Read Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works for Free Online

their friends and neighbors. But they want to know that their engagement is worthwhile.
    The Harrisons weren’t the only ones to feel left out in the 2012 election. In their home state of Ohio, for example, voter turnout in rural and traditionally blue collar counties was lower than in previous elections, including the Obama-McCain race in 2008. 1

    America’s experience in the election of 2012 confirms what the book of Proverbs says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” 2 Americans are desperate for leaders with vision—not number crunchers, not technocrats, not policy wonks, but men and women who can look beyond this week’s polls and next year’s election, who see clearly where we need to be headed. A lot of people thought they had found that leader in 2008, but Barack Obama’s vision of an America “transformed” has been a nightmare, especially for those struggling hardest.
    If you are born into poverty or are going through hard times, wouldn’t you be better off if you were surrounded by institutions like churches, good schools, scouts, and strong families? We need stronger marriages, stronger churches, and stronger communities because they do what the government cannot do. Yet the liberal establishment that controls our government, ourschools, the media, and so many of the institutions that shape our public life and form our opinions is busy tearing down these pillars of American society, starting with the family.
    Government has taken the lead in liberating men from the responsibility of providing and caring for their children and their children’s mother by providing single mothers with an alternative to building a relationship with the father of their child. Let’s face it, government welfare benefits have played a role in the demise of marriage in low-income communities and have encouraged a new cultural norm that leads to multigenerational poverty and hopelessness. 3 Believe it or not, that’s exactly what President Obama and his friends on the Left have in mind. It is their radical, anti-family dogma that government is the liberator of women and a suitable replacement for unfit fathers.
    When I make this point in town hall meetings, someone usually objects that a mother and her child are better off without a convicted felon, gang member, dropout, unemployable dad in the picture. Fair enough, but to that child, as broken as her father may be, he is still her daddy, and she wants his love. What child doesn’t want that? And how do you think the dad ended up like that? Almost 85 percent of young men in prison grew up without a father in their home. 4 Without dads in their lives, young men are much more likely to join a gang, drop out of school, father a child out of wedlock, abandon that child and the child’s mother, and fail to hold down a decent job. Not having a father in the home hurts all children, but especially boys.
    President Obama does not inflict on his own family the ruinous fantasy that a check from the government is as good as a father. I’m sure he’s a caring and loving father because he knows how much it means to his children. Let’s stop inflicting that fantasy on the poor, whose lives it devastates most.
    The Left may have invented the welfare system that robs low-income children of their birthright and destroys their best chance to climb out of poverty, but with the exception of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the Right has done little to repair it. I know, because I worked on this issue in the conservative world for the better part of twenty years, and it was a pretty lonely fight. There are a few scholars at conservative think tanks who write about this problem and a handful of congressmen who try to tackle it, but few conservatives in public life work on policies aimed at the working poor.
    It’s not that conservatives don’t care. Most of them support transforming the social welfare system. But it’s a very low priority, so conservatives are complicit in