The Pity Party (13 page)

Kindness covers all Barack Obama's political beliefs. But according to C. S. Lewis, kindness is “the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or that, but just happy.” Secular liberals' project may be understood as an effort to order the world as God would if (a) He existed and (b) weren't such a Grouch.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented?” We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves,” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
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A serious problem with kindness (or compassion, or empathy) is that when severed from any estimable, challenging conception of a life well lived it leads directly, according to Lewis, to “a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt for it.”

Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met kindly people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture [Hebrews XII, 8] points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.
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Determining whether a collection of chemicals is passing the time pleasantly requires little acuity and no censoriousness, which makes any cause of unpleasant time-passing an appropriate object of compassionate remediation. Determining whether a human being is engaged in a life well lived is harder, and inescapably entails being judgmental. Liberals feel called upon to simultaneously obey two imperatives. On the one hand, they must feel bad for, and then enact government programs to assist, the afflicted. On the other, they must not entertain certain obvious questions about the lifestyles of the afflicted, including: (a) whether the afflicted suffer from afflictions caused or aggravated by their own choices and habits; and (b) whether the lives they lead after liberal government programs have removed their afflictions amount to lives well lived. The project adhering to both imperatives requires welfare state policies that, by removing causes of suffering, enable those who prefer the great-sapping-nullity lifestyle to pursue it without feeling inferior to, or judged by, those who pursue any other lifestyle.

Third, to return to Betsy and Mpinga, the question of what compassion demands of us is inseparable from the question of how widely we draw the circle before it starts to demand less and, ultimately, nothing. The primitive tribal sentiments at the heart of patriotism, which liberals disdain, are extremely useful for fostering the spirit of caring and sharing, which liberals exalt. American liberals gaze longingly at Scandinavia. “The Danish model of government is close to a religion here, and it has produced a population that regularly claims to be among the happiest in the world,” the
Times
reports from Copenhagen. But Denmark is a nation of 5.5 million people, fewer than live in Wisconsin. That small population is ethnically and religiously homogeneous, defined by a distinct national character forged over long centuries.
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Neighboring Sweden, another model for American liberals, is only somewhat larger—its population of 9.1 million is smaller than North Carolina's or Los Angeles County's—but comparably lacking in diversity. As a result, its welfare state is “founded on a level of cultural homogeneity and an inheritance of social capital that simply isn't available in a polyglot republic-cum-empire like our own,” according to Ross Douthat. “Sweden has . . . no real linguistic or religious diversity, no experience of chattel slavery or mass immigration . . . and a culture of Lutheran thrift and prudence that endures even though Lutheranism itself is on life support.”
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The Bruce Springsteen song “We Take Care of Our Own” unintentionally illustrates the dilemma. It attempts to make patriotism safe for compassion by characterizing social justice as the patriot's central concern and highest expression. “Wherever this flag's flown,” says the chorus, “We take care of our own.” The song challenges the listener about a decline of fellow-feeling:

I've been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone;

The road of good intentions has gone dry as bone.

“We Take Care of Our Own,” released on Springsteen's 2012 album,
Wrecking Ball
, became a quasi-official anthem of the Obama reelection campaign. It was played at rallies, including after the president's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. A year after his victory, President Obama was still citing the song. In a statement issued on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Obama said of the ongoing recovery efforts, “That's who we are as Americans—we take care of our own. We leave nobody behind.”
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To declare that we take care of our own does not rule out the possibility we take care of others, too. But it's a clear, vigorous—and in some contexts, truculent—assertion that we take care of our own
first
, and help others, if at all, only after having made certain we've done all we can at home.

It would appear, however, that relying on the principle of taking care of our own creates problems for liberalism more severe than those it solves. For one thing, it raises uncomfortable questions about resolutely taking care of the business of taking care of our own, as opposed to advertising the depth and refinement of our empathy by appropriating ever more money to take-care programs that are badly conceived, implemented, and administered. It raises, as well, the question of whether it's smart or seemly to chastise Americans for failing to take care of our own at the same time liberals defend enormous middle-class entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, that require government to spend huge sums to take care of people capable of taking care of themselves.

Worst of all, in the context of our discussion of Betsy and Mpinga, is the question of whether liberals are entirely comfortable appealing to an intensified tribalism in their closing argument. In 2012 the federal government spent 14.3 percent of GDP on domestic welfare state programs, 100 times more than the 0.14 percent of GDP it spent on international humanitarian aid. The voters' preference for taking care of our own, and corresponding aversion to taking care of those not our own, looks pretty robust already.

