Conservatives have what we need to transform America — here’s how to find it

The Democratic stranglehold on the black and working-class vote has finally been broken, at least for the moment. A full-standing army of celebrities, entertainers, and mainstream media pundits were not able to bully Americans into disregarding out-of-control inflation and spiking violent crime.

Now Republicans have a narrow window of opportunity to deliver where their predecessors have failed, by reducing crime without brutalizing lower-income populations and putting forth a vision for upward mobility that goes beyond just slashing government programs.

Anyone who wants to cut government spending — and I am one of those people — needs to support robust indigenous mediating structures. These are local institutions created by those experiencing the problem of poverty or crime. They are antibodies within socially toxic neighborhoods that have demonstrated they can successfully administer cures from within.

Thankfully, the capacity building needed to develop these kinds of organizations requires just a fraction of the capital that government programs do and can be achieved completely with private money.

These organizations also overwhelmingly embody traditional values that have helped many people overcome oppression, poverty and other hardships, hard work, self-respect and responsibility among them.

Yet these groups are out of favor with political elites on both sides of the aisle.

Conservatives tend to overlook these groups because they often prefer making intellectual arguments about the problems at hand, offering abstract policy proposals or dissecting moral and political failures philosophically. 

Leftists, on the other hand, treat the poor as fundamentally incapable of self-elevation. They claim they speak for the people trying to buck the oppressive social-service state, but ignore the related facts that they’re often part of the problem — and that traditional values are part of the solution.

Consider the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the institutions that sprang up in its wake.

Mediating civil society institutions began delivering services to and representing people better than the government did, near the end of the Communist regimes — and in doing so, won the loyalties of the people.

The Charter ‘77 in Czechoslovakia, a protest document signed mostly by intellectuals but strongly supported by the public, helped galvanize the public and some political leadership against the state’s violations of human rights.

Solidarity, a Polish trade union, became so influential that it helped end Communism in Poland and its leader was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It had more than 10 million members by the end of its first year, in 1981.

Memorial is a non-profit that arose in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union partly in protest of the decades-long abuses of the USSR. Its status and activities are still aggressively disputed by the Russian government, a testament to the Russian people’s great need for its work.

Each of these organizations parlayed popular trust and favor into political capital abroad. Conservatives in the U.S., as well as other sympathetic factions, supported these institutions in Eastern Europe. The Iron Curtain fell, finally — and these groups helped provide an alternative to the sprawling, oppressive state.

For the incoming administration, these are some real-life examples of success that can be replicated today at scale. They exist even today.

The “Cajun Navy,” organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and formed again to help after subsequent storms, has rescued as many as 10,000 people stranded on rooftops.

Today, when hurricanes sweep through the Delta and Gulf Coast, these same fishermen and a growing network of volunteer members continue rescuing people from the tops of their roofs. It’s a huge organization, but remarkably swift and effective. It’s on-site before FEMA arrives, even though it is entirely volunteer-run.

Rev. Charlene Turner Johnson has been working for decades to change Highland Park, one of the most vulnerable, drug-afflicted cities in Michigan, into a safe and flourishing town. She helps the most vulnerable find work, build businesses, acquire important life skills, and renovate the city.  

Kandice Freeman, founder of “Way to Live,” is using a grant to help reduce gun violence in her community and improve the physical health of the children in her area. Her unique approach combines education, intervention and food access events to do its work.

The common threads that run through all these success stories are that the leaders live in the very zip codes they serve, not in some affluent suburb. They know best what needs to be done, they have the trust of the people they’re helping, and they know their way around the problem and the solution.

The key is not an administrative state so big that it crushes these groups with regulations. Neither is it a hands-off approach, claiming that tax cuts and deregulation will simply solve everything. Our political leaders should rather be finding these successful mediating institutions and actively connecting them to resources in the public and private sectors to replicate their successes at scale.

Empowering men and women doing this kind of work transforms communities and lives in a way no white paper or government program ever could.

That’s why it’s time to abandon the reigning model of identity politics and massive nonprofits that purport to speak for the poor but simply profit off of activism. Seek out and empower the men and women who are already changing the world — and then give them what they need to do it better. If conservative donors are serious about real solutions, that is what they will do.

If they are not, then they should be prepared to switch places with the Democrats and be thrown out in the next election.

Bob Woodson is the founder and president of The Woodson Center and the editor of “A Pathway to American Renewal: Red, White, and Black Volume II.”