The Pity Party (2 page)

The child who would grow up to become First Lady was less than a year old in 1964, and Barack Obama was only three, when NBC canceled the television game show
Queen for a Day
. Though they could not have known about it, the show previewed the modern Democratic Party's stagecraft and statecraft. Its contestants were women who would tell the host, studio audience, and viewers at home about their travails, usually financial or medical. An applause meter would then let the studio audience “vote” on which woman had told the most affecting story, making her Queen for a Day. The winner received prizes, some selected to alleviate her particular troubles, and the other contestants also received gifts. The host closed every show by saying, “This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make
every
woman a queen, for every single day!” In 2010, television writer and critic Mark Evanier wrote that
Queen for a Day
was “tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting and utterly degrading to the human spirit.”
¹¹

Be that as it may, the line between poignancy and exploitation is not only thin, but moving inexorably: expressions once condemned for exploiting are eventually hailed for their courage and candor. Elected officials like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reflect citizens' sensibilities more than they shape them. As the disappearance of “Blue Dog” voters and politicians has made the Democratic Party increasingly liberal, liberals have turned it into the pity party, committed to doing good socially and thereby doing well politically. People have interests, of course, and a political party that promises the government will give things to them and do things for them will never lack a constituency. But people also have pride: they desire approval, including self-approval. A modern American who doubts his compassion would have as hard a time sustaining a good opinion of himself as a medieval European lacking religious faith, or an ancient Roman convinced his life and character were devoid of honor. The term “compassion”—or “empathy,” or even “kindness”—is routinely used not just to name
a
moral virtue, but to designate the pinnacle or even the entirety of moral excellence. Precisely because this moral conviction is ambient, with so many Americans taking for granted that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting, and being more compassionate, it's an important yet difficult subject to analyze. Compassion is the moral sea we swim in, which works against our awareness of it, much less efforts to chart its depths and currents.

Compassion encompasses modern American liberalism, then, not the other way around. The most important source of their political strength, however, has been liberals' ability to make compassion the political sea we swim in. It not only helps Democratic politicians win votes but also helps rank-and-file Democrats feel worthy. “I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.”
¹²
A more politically formidable analyst than Keillor has seconded that motion. In a 2013 speech President Obama quoted the late film critic Roger Ebert: “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs.” And, Obama continued, “when I think about what I'm fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I'm going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that's not enough—I want your kids to do well also.” This empathy is not primarily vertical, however, the noblesse oblige the world's most powerful man feels toward ordinary citizens. Rather, it works best when practiced horizontally and reciprocally, as the disposition Americans have for one another. It's “what binds us together, and . . . how we've always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other's success.”
¹³

This subject has been a recurring theme throughout the president's public career. As a U.S. senator he gave a college commencement address that urged graduates “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.” To what end? “When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.” After his victory in November 2008, President-elect Obama responded to a schoolgirl who had written to him by advising, “If you don't already know what it means, I want you to look up the word ‘empathy' in the dictionary. I believe we don't have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”
¹⁴

By speaking in these terms, Obama carries on a tradition older than he is. In
The Liberal Mind
, a book published two years after Obama was born, the late Kenneth Minogue wrote that liberalism is defined by the commitment to find and then rectify “suffering situations,” thereby transforming politics into “an activity not so much for maximizing happiness as for minimizing suffering.” The belief there can be no neutrality in this war to rid the world of one social evil after another—if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem—reduces politics to “a melodrama of oppressors and victims.”
¹⁵
Thus, in a 1977 speech dedicating the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's Washington headquarters, which was being named after him, Senator Hubert Humphrey said, “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Those words are inscribed on the building's wall.
¹⁶

Equally important, by making an unqualified commitment to empathy, liberals put conservatism on trial. “Which side are you on?” asked the old labor movement anthem. In the rhetoric of modern liberalism, there are only two sides, and an easy choice between them. “Divine justice,” Franklin Roosevelt told the 1936 Democratic convention, “weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
¹⁷
Nineteen thirty-six was the year Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill won his first election, at the age of twenty-three, for a seat in the Massachusetts legislature. By 1984 he had become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the most powerful Democrat in Washington. FDR's rhetoric apparently made a lasting impression on O'Neill, who echoed it when he denounced President Ronald Reagan: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood.”
¹⁸
In 2013,
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman made similar accusations, employing the language of epidemiology rather than hematology. Conservatives take “positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable,” he wrote. Denouncing House Republicans for voting to cut funds for the Food Stamps program, Krugman said they were “infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness. . . . If you're an American, and you're down on your luck, these people don't want to help; they want to give you an extra kick.”
¹⁹