I point this out because if taking care of our own is to be a central component of how liberals justify themselves, the question of how we determine who qualifies as “our own” becomes pivotal. According to Tocqueville, patriots “love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers.”
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This makes sense when we recall that “patriot” derives from the Greek word meaning “of the father,” and is related to such English words as “patriarch” and “paternity.” Liberals' grave misgivings about patriotism, however, mean they are usually the last people, not the first, to contend that the causes of progress and social justice will be served by a heavier reliance on what historian Jerry Muller calls “ethnonationalism.” He writes, “When French textbooks began with ‘Our ancestors the Gauls' or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of ‘this island race,' they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice.”
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The persistence and even intensification of these feelings remains a potent geopolitical fact. After eighty-one years as a distinct nation carved out of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918—decades spent being independent, then dominated by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia—Czechoslovakia took only three years after its sovereignty was restored by the end of Soviet domination in 1989 to conclude it was two peoples, not one, each of which deserved its own nation. Not all divorces are so amicable. Belgium has been an independent nation since 1830, but ethnonationalistic antagonism between a Flemish majority, most of whom speak Dutch, and large francophone Walloon minority perpetually threatens to split the country into two even smaller ones. The Basques, Kurds, and Quebecois have never inhabited their own sovereign nations, but their separatist movements have been politically determined and sometimes violent.

Ethnonationalism figures differently, but not trivially, in America's political equations. This has been true from the start. According to the Declaration of Independence, by 1776 it had become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The phrase plants an axiom, treating as a settled fact what was, in reality, a contested question: Were the Americans indeed one people and the British another in 1776, or did they
all
remain one people, as had been widely and uncontroversially believed on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a century? The Declaration argues as if the existence of an American “us” distinct from a British “them” were a self-evident truth in its own right. Historians who study the colonial era have, in fact, found a good deal of evidence pointing to the emergence of a shared, important American identity. According to political scientist Samuel Huntington, “Before 1740 the term ‘America' described a territory not a society. Beginning then, however, the colonists and others began to speak of Americans collectively.” He says that their “collective experiences” prior to the Revolutionary War created “a common consciousness” among these Americans.
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The sense that patriotism was inherently ethnonationalistic, thereby requiring a new nation to fortify the shared identity that set its people apart from all others, continued in the Founding era. In Federalist No. 2, John Jay is at pains to describe American society in terms that make its national unity appear indisputable:

Providence has been pleased to give this one [geographically] connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
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American ethnonationalism ceded ground throughout the nineteenth century as nativist advocates of strict controls on immigration won few political victories and suffered many defeats. But Americans remained committed to the idea of a nation that, even though not descended from the same ancestors, did speak the same language, and did share manners, customs, and religions that, if not identical, were at least similar and compatible. In most countries, ethnonationalism conferred, automatically and pervasively, the benefits of cultural nationalism. In increasingly plural America, cultural nationalism was made to perform this work as part of a conscious project, given our weakened ethnonationalism's capacity to automatically confer cultural unity. Pluralism was a fact, but that fact militated against, not in favor of, turning pluralism into an ideology. According to historian John Fonte, “The assimilation of the Ellis Island generation succeeded only because Progressive politicians including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted on ‘Americanization' and crushed the proto-multicultural activists. . . .”
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In the twenty-first century, facts on the ground and ideas in the air dilute, if they do not effectively preclude, the Americanization of a hundred years ago. The Ellis Island immigrants of that era, most of whom arrived from eastern or southern Europe, had all made a long trip to America. Shuttling between their new and old countries was impossible, returning home after achieving success was not the point, and returning home after failure would have been a disgrace. The immigrants had made a big commitment to America the minute they set foot here. Because they arrived from a large number of countries, each speaking a different language, assimilation was a practical imperative. The number of immigrants from any one country, that is, was small enough to discourage life and work within a homogeneous, unassimilated enclave. Immigrants from Country A who wanted to take advantage of opportunities in workplaces employing both native-born Americans and immigrants from countries B, C, and D, or to find cheaper and better housing than what was available in neighborhoods dominated by emigrants from the same country, had strong incentives to learn English and make sure their children did.

It's different today. Most immigrants are from Mexico and other Latin American countries. It's easier than it was for the Ellis Island immigrants to get by without learning English, especially for those who work in industries dominated by other Spanish-speaking immigrants, and who reside in Spanish-speaking enclaves. “Roughly 10 percent of the American population now speaks Spanish at home,” Christopher Jencks reported in 2001. “These households are concentrated in and around a few cities. . . .”
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Because of geographic proximity and lower travel costs, today's immigrants are likely to have a less attenuated relationship with their native land, and a more qualified one with their adopted country, than immigrants did a century ago. According to Jencks:

Many Mexicans . . . see themselves as sojourners who will return home once they have made some money. The typical Mexican male earns about half what a non-Latino white earns, so if he compares himself to other Americans he is likely to feel like a failure. But if he compares himself to the Mexicans with whom he grew up, he is likely to feel quite successful. So he clings to his Mexican identity, sends money back to his parents, goes home for holidays with gifts that his relatives could not otherwise afford, tries to buy property in Mexico for his retirement, and retains his Mexican citizenship.
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