Liberal Compassion on Trial
Review: William Voegeli’s ‘The Pity Party’
Liberals enjoy pointing out that, unlike their mean-spirited and heartless conservative counterparts, they actually care about other people. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, for one, writes that conservatives are “infected” with a “pathological mean-spiritedness” and want to “give you an extra kick” when you’re down on your luck. President Barack Obama, on the other hand, says that “kindness covers all of my political beliefs.”
In Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion, William Voegeli takes a careful look at the principles of care and kindness that are at the heart of modern liberalism’s self-conception. In a straightforward style, he picks apart the relationship between liberals and empathy.
Voegeli explains the dangers of liberals’ insistence on being on the “right side of history.” He gives examples of failed policies born out of the liberal need to feel like they are doing something for those with whom they empathize. One of the most persuasive examples Voegeli presents is the $180 billion Head Start program, the federally funded pre-school program designed to prepare children from impoverished families for elementary school.
Funding has grown for the program over the 50 years since its inception, largely because liberals praise its success. Unfortunately, the only known success the program has had is making liberals feel good about themselves. Voegeli shows persuasively that Head Start has been an ineffective program, and that children who have gone through it end up no better than children in similar socio-economic situations that were without Head Start.
Obama himself admitted that until 2011, Head Start has never actually had its success demonstrated. For “the first time in history … Head Start programs will be truly held accountable for performance in the classroom,” he said. Then, during the same speech, he lauded the program as a “outstanding program and a critical investment.”
This is the measure of success determined by liberal compassion. Voegeli explains that liberals do not care much about whether their programs work. They care that they are making an attempt to diminish suffering felt by less fortunate members of society, no matter whether the attempt actually helps.
The liberal belief that it would be better to try and fail to alleviate suffering than to do nothing at all can be traced back at least to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “If [a method] fails, admit it frankly and try another,” said Roosevelt in 1932. “But above all, try something.”
Roosevelt’s words are embodied by the modern liberal do-something complex. Following the horrific Newtown shooting, liberals demanded strident new gun laws, even as they conceded that those laws would have done nothing to prevent the horrific shootings in question. When proposed gun legislation failed, Obama stood in front of the White House, flanked by families from Newtown, andsaid it was “shameful day in Washington.”
Voegeli also discusses Obamacare. He notes that liberal response to the botched implementation of its healthcare overhaul was principally concerned with how the failed roll-out might sour Americans on further liberal reforms. The New Republic’s Franklin Foer panicked that the Obamacare disaster could erode “the public’s willingness to give liberalism another shot.”
The arguments for Obamacare’s success are rooted in liberal compassion. Clearly, nobody is celebrating the horrendous Obamacare exchanges or the $300 billion the law will add to the federal deficit. The celebration from liberals comes from noting that the percentage of uninsured individuals in impoverished minority populations has decreased, regardless of the much more negative bigger picture.
The main takeaway from Voegeli’s not-so-mean-spirited diatribe is that liberal compassion is bunk.
If the concern for those with whom liberals empathize were real, it would be alarming to liberals that their welfare programs are not working. But an honest look by liberals at the effectiveness of the programs they favor would ruin their ability to feel like good people—and in the end, that’s what really matters.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/liberal-compassion-on-trial/
The need to do something tends to trump the need to understand what needs to be done. And typically, in my view, an understanding of what needs to be done reveals that, in fact, there’s nothing that government can do to ‘solve’ the problem at hand. The existence of a problem – which frequently is simply the reality of unavoidable trade-offs – does not imply the existence of a ‘solution.’ nor on those occasions when a solution exists is one that requires compromise in its implementation.
ReplyDelete"The existence of a problem – which frequently is simply the reality of unavoidable trade-offs – does not imply the existence of a ‘solution.’ nor on those occasions when a solution exists is one that requires compromise in its implementation."
DeleteThat's kinda circular logic. Essentially, I gather you are saying there are no such things as problems (in a pejorative sense) which means we should not be petitioning a freedom robbing government to fix an imaginary situation by doing what it always does, which is essentially enslaving one person for the benefit of another.
