The Pity Party (20 page)

The arc of former senator John Edwards's political career, prior to its laughingstock denouement, shows the intricacies of this political situation. Edwards set out to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as the one candidate who sought, forty years later, to recapture the moral passion of Robert Kennedy's crusade for the poor. Edwards soon realized, however, that hunting where the ducks are meant, even in Democratic primaries, seeking votes from those who were not poor. “I'm not just talking about the rich and the poor,” he said after retooling his campaign's rationale. “I'm talking about the very rich, and
everybody
else.”
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Similarly, the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its “We Are the 99 Percent” slogan, showed a good grasp of majoritarian politics, whatever else it may have misunderstood. According to the World Top Incomes Database, every American household with a 2012 income below $371,689 was a prospective candidate for the Occupy coalition. It could, therefore, have suffered a fair number of defections from proletarians scraping by on $350,000 a year, and still assembled a dominant voting majority.

The fact that the Edwards and Occupy Wall Street majorities have not yet materialized does not guarantee they never will. With Bill de Blasio in Gracie Mansion and Elizabeth Warren in the United States Senate, committed egalitarians believe their long-awaited triumph may finally be at hand. The fact that such a majority would rest on dubious empirical foundations does not preclude its emergence. The New Deal coalition rested on dubious logical foundations, after all, about social insurance programs' magical ability to make every household a net importer of governmentally redistributed dollars, yet proved formidable and resilient.

A coalition forged by inducing mainstream Americans to feel sorry for themselves would, nevertheless, be predicated on alarmism. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts' “Economic Mobility Project” followed a sample of children born in the 1950s and 1960s for three decades and found that “67 percent of Americans who were children in 1968 had higher levels of real [inflation-adjusted] income in 1995–2002 than their parents had in 1967–1971.” Adjust the data for the smaller households at the end of the century—more singles, later marriages, fewer children—and the proportion of Americans who had a higher income by 2000 than their parents did some thirty years earlier rises to 81 percent.
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The Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship, former manager of the Pew project, points out, “Even after the Great Recession, we live in larger houses and own more cars than previous generations. . . . Air-conditioning and air travel, once considered luxuries, are now available to virtually all of us.” Middle-class Americans of today are not worse off than middle-class families from the Affluent Society, but may feel worse off by virtue of the fact that average incomes, though still increasing, are rising about half as rapidly as they did from 1947 to 1979.
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Furthermore, the standard of comparison today is of midcentury affluence and optimism, while the midcentury standard was the Depression. We have more than our parents did, but expect
much
more. As a result, the home movies in our heads about middle-class Americans' lives during the Affluent Society years exaggerate the prosperity. “A ranch-style tract house, a Chevrolet, and meat loaf for dinner will not do any more as the symbols of a realized dream,” Nicholas Lemann wrote in 1989.
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The long arc of the history of social justice—from proudly defying sentimental almsgivers, to compassion for the downtrodden, to the conviction that nearly every American is among the downtrodden deserving compassion—bends toward self-absorption. As journalist Matt Bai recounts, at a “2004 book party for the liberal pundit Arianna Huffington, hosted by the billionaire Lynda Resnick and attended by Hollywood celebrities like Rob Reiner, Aaron Sorkin, and Larry and Laurie David . . . Resnick, an agribusiness titan and the owner of the Franklin Mint, ascended the spiral staircase of her legendary Sunset Boulevard mansion and declared, to great applause, ‘We are so tired of being disenfranchised!'”
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As life on earth demonstrates repeatedly, the perfection of self-absorption is the obliteration of self-awareness.

This shift—from a republic where the many are supposed to feel sorry for the few, to one where all are supposed to feel sorry for one another
and
for themselves—has political ramifications but is a sociological phenomenon. Inevitably, the axiom that empathizing with others is the paramount duty decent people are obliged to fulfill has engendered a corollary: being empathized
with
is the affirmation ordinary people are most entitled to receive. The danger is that when we are commanded to care for distant strangers with an intensity indistinguishable from the love we feel for our own families, what we get is not a nation of Albert Schweitzers and Mother Teresas, but one of frauds and hysterics.

