How to Elect Leaders Who Govern (with Brad Littlejohn)

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, president of NC Family. And each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracey Devette Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. While many of us know where our favorite candidates stand on social issues such as abortion or gender politics, we may be a little less clear on what their philosophy is on what some may think are more mundane issues, such as affordable housing, roads, public safety. Well, Dr. Brad Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, says these two are important. He joins us today to offer some guiding principles on how we can vote in people who are socially conservative, but who are also willing to do the hard work of governing. Dr. Brad Littlejohn, welcome back to Family Policy Matters.

Thanks so much for having me. So what's happened? Why do you suppose that politicians these days seem to focus their campaigns more on social issues or broad topics rather than everyday life issues that seem to impact us more every day? Yeah, well, I think there's a couple reasons. I mean, one has to do just with the nationalization of our political discourse, right? National political media discussions tend to dominate our perception of what politics is all about. And in those national discussions, obviously, they're going to focus more on these least common denominator issues, these things that all Americans care about, rather than issues that are going to be more locally relevant, like, you know, water conservation policies.

So Americans are tuned in more and more to the national political media. They hear the national politicians talking about abortion or trans issues, and that's what they expect their local politicians to start talking about as well. These are also the issues that, like, mobilize people's emotions most, right, because people have strong moral convictions. It's the easiest and cheapest way to get voters mobilized behind you is to start talking about the things that get them most worked up. It also, I think, requires less work from the candidates, right, because in a sense, although people might differ about what the right answer is to a question like abortion, we all kind of think there is a right answer, and we have strong views about what it is. Whereas there is no one right answer to a question of, like, how do you do zoning for water conservation?

It's a complicated question that you're going to have to negotiate with different parties about, and you're going to have to do a ton of homework to have a well thought through policy on that. So if you're running for office, it's a lot easier just to get voters motivated by talking about the things that you have strong views on, that they have strong views on, and not put in the work of actually digesting a well thought through policy on some of these practical infrastructure questions. So this can create problems, though, right? I mean, if we're just voting for people on these social issues, we can have some problems once they get into office on some of these more local nitty gritty issues, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, you want a society, a moral society, and you want your laws to promote a moral society. But the laws have to do the basic work of providing food, water, shelter, roads.

If you don't have a functioning society, you're not going to have a moral society. And I think too often we're ignoring some of those just sort of basic functionality issues as we get caught up in these culture wars. And we have some data on that, right? Don't we kind of know what Americans are most concerned about as far as governing is concerned?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. If you look at, you know, poll results, it varies depending on what's kind of been in the news cycle. But what we're finding is that for all the effort that politicians are spending talking about the social issues, most voters really want to elect people who just have basic competence governing skills, who are going to protect them against crime. Voters are concerned about immigration, and they are concerned about affordability issues, right? Can I pay my mortgage? Can I pay my home insurance?

Can I pay my water bill? And so voters really want stability, security, and affordability. And those are the things at the top of their list. Now, we might say, you know, as conservatives who really care about moral issues, well, this is a problem. This shows that people are too materialistic in their priorities.

And maybe that's true. Maybe we wish people were more concerned about the lives of the unborn than they were about where their next paycheck is going to come from. But the reality is that if you're going to govern, you've got to meet people where they are, and you've got to address the concerns that are most at the front of their minds. And for most voters, that is going to be these more mundane affordability and security concerns. So this could actually help our candidates cross that aisle then and get people from the other side of the political aisle in a way that maybe the social issues don't have the capacity to do? Yeah, I think there's a couple ways in which focusing more in this direction could help us. One is it could help us learn the skills of conversing, negotiating, and bargaining with those on the other side of the political aisle, which I think is skills that have increasingly been lost, right?

More and more legislators just kind of stand up, get on social media or stand up in front of a camera and kind of deliver rebukes of the other side and never actually sit down and talk to legislators on a different side of an issue and figure out how to come to something that they can both sign off on. And I think it's harder to do that on these very weighted moral issues where there are strong passions. And it should be easier to do that, again, on these things where there isn't a right answer.

There's not a right answer to, like, what is the right zoning laws for water sustainability? There's a balancing of different interests. And if we can gain the practice and the balancing of different interests in that sphere, then we can kind of relearn that skill set of how to talk to each other, how to negotiate, and may be able to actually start applying that to some of these more hot button issues. I think also voters, when they see politicians actually solving concrete problems that affect them next month as opposed to in the kind of abstract future, those leaders are going to earn the trust of voters. You earn the trust of voters, then maybe you have room to start foregrounding some of the social conservative priorities again.

You can start talking about abortion again if you've actually got voters who trust you, and they trust you because you solved their electricity affordability problem. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens about issues that impact faith and family here in North Carolina.

Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished. For more information about NC Family and how you can partner with us in pursuit of this vision, visit our website at ncfamily.org, and be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts, and Family North Carolina magazine. You can also follow us on social media at NC Family Policy.

That's at NC Family Policy. Okay, so in practical terms, though, how? How would you suggest that our conservative policymakers and candidates do this? Because you and I have both seen instances where there's a conservative lawmaker speaking to a liberal lawmaker, we might not even know what they're talking about. And you know how the internet blows up and people just can't believe they're even talking to each other. So are there some realistic ways of meeting the other side without creating this kind of unnecessary drama?

