The Pity Party (32 page)

The ability of governmentalized compassion to weaken all the other ties that connect a society's members works down to the most basic level. Alan Wolfe, a critic of what he considers conservatism's contradictions, has acknowledged this liberal one. “The Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers,” he wrote in 1989, “are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.” They do so most directly by imposing the high, widely applicable taxes needed to fund generous government programs. Such taxes make it extremely difficult for married couples to be other than two-career couples, even if their preference would be for one parent, usually the mother, to stay home full- or part-time to care for children, or to take an active role in caring for an aging parent. The great difficulty of maintaining a middle-class standard of living, after the taxes have been paid, necessitates two paychecks from two full-time workers. As a result, family obligations are outsourced to state-supported caregivers, whose own salaries depend on the same heavy taxes that drive customers to their door. “Socializing the young and caring for the sick, viewed traditionally as women's work,” Wolfe writes of Scandinavia, “are still women's work, but now they are carried out for a government wage rather than within a family setting.” Nearly two-thirds of the Danish women who left domestic life for the paid workforce in the 1960s and 1970s, he reports, wound up working in day-care centers, old-age homes, hospitals, or schools. As a result, “the Scandinavian welfare states organize through taxation and public services activities for all of society that were once undertaken intimately and privately.” The danger is that “as intimate ties weaken, so will distant ones, thus undermining the very moral strengths the welfare state has shown.”
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This feature of the liberal project is not a surprising, unforeseen development, but a direct consequence of its logic. As George Lakoff contends, “We're in this together. We bear joint responsibility for one another and all our children.” To understand and accept that joint responsibility means rejecting in all its wicked manifestations the conservative ideology that prizes individual liberty as a license to heedlessly pursue our own self-interests.
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Any result
other
than
the attenuation of families, churches, civic groups, and all other nonpolitical human bonds, while the ties that bind the “national family” get stronger and stronger, would be the real anomaly. Bertrand de Jouvenel argued in
The Ethics of Redistribution
that as ever higher taxes fund ever more governmentally dispensed provisions, individuals' exertions to provide for their immediate and extended families are ultimately restricted to funding hobbies and amusements.
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The political effect of liberal compassion is, then, doubly constricting. First, it makes clear that the only motives and considerations that are wholly welcome in the public square are disinterested, selfless ones. Liberals in a democracy must often stoop to advocating their plans in the self-interested, dollars-and-cents terms the benighted voters are so fond of. They do so, however, only to conquer that atavistic, contemptible outlook, steadily and someday completely replacing it with a wholly enlightened one. Second, once we situate our empathetic concerns and aspirations in the public realm, they can have one and only one decent expression: support for government social welfare programs to alleviate suffering. The attainment of social justice will obviate mere philanthropy, so the pursuit of it must repudiate charity.

As I've argued throughout, however, liberal compassion does not banish selfishness from politics, as its advocates assume. Rather, the advance of the belief that compassion is the moral and political consideration that should prevail against all others merely displaces one kind of selfishness—largely concerned with material well-being, family advancement, community respectability, and patriotic pride—with another, which is preoccupied with emotional, psychological, and status gratifications. Viewed in this way, the debate between conservatives and liberals is not an argument between the champions and enemies of selfishness. It is, instead, an argument between conservatives who endorse self-interest well understood, and liberal advocates of selflessness cynically or stupidly misrepresented.

The futile, pernicious quest to extirpate selfishness from politics makes
Bleak House
's Mrs. Jellyby, devoted practitioner of “telescopic philanthropy” on behalf of the suffering natives of Borrioboola-Gha, a liberal paragon rather than a liberal cartoon. She does Marian Wright Edelman and Melissa Harris-Perry one better, not merely refusing to discriminate between her own and other people's children, but caring for theirs
more
attentively than hers. There can be no compelling moral duty to accomplish that which it is impossible to accomplish, however. We cannot devote our lives to widening the ambit of our concern, all the while effacing the self at the center of that ambit. “Compassion fatigue” is the inevitable result, not of moral deficiencies but of moral and political standards badly chosen. Pete Hamill wrote in 1986 that after the upheavals and disappointments of the 1960s, many burned-out liberals “pulled back to tend private gardens, to raise children, to build careers, to eat and live well. . . .” One told him:

I just gave up and I'm not ashamed of saying it. I did everything I could in my day and then realized I really couldn't make any difference. I couldn't change the welfare system. I couldn't create a half-million jobs. I couldn't teach people how to get up in the morning, every day of the week, and go to work. I couldn't make dumb people smart. Most of all, I couldn't help people who wouldn't help themselves.
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Liberals need to wise up so this guy can lighten up. Selflessness, the never-ending quest to eradicate every trace of self-regard, is not a rational political standard. Selflessness
has
been the ideal for the devoutly religious aspiring to sainthood. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” according to the New Testament. Nontheocratic republics cannot operate by demanding a corresponding secular sainthood, however, where the only path to find one's life is to lose it for the sake of the children of Borrioboola-Gha or the endangered tropical rainforest.

