So it’s a matter of finding ways to express truth
accurately.
Some of what we conservatives need to do is understand how
the other side thinks, because we probably both want freedom, prosperity and civilization, but for some reason the words don’t translate into their minds.
They say we’re racist, bigoted, hard-hearted, violent—and a host of other
epithets that we know are not true. What do they get out of telling those lies
about us? Or believing those mischaracterizations?
Except for maybe some clinically mentally ill, people tend
to do what they think will make them happy. They want to feel good. So let’s go
with the assumption that those who choose more government intervention do it
out of interest in living better lives.
William Voegeli wrote the Hillsdale College Imprimis piece for October: “The Case against Liberal
Compassion.” He gives an excellent, and probably accurate, description of the
opposition mindset. He starts by pointing out, as we all know, the War on
Poverty has failed. Government social programs are an utter failure. And yet
the big-government set keeps asking for more of that failure.
I think he’s asking some very good questions:
All along, while the welfare state was growing constantly,
liberals were insisting constantly it wasn’t big enough or growing fast enough.
So I wondered, five years ago, whether there is a Platonic ideal when it comes
to the size of the welfare state—whether there is a point at which the welfare
state has all the money, programs, personnel, and political support it needs,
thereby rendering any further additions pointless. The answer, I concluded, is
that there is no answer—the welfare state is a permanent work-in-progress, and
its liberal advocates believe that however many resources it has, it always
needs a great deal more.
That’s a starting point for understanding. But the next
question is, since there can never be enough, and programs actually fail, and
waste money, why is that OK? He doesn’t assume it’s because liberals are bad
people. He says,
Readers could have concluded that liberals are never
satisfied because they get up every morning thinking, “What can I do today to
make government a little bigger, and the patch of ground where people live
their lives completely unaffected by government power and benevolence a little
smaller?” …
If we make that effort—an effort to understand committed
liberals as they understand themselves—then we have to understand them as
people who, by their own account, get up every morning asking, “What can I do
today so that there’s a little less suffering in the world?”
He quotes President Obama as saying, “Kindness covers all of
my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up
every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness;
empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make
sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough—I want your
kids to do well also.”
If the president wants to be believed, he ought not use the
IRS and NSA to target anyone who has a non-liberal/progressive/socialist approach to
bettering the interrelated causes of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. To us
conservative targets, he seems a lot more tyrannical than kind. But back to
Voegeli’s explanations.
Compassion, he says, is used as a political weapon against
anyone who disagrees, because that works:
Arguments and rhetoric that work—that impress voters and
intimidate opponents—are used again and again. Those that prove ineffective are
discarded. If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective
rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone
could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago
stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for
fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential
benefits.
But here’s the important thing: using the compassion claim
as a political weapon—to gain power—is the end; actually accomplishing
compassionate ends do not matter. In fact, getting to that end would eliminate
the powerful political weapon, and that isn’t even desirable. That’s a pretty
damning accusation, so we’d better look at the rest of Voegeli’s reasoning. He
uses the recent Obamacare website debacle as an example. He quotes liberal
columnist, and then makes his observation:
A sympathetic columnist, E. J. Dionne, wrote of the website’s
crash-and-burn debut “There’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.” That such an elementary lesson is one
liberals need to learn over and over suggests a fundamental defect in
liberalism, however—something worse than careless or inept implementation of
liberal policies.
That defect, I came to think, can be explained as follows:
The problem with liberalism may be that no one knows how to get the government
to do the benevolent things liberals want it to do. Or it may be, at least in
some cases, that it just isn’t possible for the government to bring about what
liberals want it to accomplish….It may also be, as conservatives have long
argued, that achieving liberal goals, no matter how humane they sound, requires
kinds and degrees of government coercion fundamentally incompatible with a government
created to secure citizens’ inalienable rights, and deriving its just powers
from the consent of the governed.
So we are, possibly, at an impasse. Liberals want to be
compassionate, and conservatives see that their efforts are fruitless, as well
as dangerous to our freedoms. Liberals think we should just keep pushing toward
the goal—living out a definition of insanity by doing the same thing over and
over, more and more, and expecting different results. Conservatives think we we’ve
tried the bad policies long enough to prove to everyone that they don’t work. It’s
a $3 Trillion going concern. We’re spending $10,000 per American per year, much
of it on people are not, by any stretch, impoverished, insecure, or suffering.
Liberals think conservatives are evil for not continuing the
failing “compassionate” policies. But there’s the error. Conservatives want to actually
relieve suffering, not just relieve their own conscience by expressing
compassion pointlessly.
Voegeli quotes Rousseau on compassion, and then explains:
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, “When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify
myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in
order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him
for love of myself.”
We can see the problem. The whole point of compassion is for
empathizers to feel better when awareness of another’s suffering provokes
unease. But this ultimate purpose does not guarantee that empathizees will fare
better.
Sometimes altruism actually causes harm to the target of
sympathy. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes failure to help is part of
the equation: “This is why so many government programs initiated to conquer a
problem end up, instead, colonizing it by building sprawling settlements where
the helpers and the helped are endlessly, increasingly co-dependent.”
He quotes political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain as saying,
“Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to
experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict
needs drugs.”
So, what we have with all these compassionate liberals,
then, is a large segment of the population addicted to the self-satisfaction of
“caring,” not to help, but to feel better about themselves. Simply put,
Because compassion gives me a self-regarding reason to care
about your suffering, it’s more important for me to do something than to
accomplish something. Once I’ve voted for, given a speech about, written an
editorial endorsing, or held forth at a dinner party on the salutary generosity
of some program to “address” your problem, my work is done, and I can feel the
rush of my own pious reaction. There’s no need to stick around for the complex,
frustrating, mundane work of making sure the program that made me feel better, just
by being established and praised, has actually alleviated your suffering.
I think Voegeli is right in his assessment of the liberal
mind. He is also accurate about the insanity of squandering more and more money
on programs essentially designed to fail.
What we as conservatives need to do, then, is not simply
deny the accusation that we’re hard-hearted. We need to clarify the truth of the situation.
We need to connect the dots between government welfare and increased pain. We
need to make it clear that, any time an American tax dollar is spent on
something extra-Constitutional, it has the unintended consequence of causing
harm in place of alleviating suffering.
There are times when charitable giving is appropriate—but never
through government coercion. It’s not even possible for government to coerce
charitable giving; its not logically, by definition, possible. We want to actually alleviate suffering. We will do it by
following the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. That’s what
works.
Let's speak the truth clearly.
Government “giving” hurts people, and mostly hurts the very people designated
to be helped. So if you’re in favor of government welfare, you’re in favor of
hurting the most vulnerable among us. If you want to think of yourself as kind,
you need to change your ways.