The best prospects for doing this start more locally, right? I mean, the more local you are, the more likelihood that voters actually know something about the person who's representing them or the two candidates who are vying to represent them. And therefore, there is a good chance that you might say, well, I disagree with this person's policies in X, Y, and Z, but I happen to know that he's a decent person because he's actually somebody who's been in the community, right?

You might not know him personally, but you know somebody who knows him, et cetera, right? So I think that that personal knowledge can help diffuse some of that partisan tension. And so at the more local level, you can have lawmakers crossing the aisle and negotiating with people on the other side in a way that hopefully is not going to be triggering because we recognize that the kind of the partisan differences are secondary to the actual human character of the people.

The further up you go, the more our leaders are just kind of, we form just mental caricatures of them based on what we see on TV. So I think that that kind of restoring of trust in the political process is going to have to start at that more local level. And then hopefully that can create a virtuous cycle whereby we actually start to have faith in the possibility of political negotiation, even in Congress, you know, that's still possible.

I love that concept. Of course, the North Carolina Family Policy Council is a statewide public policy organization, and we talk to the people that support us and receive our emails all the time about how important local is, how important statewide is. And a lot of times those, at least the policies, can bubble up. You know, we think a lot of times that they have to come down from the federal level. But I love that idea that this kind of cooperation between the two sides of the aisle could start at the local level and perhaps bubble up. Well, that's a hopeful statement for you to make.

So thank you for that. So, OK, so what do you think in general? Do you think that conservative elected officials or just officials in general are well equipped to govern? Are we losing some of that? I mean, I think we are losing it. It's been a long process in terms of the increasing domination of media over the political process, right? First cable news, then the proliferation of different cable news channels, and then, of course, the proliferation of social media. And so what that means is that more and more and more of what a political leader does is communicating with the public rather than communicating in private with other lawmakers or other folks within the government that he has to be working with. So they're losing the skills of actually working with other political leaders to accomplish change within an institution, and they're substituting those for the skills of mass communication, which are very different skills. In the latter, it's more about emotion.

In the former, it's more about reason, right? In the social media sphere, it's more about mobilizing people who already agree with you as opposed to finding a way to get something done with people who disagree with you. So I think our incentives have just been skewed by the dominance of media, and we are electing people who are good at posting on Twitter, you know, or good at standing in front of a camera, which is not the same skill set as good at, you know, overseeing zoning reform.

And so I think, you know, I just said something hopeful before. I don't know that I have a particularly hopeful take on this because I'm not sure how you reverse this. We're not going to convince all of our politicians to get off of social media, but the incentives are very skewed in a way that selects for the wrong sorts of leaders with the wrong sorts of skills. So what can we as voters do?

How can we find some candidates then who will also govern? What are some guidelines for us? Yeah, well, I think one thing I think about a lot in this is that we can sometimes think of politics as its own completely different sphere, but in reality, there's politics at all different levels of human life. And we talk about this, we talk about office politics, talk about church politics, right? Wherever there's an institution, there's a kind of politics, there's inequalities of power, different viewpoints about what is best for the community and the need for people to exercise authority responsibly and negotiate with their equals, hear the concerns of people beneath them, respect the judgments of those above them. These are all skills that you have to learn to be a good business leader or to be a good church leader or a good nonprofit leader. So I think the actual skills of good political leadership, there's still plenty of places to learn those skills. And what I'd like to see us doing is really prioritizing in our local political contexts, you know, not who's the candidate who's got the slickest marketing machine, but who's the person that has established his reputation in the community as a really successful business leader who knows how to handle the politics of an institution and knows how to make hard choices and trade-offs within that institution. And then we know that we can trust that person to use those skills at a higher level. So I think looking for what are those contexts in society where we're still actually forming the skills of political leadership and then trying to encouraging those people. I think it's a lot of people who are most qualified don't want to run for office because they recognize that it's just kind of, you know, a media thing now. But really finding those people who have those skills and encouraging them, you need to be the person representing us in the legislature because you actually have honed these skills in the private sector. All right.

Well, we're just about out of time. You did write a recent article for World Magazine, Get Back to Governing, and you had some really interesting examples in there about Florida and Arizona. But are there other ways that people who are listening that are intrigued by this short conversation can go and hear more of your ideas? Yeah, I think the best place to follow my work is my new substack, bradlittlejohn.substack.com.

So I write original content there, but I also have every week a kind of roundup of anything that I've published elsewhere. Also, summaries of things that I'm reading that I would encourage people to read. One book that I'm reading right now that's relevant to this is Yuval Levin's new book, American Covenant.

I think Yuval is one of the best political writers right now really on the right who is really trying to move the discussion back toward what does it mean to actually effectively govern, effectively negotiate over political differences, and recognize that you're always going to have differences, and the art of politics is learning how to negotiate those, not just hoping that half the country will just go away and disappear. Alright, well thank you Dr. Brad Littlejohn, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Thanks so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org and check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.