Free Republic

For many years now grassroots conservatives have grumbled that the Republican establishment in Washington views them with contempt. Rarely has that contempt been displayed as brazenly as it was on this week’s episode of Fox News Sunday. During the show’s panel discussion, columnist George Will and Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in particular showed how GOP bigwigs view their base. Will started the banter by suggesting that the popularity of insurgent GOP candidates was tantamount to “primal scream” psychotherapy where voters are venting their frustrations by backing political newcomers over their more traditional rivals. Brooks seconded Will’s thesis...

What do Glenn Beck, Carly Fiorina, S.E. Cupp, Dana Perino, Zac Moffett (Romney Campaign), and Arther Brooks have in common? They are all avowed members of the Never Trump coalition.  And according to recent media reports, they are also the names scheduled to meet with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Facebook’s ideological censorship of political views. […] “I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last week. “The reason I care so much about this is that it...

Get this: Conservatives give better graduation speeches than their more liberal-minded counterparts. After reviewing two commencement-speech anthologies - "The World is Waiting For You," which features 18 speeches by liberals, and "Remembering Who We Are," which showcases 30 conservative speeches - Washington Post blogger and book critic Carlos Lozada gives five reasons why conservatives do a better job. First, he writes, conservatives are more likely to speak to graduates as individuals, rather than as members of a movement or generation. Whereas liberal speakers say things such as, "you are the first generation that ...," conservative speakers are more likely to...

President Obama said today that the incidents with police in Baltimore and Ferguson, along with “a growing awareness of inequality in our society,” can turn attention back to poverty in America and bridge “ideological divides that have prevented us from making progress.” At the Georgetown University panel on poverty, Obama name-dropped Ayn Rand and acknowledged he may speak differently to a black audience. Panelists joining the president were American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor Robert Putnam, and Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “The stereotype is that you’ve got folks on the left who just want to pour more...

On July 4, we celebrate the great day that our Founders proclaimed Americans' "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This Independence Day, however, many Americans are expressing concern that the system of limited government bequeathed by our Founders is under attack. If the policy course being set in Washington, D.C., continues, the viability of the Founders' vision -- and the American Dream it spawned -- may be in doubt. In a new book, Arthur Brooks -- president of the American Enterprise Institute -- explains that we're witnessing a clash of visions that will determine America's future...

Happy Now?What’s at stake in America’s battle over free enterprise.  On May 13, 2009, at Arizona State University, Barack Obama delivered his first commencement address as President of the United States. At one of the most frightening economic moments in America’s history, it was a chance to be a mentor, a teacher, and the nation’s inspirer-in-chief. Did the president urge the graduates to get out there and create the growth and jobs our country needs? Did he inspire them to be the next generation of great American innovators and entrepreneurs? No; instead, he told the graduates that people who “chase...

Three days after calling health-care reform a debacle for the Republicans, David Frum was forced out of his job at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday. The ouster also came one day after a harsh Wall Street Journal editorial about the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which said that he "now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans" and accused him of "peddling bad revisionist history." Frum made clear in a letter to AEI President Arthur Brooks that his departure after seven years at the conservative think tank was not voluntary. "I have had...

Not About the Money by: Alana Goodman, August 07, 2009 Opponents of free-market economics have often portrayed capitalists as greedy money-grubbers, but one conservative think tank is arguing that free enterprise is the foundation of a virtuous and moral society. “Taxation is about fairness and freedom, it’s not about money,” said American Enterprise Institute (AEI) President Arthur Brooks at the Heritage Foundation on August 4th. “You can raise my taxes another five points. I’m not going to like it, but my kids are not going to go without shoes. What’s going to offend me is it’s going to make me...

REVIEW OF: Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Arthur C. Brooks (Basic Books, 250 pp., $26.00) It’s tempting to say that Arthur Brooks, in his definitive new book on American charitable giving, has shown that there is nothing oxymoronic about the term “compassionate conservative.” That, at least, is the conclusion that critics have drawn from Brooks’s demonstration that conservatives, despite the myth that they lack compassion, give significantly more to charity than liberals do. But in fact Brooks has shown something even more significant: that “compassionate conservative” is not only overly defensive,...

In December, 2005, I wrote an article entitled, “Proof Conservatives Donate More Than Liberals Do”. In that article I presented data that indicated that residents of states that voted Republican in 2004 donated more, in terms of per capita income, than did residents of states that voted Democrat. Here is an excerpt from that article: “One of my children, who is of the liberal persuasion, implied recently that liberals were, well, just nicer people than conservatives. This goes back to the old "fish" argument - that it is better, and more compassionate, to teach a man to fish than to...