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MIKE LEE

UNITED STATES SENATOR, UTAH

AN AGENDA FOR OUR TIME

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I N T R O D U C T I O N A N A G E N D A F O R O U R T I M E

INTRODUCTIONAN AGENDA FOR OUR TIME

The four speeches in this collection represent a key part of my effort over the past three years to reinvigorate the Republican Party and inspire the conservative movement to produce a positive policy reform agenda aimed at the greatest challenges of our generation. When I arrived in Washington in 2011, I joined a Republican Party that had been put in the position of saying “no” a lot by a Democratic-controlled Congress intent on fulfilling President Obama’s campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” But while minority parties always have to oppose, they cannot grow into majorities unless they also propose. As I saw it, the Republican Party needed to do a better job articulating a positive conservative vision for society and connecting that vision to a concrete policy agenda. This conservative vision, as I explain in the first speech, is one of social solidarity and mutual cooperation, buttressed by the twin pillars of American freedom: a free enterprise economy and a voluntary civil society. These institutions exist and operate in the vital space between the government and the individual where organic communities form and networks of economic opportunity and social cohesion are built. While not inherently hostile toward government, the conservative vision sees the role of government as protecting that space, rather than trying to control or replace it. Our vision recognizes that the more power government accumulates and consolidates, the more it tends to become unfair, inefficient, unaccountable, and harmful to the healthy functioning of the free market and civil society. Thus a true conservative reform agenda must do more than just cut big government—it also has to fix broken government. And with a government as broken as ours, the first step in this effort is to thoughtfully diagnose the problem. In the remaining three speeches I lay out a conservative diagnosis of our current government dysfunction and offer some potential remedies—some of my own and some from other reform-oriented conservatives.

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I NT R O D U C T I ONA NA GE N DA F OR O UR T I ME

In my view the greatest domestic challenge of our generation is America’s large and growing Opportunity Deficit. This opportunity crisis presents itself in three principal ways: immobility among the poor, trapped in poverty; insecurity in the middle class, where families just can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic elites twist policy to unfairly profit at everyone else’s expense.The Left assumes this inequality is a sign of market failure or insufficient government regulation. But the fact is that bad government policies are too often the cause of unequal opportunity. For the same kind of dysfunctional big government that unfairly excludes the poor and middle class from being able to earn their success on a level playing field sometimes unfairly exempts the wealthy and well-connected from having to earn their success.These speeches are not the culmination of a conservative reform agenda, but merely the beginning. With much of the difficult work still ahead of us, they are meant to reorient the Republican Party and direct the creation of its agenda toward the goal that Abraham Lincoln set forth over 150 years ago:

“to lift artificial weights from all shoulders… clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, … [and] afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Mike Lee