There's no need to belabor the advantages liberals secure, on Election Day and in policy debates, by contending the republic's essential choice is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. Again, however, this way of framing the question yields not only political advantages but psychological and sociological ones. Given compassion's centrality, both to the modern understanding of moral decency and to liberal politics, liberalism offers those who embrace it a reliable basis to feel good about themselves, which includes ample reason to revile those deemed compassion-deficient. On the floor of the House of Representatives, for example, Democratic congressman Alan Grayson declared in 2009 that Republican colleagues who opposed the health care proposals advanced by Democrats had a plan of their own: “Don't get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
²⁰
Following Obama's 2012 reelection, one blogger spiked the football in an open letter to Republicans, to which many websites provided a link. “Koolking83,” apparently the nom de pixel of Chicagoan Steve Sanchez, gloated that the conservative campaign to “take back the country” had failed because that country, along with its moral failings, is at long last vanishing. In “your Country,” the letter asserted, “Voters don't cast their ballots with the welfare of the guy or woman next to them in mind—they don't vote for universal prosperity and equality, they don't vote with a heart full of compassion and a mind with a vision for a more fair and a more inclusive Country.” Mitt Romney lost because he was “the embodiment of everything that is wrong with YOUR Country,” in that he was both “insatiably greedy” and “invariably self-interested.”
²¹

One of compassion's advantages is that the scorn for the uncompassionate it validates is all-weather gear, which can be worn during both triumphs and setbacks. Krugman's colleague,
Times
columnist Charles Blow, reacted to the 2013 House vote on Food Stamps by deploring not just “the pariahs who roam [America's] halls of power” but also “the people who put them there” for being “insular, cruel and uncaring.” He lamented a public opinion survey showing a plurality of Americans believed high poverty rates persisted because excessive welfare benefits stifle initiative. “How did we come to such a pass?” Blow demands. “Why aren't more politicians—and people in general—expressing outrage and showing empathy?”

Part of our current condition is obviously partisan. Republicans have become the party of “blame the victim.” Whatever your lesser lot in life, it's completely within your means to correct, according to their logic. Poverty, hunger, homelessness and desperation aren't violence to the spirit but motivation to the will. If you want more and you work harder, all your problems will disappear. Sink or swim. Pull yourself up. Get over it.

This callousness reflects not only the deficiencies of Republican politicians, however, but the broader phenomenon that “many Americans look at the poor with disgust.” Washington, D.C., is a “town without pity,” he concludes, because too many Americans desire and have succeeded in making the United States a nation without pity. “If some people's impulse is to turn up a nose rather than extend a hand, no wonder we send so many lawmakers empty of empathy to Congress. No wonder more people don't demand that Congress stand up for the least among us rather than on them.”
²²

Some readers who have come this far may, like Democratic politicians and
New York Times
columnists, hold these truths to be self-evident: that compassion is the essence of moral and political decency; that liberalism is fundamentally noble because it places compassion at the center of its political efforts; and that conservatism is fundamentally odious because
its
central purpose is to reject compassion in favor of selfishness, greed, and cruel indifference to suffering. Those readers should get off the train at this station, since they will find a book interrogating these propositions as pointless as one that examines whether the world is round or the sky blue.

For those of you still on board, at least for a while, I readily confirm the subtle hints given by the preceding pages and this book's title: I am indeed a political conservative, so approach the claims made for liberal compassion skeptically, not reverently. During the Reagan-Thatcher era, some conservatives felt free to dismiss such claims as the whining of collectivists who could not accept the demise of the only alternative to market economics. Electoral setbacks—only one Republican nominee (George W. Bush with 50.7 percent in 2004) has won a majority of the popular vote in the six presidential elections beginning with Clinton's victory in 1992—and well-documented demographic trends indicating future elections are likely to grow even more difficult have drained this triumphalism from the American Right. As they did when reading the first issue of
National Review
in 1955, conservatives once more stand athwart history, yelling Stop!

Especially, however, if liberals realize their hopes of dominating the landscape as they did in the 1930s, we need to examine—less for the sake of reinvigorating conservatism than for the more general imperative to advance clear thinking and good governance—what the politics of kindness means, and how it works. If American politics is becoming an ecosystem where liberalism's natural enemies are too weak to challenge it, the only remaining restraints on the politics of compassion will exert their influence from within liberalism, rather than by opposing it from the outside. But if political compassion proves to be confused, futile, or destructive in ways that neither interest nor inhibit liberals who believe that platitudes about warmhearted empathy for the least among us constitute a political philosophy, America faces dangers it needs to understand. They are what this book is about.

My argument will have this structure: Chapter One's subject is compassion's meaning in modern discourse, and how it became central to the moral outlook, not just of American liberalism, but of social and political life in general. The next two chapters take up the question raised by Barack Obama's entreaty to broaden our ambit of concern. Some liberal polemicists to the contrary notwithstanding, most people, even registered Republicans, do not really need to be shamed into empathizing with their family members, friends, or neighbors. The question, then, is not
whether
to be compassionate or indifferent to the suffering of others, but the proper scope of compassion's ambit. This issue is best examined from the outside in: Chapter Two works through the implications of empathy that stretches across international borders. Those problems explicated, in Chapter Three I consider liberal compassion within America, an ambit better suited to the theory and practice of liberalism. Even so, the politics of kindness cannot be judged a success at the national level, either in terms of making sense or making a difference for the better.
Why
liberal compassion's good intentions translate so unreliably into good results is the subject of Chapter Four, which argues that the quality of mercy is a more consequential problem than, as liberals posit, its chronically insufficient quantity. Finally, Chapter Five examines the conservative response to liberal compassion to see how it has fared, why it hasn't done more to make liberals fear that the political risks of denouncing conservatives' alleged heartlessness might exceed the rewards, and how conservatives could explain their reservations and objectives more persuasively.