The Pity Party (23 page)

And without the logic of liberalism. The acquiescence in wasteful and ineffective programs—so strikingly at variance with the earnest, often fervent, expression of solicitude for the sufferers who are supposed to benefit from those programs—persists not only because implementation is administratively and politically difficult, but because the liberals who create, perpetuate, defend, and expand social welfare programs are devoted to them less because they care about helping than because they care about caring. This fundamental flaw connects the theory of liberalism to the malpractice of liberalism. It explains why—in the words of Joe Klein, whose sparsely populated spot on the political spectrum may be described as rigorous, skeptical liberalism—the “special responsibility to make sure that federal programs are effective and well managed,” which ought to be liberals' highest priority, is instead one they regularly subordinate to campaigns for “getting massive new programs passed.” By embracing those priorities and allowing misconceived, mismanaged programs to shamble along endlessly, rarely reformed and never replaced, liberals confirm rather than refute conservatives' conviction that, as he writes, “government can mess up a one-car parade.”
²⁴

Even columnist E. J. Dionne Jr.—a better team player than Klein, meaning a less rigorous and skeptical liberal—conceded that 2013's incompetent rollout of the Affordable Care Act, after the Obama administration had been given three and a half years following the law's passage to prepare for it, showed “[t]here's a lesson here that liberals apparently need to learn over and over: Good intentions without proper administration can undermine even the most noble of goals.”
²⁵
That such an elementary lesson is one liberals need to learn over and over suggests a fundamental flaw in liberalism, one that cannot be fixed by exhortations from friendly journalists. Obamacare's debut moved Franklin Foer, editor of the
New Republic
, to worry that the program's failure would erode “the public's willingness to give liberalism another shot,” the kind allowing it to “replicate its greatest victories,” since it has always been the case that “[i]f liberals wanted the federal government to take on big new projects—more to the point, if liberals wanted taxes to pay for them—they needed the public to believe that the money would be well spent.”
²⁶

That Dionne and Foer place such concerns front and center inadvertently confirms Klein's point: liberals instinctively stress the importance of political victories over the need for successful policies. The perverse determination to assign government new social welfare responsibilities, rather than focus like a laser on discharging existing ones as effectively as possible, makes sense if the welfare of the people whom government programs were created to help was never really the main point of those programs. Rather, it was secondary, irrelevant, or even contrary to the more pressing need: embarking on humanitarian endeavors that, however much or little suffering they alleviated, reassured those who demand, enact, administer, and uphold all such programs that
they
are admirable people and their political adversaries are not.

In
Meditations on Hunting
, José Ortega y Gasset wrote that “one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.” More generally, “when an activity becomes a sport, whatever that activity may be, the hierarchy of its values becomes inverted.” When a failed hunt meant starvation, the hunter's “true purpose” was to kill his prey. For the sportsman who will be well nourished in any case, the “demonstration of effort and skill,” which had been merely a means to the end for the “utilitarian” hunter, becomes an end in itself.
²⁷

Liberalism's concern with moral self-validation, tacit though pervasive, does indeed signal an inversion of the hierarchy of values. Conservative critiques of liberalism sometimes concede that liberals' aspirations are laudable before insisting that the means liberals favor are insufficiently practical and at least potentially destructive. The way liberal compassion lends itself to liberal bullshit, however, argues for a less forgiving interpretation. Liberals' ideals make them more culpable, not less, for the fact that government programs set up to
do
good don't reliably
accomplish
good. Doing good is often harder than do-gooders realize, but doing good is also more about the doing and the doer than it is about the good. Too often, as a result, liberals are content to treat gestures as the functional equivalent of deeds, and intentions as adequate substitutes for achievements.

Consider gun control. The issue had been dormant in American politics after many Democrats concluded their party's commitment to that cause was costing its candidates votes they could not afford to lose. (If Al Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee, for example, he would have won the presidency in 2000, regardless of any court's rulings about Florida's hanging chads.) Even after a gunman shot seventy people, twelve fatally, in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in July 2012, less than four months before Election Day, Democrats addressed the question with great caution. The presidential press secretary, Jay Carney, went out of his way to signal the Obama administration's lack of interest in new legislation, telling reporters that “the President's view is that we can take steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them under existing law. And that's his focus right now.”
²⁸
Obama did not mention guns in his convention acceptance speech seven weeks after the shootings, and the party platform devoted a single modulated paragraph to the issue.

The month after Obama's reelection saw the perpetration of another massacre, this time in Newtown, Connecticut. An unhinged young man named Adam Lanza used guns his mother had acquired and kept at their home to murder her, twenty schoolchildren, and six school employees, before killing himself. Campaigning now for a place in history rather than a second term, President Obama was less circumspect after Newtown than he had been following Aurora, no longer willing to confine the discussion to the unrealized possibilities afforded by existing laws. Instead, in a news conference five days after the shootings, he aligned himself with the “majority of Americans” who support new laws banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, and “requiring background checks before all gun purchases.”
²⁹

By the time Congress began considering the issue in 2013, however, Democratic leaders concluded they had no way to secure the votes needed to ban any particular type of weapon or ammunition, and concentrated on legislation that would expand background checks. Their efforts had to overcome not only a political problem, the National Rifle Association and other opponents of gun control, but a logical one: explaining how Adam Lanza's crimes made it imperative to enact legislation that would not have prevented those crimes. “It's true,” wrote the
New Yorker
's Margaret Talbot, “that a background check would not have stopped Adam Lanza, who had no criminal record, and whose mother had bought the guns and ammunition he used in Newtown.

