensure that the light of the American Dream animates the lives of all Americans for centuries to come.

Our assorted problems have left many feeling overwhelmed today and less confident about tomorrow. Yearning for a better time when our leaders had answers and our institutions worked. Yet there is no time in our history I would rather live in than right here, right now. For we are on the eve of a new American Century. The most prosperous and secure era in our nation's history is within our reach. All that is required of us is to do what those who came before us did: confront our challenges and embrace our opportunities. And when we do, we will leave for our children what our parents left for us: the most exceptional nation in all of human history.