Liberalism calls on us to deny the undeniable fact that we live our lives in concentric circles of regard and obligation. My own children matter more to me than do my neighbor's kids, who matter more to me than my neighbor's cousin's plumber's kids. My embrace of the duty to nurture these children changes and diminishes as we move from inner circles to outer ones, a tendency liberals view as a moral failing betraying atavistic self-centeredness. By the same token, patriotism is not an embarrassing vestige of tribalism, one we should aspire to outgrow by evolving toward an empathy that extends an undiminished, undifferentiated solicitude throughout the world. Far sounder and healthier, according to the late political scientist Joseph Cropsey, is the conservative presupposition that it is “more human, surely more civil, to love what is near and similar, as such, than what is remote and strange, as such.”
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The alternative to liberal compassion is not, as liberals have convinced themselves, insatiable greed. The normal, inevitable, and admirable desire to prefer my children to other people's, and my compatriots to foreigners, is not a failing to be overcome but a foundation on which to build. The duties and rewards of parenthood and patriotism don't detract from the possibility of treating other children or members of other nations respectfully and, when feasible, helpfully. It is, instead, the only possible human basis on which I can even begin to navigate the terrain between callous disregard and frantic sensitivity toward people to whom I am not related by bonds of family, community, country, or creed.

Liberalism, by resting on the belief that we can and must apply our moral sentiments and duties to infinitely wider circles, guarantees sociological inanities and governmental perversities. An example of the latter is the California Supreme Court's
Serrano v. Priest
decisions against relying on local property taxes to finance public education. (In subsequent years, other states' supreme courts have made similar rulings about the meaning of their state constitutions, though the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause by a vote of 5 to 4 in 1973.) When it first ruled, in 1971, that the funding disparities between rich and poor districts were intolerable, the California legislature responded by directing additional state funds to school districts that had meager revenues from property taxes assessed within their boundaries. By 1976, according to economist William Fischel, “state aid accounted for the majority of the financing of the property-poor districts.” In
Serrano v. Priest II
, a decision that would have confirmed Tocqueville's worst fears, the court then ruled that a high floor was not good enough: the egalitarian imperative also demanded a low ceiling to prevent communities from taxing themselves to provide their own children any educational advantages not available throughout California. The inevitable result was to equalize per-pupil expenditures throughout California and make the state government, rather than school districts, the nexus of educational finance.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, at least to liberals. They voiced the confident hope that as a result of the court decisions the general level of expenditures for education, statewide, would greatly increase. The thinking was that if no one can get excellent schools unless everybody gets excellent schools, then voters will approve the taxes needed to pay for excellent schools across the state. In 1980's
The Revolt of the Haves
, Robert Kuttner looked forward to
Serrano
logic's being applied to other public services: “If the state is paying the bill, how can huge disparities be justified in welfare, health, sanitation, or recreation any more than in education?”
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And if social justice demands eliminating every intrastate disparity in the funding of the entire range of public services, by what logic could it possibly countenance
interstate
disparities? Kids in Compton deserve not just good public schools, but schools every bit as good as the ones in Beverly Hills. Equalizing per-pupil expenditures across California was the response to that command, but achieving it does nothing for the kid in Salt Lake City whose school spends less than the ones in Compton and Beverly Hills. (In 2011, according to the Census Bureau, California's public schools spent 47 percent more per pupil than Utah's.)
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The
logic
of
Serrano
, the logic of economic justice in general, is to make the national government, rather than state or local ones, the nexus of finance for all public services.

According to Fischel, however, “The genius of local property tax financing for schools is that it gives everyone in the community—not just those with kids in the public schools—an incentive to favor efficiently run, high-quality schools.” That is, it connects individual self-interest to a comprehensible community interest. Because good schools enhance property values and high taxes reduce them, prudent citizens will have a strong incentive to be mindful of the costs and quality of the public education offered in their district, giving them a basis for differentiating tax increases that are worth it from ones that are not. This willingness to pay taxes for schools one does not use directly rests on self-interest well understood rather than, as Melissa Harris-Perry imagined, the amorphous altruism of being “connected to a larger whole.” By contrast, when a vast, populous, and diverse state like California centralizes school financing, citizens have a strong incentive to
dis
engage from schools, politically and financially. It is no longer possible to weigh the cost of a tax increase against any discernible benefit, since more money may—or may not—improve the schools, and those improvements that do occur may be manifested in distant parts of the state. The
Serrano
rulings, hailed at the time as a liberal triumph, paved the way for Proposition 13, the 1978 tax cut that assaulted the liberal project. Liberals assumed that Californians would easily redirect their concern for their local community to the entire state. When they refused, liberals did not question their own premises about human nature and motivations, but accused the Californians who enacted Proposition 13 of greed and bigotry.
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The “sort of hope that characterizes modern liberal societies,” wrote the late philosopher Richard Rorty, is “the hope that life will eventually be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everyone's descendants.”
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According to the British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “almost all Americans are liberals,” in the older, broader sense of the term, which means they “believe in an open society, in material progress, in individual fulfillment, in the pursuit of happiness. You believe in that. So do I.”
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The debate since 1932 between conservatives and liberals (in the narrower, more modern sense) is about the means to the end of human flourishing, on which all disputants are in basic agreement. Throne-and-altar conservatism has long since disappeared, and no one on the Left can explain how socialism in the twenty-first century would surpass its dismal record in the twentieth. Mostly, no one even tries. As the Hoover Institution's Tod Lindberg wrote in 2013, there may be “a few aging radicals who still dream of sweeping the whole capitalist system away and starting over. But never in the history of the Left have such views been so marginal.”
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