But laws influence culture, just as culture influences laws, and if Congress enacted
a
serious piece of gun-control legislation
perhaps that might initiate a subtle shift
in American attitudes toward guns, and that
might eventually lead
some parent
with a deeply troubled, deeply isolated son fascinated by violence to think twice before turning the family home into a munitions depot. [Emphasis added.]
³⁰

Or, as William Buckley liked to say, if we had some ham we could make a ham sandwich. If we had some bread.

With champions who declare it doesn't really matter what new laws say or do, gun control barely needs detractors. According to Talbot's argument, any gun law, as long as it is perceived to be serious, has the potential to catalyze the revaluation of all values relating to firearms. Talbot's moralizing on behalf of vague gestures we can all feel hopeful about—thereby sparing us the need to attend to the boring details about what conduct new regulations will actually proscribe and require, how these commands will be enforced, and the plausible cause and effect between the enforcement of their provisions and the realization of their intended goals—presents liberal bullshit as self-caricature.

Not all gun control advocates rely so heavily on wishful thinking about legislating morality. Even the more grounded arguments partake, albeit less flagrantly, of liberal indifference to efficacy. It is, in the first place, a hollow victory for a policy to “succeed” if it is endorsed and enacted according to terms by which it could not possibly fail. This kind of unfalsifiable proposition is essential to the argument that even if new gun control laws might not make much difference, they will make some. And some is better than none. “If there is even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town” from the kind of agony Adam Lanza inflicted on Newtown, President Obama said in a memorial service there, “then surely we have an obligation to try.”
³¹
In April 2013, after legislation expanding background checks fell short of the sixty votes needed to end debate in the Senate, effectively scuttling the bill, the president pressed the same argument in a Rose Garden appearance, where he was accompanied by several parents whose children were among the Connecticut murder victims:

One common argument I heard was that this legislation wouldn't prevent all future massacres. And that's true. As I said from the start, no single piece of legislation can stop every act of violence and evil. . . . But if action by Congress could have saved one person, one child, a few hundred, a few thousand, if it could have prevented those people from losing their lives to gun violence in the future while preserving our Second Amendment rights, we had an obligation to try. And this legislation met that test. And too many Senators failed theirs.
³²

Politicians, as a class, are not legendarily meticulous when characterizing ideas they dispute and wish to defeat. Even judged by the norms of his profession, however, Obama's resort to straw man arguments is remarkably facile and shameless about ascribing idiotic views to those with whom he disagrees. In February 2009, during his first press conference as president, Obama congratulated himself for taking a tone with congressional Republicans “that has been consistently civil and respectful,” before lamenting that based on what an unspecified “some in Congress” had been saying about his proposals to stimulate the critically wounded economy, “there seems to be a set of folks who—I don't doubt their sincerity—who just believe that we should do nothing.” Even the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
, newspapers that exert themselves to give Obama the benefit of every doubt, made plain that
no one
on Capitol Hill contended, sincerely or otherwise, that the government's best response to the economic crisis was utter passivity.
³³

By the same token, Obama did not identify anyone who made the “common argument” that expanded background checks prior to gun sales were useless at best because they “wouldn't prevent all future massacres,” much less “stop every act of violence and evil.” Having disposed of the ludicrously high standard gun control opponents allegedly insisted on, Obama could adopt one of his favorite poses, the grown-up in the room, by invoking a ludicrously low standard, our duty to try policies that could save even one child from gun violence. In doing so the president employed a logical fallacy he was no doubt warned against while a law student: the argument that proves too much. If the government has an obligation to try anything that might save even one life, then it is going to be hyperactive in discharging an infinite workload.

This logical failure brings us to a prudential one, another hallmark of prescriptive bullshit: the failure to weigh a proposed course of action in light of possible alternatives, troubling implications, and foreseeable impediments, political and administrative. The
Atlantic
's Conor Friedersdorf criticized Obama's rhetoric by pointing out that any list of options that might plausibly reduce the likelihood of the next Newtown massacre would have to include dramatically lower barriers to monitoring or even institutionalizing people with mental illnesses. Adam Lanza, though clearly troubled, had never run afoul of the law before the last day of his life, nor had he been placed under clinical supervision. Vigorous intervention by the authorities to treat or even confine him might well have prevented his killing spree—but would also require assigning government officials sweeping powers regarding weird, pathetic misfits in general. A few assailants may well be interdicted as a result, but a vastly larger number of troubled though harmless people will have their freedom curtailed and their lives diminished. To recoil from this prospect is not the moral equivalent of chortling during the Newtown funerals.
³⁴

The obligation to try anything that might save even one child's life would also, in short order, require contemplating stern social or government sanctions against violent movies and video games. (Lanza spent hours absorbed in the latter, according to some accounts.) The
New Yorker
's Adam Gopnik, a gun control supporter, saluted the “liberal creed of open inquiry and presentation,” before raising a troubling question:

It's difficult to believe that a hundred years from now historians are going to say, “America had a terrible curse of gun violence. It also had entertainments of all kinds, which depended on the use and glorification and a fetishization of guns, but these two things had no connection. They ran on completely different cultural circuits.”