The Pity Party (35 page)

Based on this shift in public attitudes, conservatives dared to believe
all
the big political events a generation ago—the tax revolt started by the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 in California, Margaret Thatcher's victories in Great Britain, Ronald Reagan's election and reelection to the presidency, the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the 1994 midterm elections—meant that long decades of liberal hegemony were giving way to a new, comparably enduring, conservative era. In fact, conservatism's political advantages in that era yielded victories far less formidable and durable than the ones liberalism secured in the middle of the twentieth century. It's clear that in a contest between “progressives” and “conservatives,” both sides have embraced designations that assume the passage of time is likely to aid the former's cause and damage the latter's. Whatever else it encompasses, the term “conservative” conveys acceptance of a duty to safeguard a legacy, one that is vulnerable, therefore requiring conservation, and valuable, therefore deserving it.

This sense of resisting history's gravitational forces, woven into the conservative enterprise, has a specific focus. “Liberalism is the glue that cements the conservative movement,” political scientist James Ceaser argues, “and if liberalism were to disappear tomorrow, the conservative movement as we know it would begin to disintegrate on the next day.”
⁵⁸
There is no prospect liberalism will disappear tomorrow, so in that sense conservatism's future is assured. It is doubtful for other reasons, however. The
National Journal
's Ronald Brownstein has argued that Republicans are getting a larger percentage of the vote from exactly one segment of the electorate, white voters without a degree from a four-year college, a group in steady decline, accounting for 53 percent of the electorate in 1992 but only 39 percent in 2008. Democrats, meanwhile, are doing better with every other segment—white college graduates, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities—all of which are a growing proportion of the population. What Brownstein calls the Democrats' “Coalition of Transformation” appears poised to gain strength, perhaps for many years to come, vis-à-vis the Republicans' “Coalition of Restoration.” This means, he writes, that the days of “the political dominance of married, churchgoing white families” are “gone.”
⁵⁹

Inevitably, conservatives are exerting themselves to devise political strategies that will prevail against these trends. There are certainly things conservatives can do to improve their fortunes, including some they've not done at all and others they've not done well. There may even be many such things . . . but there are only so many of them. In a democracy, the question of
how
to win future elections is so engrossing that it constantly threatens to efface the question of
why
to contest them. At some point, however, a political movement dishonors itself if it doesn't draw a line and say it's better to lose an election than to win by abandoning certain essentials. What a British conservative said of war is also true of politics: it being impossible to guarantee victory, one can strive only to deserve it.

Conservatives would deserve more victories, and might even secure more, if they clarified their mission. Conserving America's experiment in self-government does require opposing liberalism. Paradoxically, conservatives would oppose liberalism more effectively if they opposed it less fundamentally. Liberalism is
a
problem, but not
the
problem. The more basic challenge is to protect democracy from itself, since its strongest tendencies include some of its most self-destructive ones. Liberalism tells Democrats what they want to hear, that the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. In calling for more democracy, liberals encourage the people to demand much from government, in the belief that its democratic character will suffice to make it responsive, efficacious, and benign.

Compassion emerges naturally from Democratic politics. The pervading axiom that people are fundamentally equal and alike engenders the belief that everyone has the capacity to understand everyone else's viewpoint and sorrows, whether (as on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
) they are movie stars or battered spouses. Compassion also reconciles us to the inescapable political inequality: even though the governors derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, we hope the power they exercise
over
us will be
for
us. To reassure us of their benign intentions, and that the power we entrust to them won't go to their heads, they offer constant pledges about feeling our pain, and testimonials about enduring suffering in their own lives that drive them to work night and day to spare us from similar distress.

Conservatism, by contrast, tells Democrats what they need to hear: the corrective for the harmful dispositions of democracy is better democracy. In calling for better democracy, conservatives summon Democrats to be cautious rather than zealous, farsighted rather than impulsive, apprehensive about democracy's fragility rather than complacent about its durability. As Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.” A democracy that resents and dismantles rather than honors and upholds the ways Democrats are restrained, checked, and limited is one that threatens the only basis for hoping that democratic government will reliably produce good government.

The politics of compassion jeopardizes democracy by disdaining such caution and consensus. The deliberate judgment of the people exercised through constitutional channels, from the perspective that makes compassion the supreme political virtue, yields nothing more than a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference, all for the sake of sparing us the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity. Even if there had been no Progressive movement, then, no New Deal and no Great Society, democracy itself would give rise to an abiding need to cultivate the habits and dispositions—both public and private—that sustain self-government, while opposing the ones that erode it.

