The Pity Party (31 page)

“I know Republicans—across the country—are generous of heart,” Bush said in announcing his candidacy in 1999. “I am confident the American people view compassion as a noble calling.” Bush not only insisted that conservatives were within America's moral mainstream, as his father had done a decade earlier, but conveyed the desire for a more ambitious, telling rebuttal of the charge—that conservatives were heartless—than was Bush 41's “thousand points of light.” For Bush 43, compassionate conservatism would go beyond politicians praising and encouraging private organizations and volunteerism. Federal policy would seek to catalyze such efforts, and make
them
, rather than designed-in-Washington government policies, the vehicle for alleviating suffering and solving social problems. The goal was “prosperity with a purpose”—not just material advances but progress toward stronger character and communities. The relation between empathizers and empathizees Bush envisioned was, as a result, moral rather than nonjudgmental. What made compassionate conservatives compassionate was their concern for the poor. What made them conservative was their belief that because people who acquired certain dispositions and habits were highly unlikely to be poor—and, if so, briefly rather than protractedly—a society that failed to transmit and instill those dispositions and habits was condemning more people to poverty through an egregious sin of omission. “For our children to have the lives we want for them, they must learn to say yes to responsibility, yes to family, yes to honesty and work,” Bush declared. “I have seen our culture change once in my lifetime, so I know it can change again.”
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It remained unclear, throughout Bush's campaigns and presidency, what such intentions meant in terms of public policy. “Government can spend money,” he said in 1999, “but it can't put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. This is done by churches and synagogues and mosques and charities that warm the cold of life.” Bush promised to be a president who would usher in a “responsibility era” but this, too, is bully pulpit stuff, not policy. Bush said he would “lift regulations” that hampered nonprofits, and “involve them” in social policy pursuits like prison and welfare reform. In his 2000 acceptance speech, Bush said, “My administration will give taxpayers new incentives to donate to charity, encourage after-school programs that build character, and support mentoring groups that shape and save young lives.”
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Once inaugurated, Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, but its first director, political scientist John DiIulio, returned to academia after less than a year. In October 2002 he wrote, “There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism.”
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DiIulio's complaint is more than if-only-they'd-listened-to-me carping by a departed government official: there remained no policy flesh on the bones for the duration of Bush's presidency. (The term “compassionate conservatism” does not appear in Bush's presidential memoir.)

One might conjure a counterfactual history of the Bush presidency, in which there was no terrorist attack on American soil, and no wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The resulting domestic policy agenda could then have provided the focus and resources to demonstrate compassionate conservatism's operational meaning. Weighing against any such prospect, however, is the basic tension inherent in fashioning a
political
agenda for the purpose of catalyzing a
social
transformation, especially an agenda proposed by a party that proclaims itself the champion of limited government.

It is clear that social problems have policy implications. According to the Centers for Disease Control, for example, 18.4 percent of all babies born in 1980 had an unmarried mother, compared to 33.2 percent in 2000, and between 40 and 41 percent each year from 2008 to 2011.
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The increase in divorces and out-of-wedlock births means a growing portion of American children live with one parent, almost always their mother. Nearly half of such children (45 percent) live in poverty, while only 13 percent of children residing with both parents do, a disparity with profound consequences for crime, education, welfare, and the labor force.
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It does not follow, however, that traffic on this street can be made to run in both directions. The desire for policies that correct the causes of social problems, as distinguished from policies that merely attempt to cope with their consequences, does not guarantee such policies will be formulated and successfully implemented. Indeed, it does not guarantee that any such policies are possible. That being the case, the compassionate conservatism George W. Bush invoked was an incongruous basis for securing and wielding political power. It seems Bush, who joined the United Methodist Church as an adult, embraced a Wesleyan conception of America's urgent need “to rally [the] armies of compassion that exist in every community” so that they could nurture, mentor, comfort, and “perform their commonplace miracles of renewal.” This sounds like the work we would expect from moral and religious leaders—but not, as Bush called it, “one of the biggest jobs for the next
president
,” since it is highly doubtful the remoralization of society can be reconciled with the tool kit or job description of a politician in a modern, plural, secular republic.

Does the failure of compassionate conservatism show that conservatism makes no sense without the insistence that the only good compassion is private compassion, on the grounds that giving it
any
political role guarantees self-righteous bullying by hectoring liberals? Milton Friedman, champion of market economics, cast a vote against that proposition in
Capitalism and Freedom
, published in 1962. He argued that government social programs, funded at gunpoint, as libertarians would say, address a collective action problem that private charity cannot, since “the benefits from [charity] accrue to people other than those who make the gifts.”

I am distressed by the sight of poverty; I am benefited by its alleviation; but I am benefited equally whether I or someone else pays for its alleviation; the benefits of others' charity therefore partly accrue to me. To put it differently, we might all of us be willing to contribute to the relief of poverty,
provided
everyone else did. We might not be willing to contribute the same amount without such assurance. In small communities, public pressure can suffice to realize the proviso even with private charity. In the large impersonal communities that are increasingly coming to dominate our society, it is much more difficult for it to do so.