What we get, in fact, is the Oprahfication of America, evident in the way political conventions now aspire to be empathy-fests that can hold their own with daytime talk shows. As Lee Siegel has argued, “The reverse side of a democracy based on exchangeable feelings is the creation of a kingdom of mere sensations, in which no experience has a higher—or different—value than any other experience.” Oprah Winfrey dominated daytime television for two decades, during which she fortified and legitimized a social transformation that “turned living vicariously into living authentically.” Winfrey taught America to “weep and empathize” with celebrities struggling with substance abuse or paparazzi, writes Siegel, and with ordinary Americans turned into celebrities for a day as they discussed their travails, from ghastly tragedies to mundane frustrations, for a studio and national audience. “The fungibility of feeling is really a reduction of all experience to the effect it has on your own quality of feeling.” Because democracy means all have suffered and all deserve compassion, a republic created to secure inalienable rights becomes a continental support group to salve psychic wounds.
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Consider the victim impact statements offered during the sentencing phase of criminal trials, an innovation that became commonplace in America in the late twentieth century. Those who have survived a crime, or the friends and relatives of those who did not, are given an opportunity to tell the court (or parole board) about how they have been scarred by the experience. It is, then, exactly the kind of practice likely to be routinized in the Age of Empathy, but one raising problems unique to any such epoch. Historian Pamela Haag points out the corollary implied by inviting victims to entreat, on the basis of their suffering, the government to impose harsh punishments on those who wronged them: a criminal should receive “a more lenient sentence if his victim was someone of so little charm or social worth that he had no one to testify movingly for him.”
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Blurring the distinction between the courtroom and a support group or talk-show set is a solution that legitimizes the problem it is meant to solve, bringing us closer to the visceral, unprincipled frontier justice Mark Twain derided. The reason criminal cases have titles like
Wisconsin v. Smith
or
United States v. Jones
is that violations of criminal law are considered transgressions against the entire community—against its safety and tranquility, its constitutive moral convictions, its capacity for efficacious self-government—not simply against a particular crime's victim. A national community with the moral confidence to punish criminals sternly would not need weeping relatives to clarify the intolerable wickedness of the criminal act. America was not, when victim impact statements became routine, such a nation. A 1995 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that prisoners convicted of violent crimes and released from prison in 1992 had served, on average, sentences of 43 months. Convicted murderers received, on average, sentences of 149 months but had actually spent only 71 months in prison. For rapists, the corresponding numbers were 117 and 65 months; for kidnappers, 104 and 52 months; and for robbers, 95 and 44 months.
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The claims made for compassion by its most ardent publicists appear, in this light, highly suspect. A nation increasingly dependent on heartrending anecdotes to focus and activate its sense of justice is one that's losing the capacity for moral and abstract reasoning. Such a society, Jean Bethke Elshtain worried, will discover that “undifferentiated, unmediated emotion cannot sustain an ethical commitment to others.” The question before the United States in 1787, wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1, was a question of urgent importance to the whole world: whether good government could be established by “reflection and choice,” or would always rest on “accident and force.” It is not just the founding, however, but the perpetuation of republics that makes reflection and choice imperative, and accident and force dangerous. If we agree the prospect of global empathy, felt for all without distinction, is ludicrous and hideous, then the politics of kindness will always rest on accidents. Wherever my expansive soul alights will be the place where an arbitrarily, randomly chosen sad story makes me tend to my well-being and self-regard by tending to the sufferer I happen upon. Such a nation, Elshtain contends, abandons the ideal of being a republic “sustained by ethical formation in and through our basic institutions” in favor of becoming “the United States of feeling good about ourselves.”
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For humans, feeling good about ourselves always takes place in a social context. We feel good, that is, not just about conforming to some abstract standard, but about emulating or validating the standards of the groups we care about, and surpassing or spurning the standards of groups we dislike. According to
The Righteous Mind
, Jonathan Haidt's widely discussed book on “why good people are divided by politics and religion,” we appear to be citizens and voters who are weakly selfish but strongly “groupish.” Individuals' political opinions often contradict their objective interests, but more reliably conform to the views of the groups they feel most strongly attached to. We “can believe almost anything that supports our team,” he argues, because political opinions serve as “badges of social membership.” Thus, people make sense of political reality by asking, “What's in it for my group?” rather than “What's in it for me?”
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Often, however, whether my group is in fact a group where I'm a member in good standing is not a clear, settled question. What I think of as “my” group may say more about what I aspire to, or how I see myself and want others to see me, than about the person I really am, who often turns out to be less well regarded by those whose good opinion I seek most avidly. “We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us,” Haidt writes, “although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us.” We formulate and express opinions not only to “support our team,” but to “demonstrate commitment to our team.”
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Thus, Garrison Keillor's description of what the politics of kindness means to its adherents sounds like a market research report about the National Public Radio audience, or at least on how those listeners like to think of themselves. “Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.”
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The notion that the list of things that make America worth dying for includes art, poetry, and high-density living sounds like Keillor in his standard mode of gentle self-deprecation. Light irony is not the tone favored by syndicated columnist Dan Savage, however, who reacted to Republican victories in November 2004 by declaring, “Liberals, progressives, and Democrats” are “citizens of the Urban Archipelago,” united by their rejection of “heartland ‘values' like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country.” Savage went on to demonstrate his commitment to the liberal team in strident terms. Though he cautioned denizens of the urban archipelago against indulging fantasies of exile or secession in reaction to the 2004 election, internal defiance was still possible:

We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. . . . We can create a new identity politics, one that transcends class, race, sexual orientation, and religion, one that unites people living in cities with each other and with other urbanites in other cities. The Republicans have the federal government—for now. But we've got Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City . . . and every college town in the country. We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan. . . .

To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We're going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy. . . .

In short, we're through with you people. . . .

From here on out, we're glad red-state rubes live in areas where guns are more powerful and more plentiful, cars are larger and faster, and people are fatter and slower and dumber. This is not a recipe for repopulating the Great Plains. . . .
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Novelist Jane Smiley was only slightly more restrained in her reaction to the 2004 election results. “The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America,” she wrote in
Slate
. “[R]ed state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do—they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.” Republican leaders, she continued, “are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up.” In short, “red state types love to cheat and intimidate, so we have to assume the worst and call them on it every time. We have to give them more to think about than they can handle. . . .”
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