Compassion is not, in itself, one of the latter. We may even join with Nicholas Kristof in calling it a mark of civilization. It is not the only one, however. Another is an abiding sense of civilization's frailty. Evelyn Waugh voiced this concern in 1964 when reviewing a biography of Rudyard Kipling, whom he described as “a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” The sentiments Waugh ascribes to Kipling are ones he expressed in his own name in 1939: “Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. . . . Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent.”
⁶⁰

To insist compassion must have its way because it is such a basic, noble emotional force; to insist that all who defy it are mean and greedy; to disdain the reality that governance's challenges will frequently impel decent nations to subordinate compassion's claims to those of justice, honor, liberty, and security—is to complicate and imperil self-government. It is nice, all things being equal, to have elected officials who feel our pain rather than ones who, like imperious monarchs, cannot comprehend or do not deign to notice it. Much more than their empathy, however, we require their respect—for us; our rights; our capacity and responsibility to feel and heal our own damn pains without their ministrations; and for America's constitutional checks and limitations, which err on the side of caution and republicanism by denying even the most compassionate elected official a monarch's plenary powers. Kindness may well cover all of Barack Obama's political beliefs, and those of many other self-satisfied liberals. It neither begins to cover all the beliefs that have sustained America's republic, however, nor amounts to an adequate substitute for those moral virtues and political principles indispensable to sustaining it further.

N
OTES

1.
     
Christopher Reeve, 1996 Democratic National Convention Address, August 26,
1996, American Rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/christopherreeve1996dnc.htm.

2.
     
Clifford Orwin, “Compassion,”
American Scholar
, Summer 1980, p. 324.

3.
     
Al Gore, “Speech to the 1996 Democratic Convention,”
New York Times
, August 29, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/29/us/gore-speech-america-is-strong-bill-clinton-s-leadership-is-paying-off.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm.

4.
     
Kevin Sack, “Gore Forced to Make Hard Choices on Tobacco,”
New York Times
, August 30, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/30/us/gore-forced-to-make-hard-choices-on-tobacco.html.

5.
     
Erik Schelzig, “Al, Tipper Gore Kiss 40 Years of Marriage Goodbye,”
Dallas Morning News
, June 2, 2010, http://www.dallasnews.com/news/20100602-Al-Tipper-Gore-kiss-40-5764.ece.

6.
     
Glenn Kessler, “‘The Road We've Traveled': A Misleading Account of Obama's Mother and Her Insurance Dispute,”
Washington Post
, March 19, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-road-weve-traveled-a-misleading-account-of-obamas-mother-and-her-insurance-dispute/2012/03/18/gIQAdDd4KS_blog.html?hpid=z2.

7.
     
Barack Obama, “Remarks on Signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” March 23, 2010, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=87660.

8.
     
Louise Radnofsky, “Boy at Obama's Side Now in High School,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 1, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/wash wire/2013/10/01/boy-at-obamas-side-now-in-high-school/. See also Kyung M. Song, “Boy Who Lost Mom Takes Health Care Story to D.C.,”
Seattle Times
, March 8, 2010, http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2011292589_marcelas09m.html.

9.
     
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “To Promote Health Care Plan, Obama Talks About His Own Grandmother,”
New York Times
, August 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/health/policy/16address.html?_r=0.

10.
   
“Remarks by the First Lady on What Health Insurance Reform Means for Women and Families,” September 18, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-what-health-insurance-reform-means-women-and-families.

11.
   
Mark Evanier, “Bottom of the Barrel,”
News from Me
, February 2, 2010, http://www.newsfromme.com/2010/02/10/bottom-of-the-barrel/.

12.
   
Garrison Keillor,
Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America
(New York: Viking, 2004), p. 20.

13.
   
“President Obama Speaks on the Economy,” November 26, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/11/26/president-obama-speaks-economy#transcript.

14.
   
Paul Bloom, “The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy,”
New Yorker
, May 20, 2013.

15.
   
Kenneth Minogue,
The Liberal Mind
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), ch. 1, sec. 1, “Suffering Situations,” http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=672&chapter=165210&layout=html&Itemid=27.

16.
   
Remarks at the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, November 1, 1977,
Congressional Record
, November 4, 1977, vol.123, p. 37287.

17.
   
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.,” June 27, 1936, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15314.

18.
   
Steven F. Hayward,
The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989
(New York: Crown Forum, 2009), pp. 383–84.

19.
   
Paul Krugman, “Hunger Games, U.S.A.,”
New York Times
, July 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/opinion/krugman-hunger-games-usa.html?_r=0.

20.
   
Jonathan Allen, “Grayson: GOP Wants ‘You to Die,'”
Politico
, September 9, 2009, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27726.html.

21.
   
“An Open Letter to Republicans: Your Country Isn't Coming Back,”
ChicagoNow.com
, November 8, 2012, http://www.chicagonow.com/offhanded-dribble/2012/11/an-open-letter-to-republicans-you-are-not-getting-your-country-back/.

22.
   
Charles M. Blow, “‘A Town Without Pity,'”
New York Times
, August 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/opinion/blow-a-town-without-pity.html.

1.
     
Benjamin Adams and Jean Larson, “Legislative History of the Animal Welfare Act,” National Agricultural Library, United States Department of Agriculture, Animal Welfare Information Center, http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/AWA2007/intro.shtml.