Friedman finds this consideration adequate to justify “governmental action to alleviate poverty; to set, as it were, a floor under the standard of life of every person in the community.”
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The correlation of incentives, then, makes it unlikely that Sumner's A and B who want to help X would have done so, as he hoped, “without any law.” But enacting a law will necessarily require C to help X, too, even if C would never have voluntarily contributed to A and B's charitable campaign.

It's important to note that Friedman's argument does not necessarily depend on the operation of compassion, either in Rousseau's sense of alleviating the distress your suffering causes me, or according to Kant's idea of enabling me to have a good opinion of myself by virtue of responding to your suffering in the way I would want you to respond to mine. The resident of a crowded city, for example, would probably desire that homeless people have a place to sleep other than the doorsteps or heating grates adjacent to his own home and business. According to Tom Wolfe's
The Bonfire of the Vanities
, the key to managing New York City life in the 1980s was to “insulate, insulate, insulate.” Only so much insulation is feasible, however, beyond which addressing the problems one seeks insulation from becomes imperative. The motives for doing so would include: empathy; concerns about the quality of life; peace of mind for one's family; peace of mind
about
one's family and property; and (for business owners) the desire not to lose customers to competitors in locations where the homeless are not present. Different people will harbor these concerns in different proportions, ones that we and even they will struggle to define precisely.

Rather than treating compassion as the only decent basis for addressing the problem, self-interest well understood can encompass and reconcile altruistic considerations with self-interested ones. As Friedman says, a charity drive for a homeless shelter to address this urban problem faces doubtful prospects. If everyone responds to the incentives rationally, the shelter that everyone thinks would make the neighborhood more livable never comes into existence or, if it does, operates perpetually on a shoestring budget. The welfare state cuts that Gordian knot by making every taxpayer a “donor” to the program, and making government the vehicle for acting together to address problems that affect us together. In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt argued from self-interest rightly understood in praising the “wholly new science” of public health. Communicable illnesses give the healthy obvious reasons to heal the sick, but serious illnesses of all kinds curtail the productivity of both the afflicted and the family members forced to care for them. Thus, FDR said, “from the purely dollars and cents point of view that we Americans are so fond of thinking about, public health has paid for itself.”
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There's no mistaking Roosevelt's disdain for his countrymen, who can be persuaded to do the right thing only if they're given a dollars-and-cents answer to the question “What's in it for me?” It would be far more edifying to secure popular support for liberalism by telling voters that virtue—in the form of supporting the liberal agenda—is its own reward, which was Robert Kennedy's approach with college audiences in 1968. The unremitting denunciations of greed and selfishness make clear that liberal politicians speak like Roosevelt did in 1932, which is most of the time, because they think they have to, and like Kennedy did in 1968 because they want to.

In that speech, Franklin Roosevelt rejected “the philosophy of ‘letting things alone,'” because it “has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest.” This rationalization of passivity, he said, holds that “if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us.” The only alternative to that reliance on spontaneous order is to pursue “the protection of humanity and the fitting of as many human beings as possible into the scheme of surviving.” Embracing it will require initiatives that “make the average of mankind comfortable and secure.” Instead of waiting and hoping for prosperity to trickle down, social action will cause it to “rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks.”
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The welfare state reconfigures the compassionate bonds among citizens, however. The sincere, spontaneous reaction to suffering, which propels the liberal project, is attenuated by the pursuit of that project. FDR's larger point in 1932 was to advocate “social justice through social action.” He contended, “The followers of the philosophy of ‘social action for the prevention of poverty' maintain that if we set up a system of justice we shall have small need for the exercise of mere philanthropy.” Leon Wieseltier of the
New Republic
made the same point seventy-five years later: individuals' voluntary generosity “is not economic justice,” since it is “the absence of economic justice that makes charity necessary.”
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It follows that the presence, or perfection, of economic justice will make charity unnecessary. That culmination will leave nothing for private citizens to donate to, or volunteer for, that isn't already being done better by a government agency. Whether it's possible to retain hearts full of compassion after all our empathetic impulses have been routed through the voting booth, tax collector's office, and government social welfare departments is highly doubtful.

Indeed, not only will the attainment of social or economic justice make mere philanthropy unnecessary. The pursuit of that objective renders philanthropy harmful. For one thing, the alliance of experts and victims will progress toward its goals more slowly and with greater difficulty if amateurs, hobbyists, and dilettantes are mucking about, trying to alleviate victims' suffering. They don't know what they're doing, and should keep out of the way of people who do. Furthermore, caring for others by any means other than supporting, with votes and taxes, welfare state programs to enact and adequately fund those programs postpones rather than hastens the realization of social justice. “I gave at the office” should mean just one thing: the taxes withheld from my paycheck are funding government programs, the only path to social justice. If it means, instead, charitable contributions or activities that endorse the efficacy and virtue of extragovernmental efforts to ameliorate suffering situations, the pursuit of social justice is thwarted.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, realizing a social democratic conception of economic justice in America would make ours a more statist and less charitable country. The OECD social expenditure database found that in 2009 more than one-third of all social welfare spending in the United States came from private sources, compared to less than a tenth in Denmark, France, and Sweden. Combine more extragovernmental spending in America on social welfare with the fact of our more productive economy, and the total social spending figures belie the notion of American meanness in contrast to other modern nations' liberality.
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