When I read your posts TS, I keep feeling that my fundamental difference with you is that I believe a group of individuals, who choose to live together as a society, have a right to give their society rules and attempt to shape it to reflect their views. To further my heretical view, I believe the founding fathers intended that we could make these decisions for ourselves in order to adapt to changing views. Admittedly, from the conservative perspective, it is easy to find countless, actually endless examples of undesired outcomes that occurred after some government program was implemented. In my early 20's, I thrived on reading that shit and throwing it in the face of liberal thinking people. I just don't think it's that simple anymore.
47 years of life has taught me that nothing lasts forever, and no situation is ever perfect. A negative trade off in my eyes is that without regulation, megabanks and ruthless fuckers like Walmart suck money out of local communities and redistribute it elsewhere. Regulation could potential FORCE competition just as well as it could stifle the desire to succeed because the payoff isn't strong enough. My difference in thinking, I believe, is that I think it's worthwhile to try and find the balance. At times, the holders of capital need to be incentivized. At other times, I believe they need to be forced to compete like everyone else.
Programs like head start are kind of a bandaid. Perhaps hungry kids are not a problem and instead are just an unfortunate result of their parents being to stupid to do better.
Sometimes I feel the same way about government apologists Max. We know that the financial industry laundered drug money, created knowingly bad loans, forged mortgage documents both at the origination and later to slide out from under the rock called MERS. These documents along with robo signed false documents were knowingly presented to the court... clearly fraud upon the courts. We know that banks deliberately bundled bad loans and sold them as good and ‘forced’ ratings agencies to comply. We know that the fed is complicit in the LIBOR rate fixing and yet no one went to jail. No one even faced a grand jury for, from the view point of a casual observer, clearly criminal acts. This is particularly odd in light of laws created after the Enron and Worldcom trials that explicitly held CEO’s and CFO’s accountable for the operations of their companies.
DeleteNow, I can only see three possible reasons that none of these bad actors went on trial.
1. Government regulation and guidance was such that these guys were only working within the framework of what government pushed it to do so no charges could be brought against these firms
2. A lot of high level government officials were so deeply imbedded in the corruption that to implicate the private sector was to implicate themselves
3. Conspiracy theorists are correct and the government is actually shadow run by a banking cartel headed by the Rothschilds...
With respect to the CRA, yes it had been around for a long time but no one talks about the changes and pressures put in place in the 90’s and early 2000’s. The ones that allowed community activists to directly affect banks with protests and complaints; the same regulations that were exploited by hedge funds to further their gains in REIT investments by using activist organizations to put pressure on banks to lend more.
With respect to the S&L meltdown, people want to focus on the deregulation that caused the problems and no one wants to look at the tight regulations that put these institutions in financial dire straights in the first place. Regulations that tied their hands in the face of high interest rates that killed their ability to retain depositors. ‘Encouragement’ by regulators to continually create loans of fix rates at 10, 20 and 30 years which locked in their exposure while preventing them from being competitive. The same regulators that sat on the problem because to make it public would have shined a light on regulatory failure.
Look, I know that the private sector has bad actors... bad actors that need to be put in jail and companies that need to be boarded up but the problem always seems to come back to poorly designed regulation, shoddy oversite, corrupt government officials or over zealot desire to control something that doesn’t need control and until we understand that government in a good many instances is in fact the problem, these problems will just get bigger... what for the next bubble to break.
One last thing... your comment about the ruthlessness of Wal-Mart. Every since they were a small company, the petitioned government for favor. Government fell all over themselves to give these guys tax breaks, infrastructure, immanent domain rulings that stripped legitimate owners of their land, trade agreements that favored their import operations and in return Wal-Mart rewarded those who helped. These are on top of poorly considered and badly implemented programs like food stamps that allow business to not only to shift costs to the taxpayer but to count it as a major income stream as well. Get government out of business and you won’t have these kinds of outcomes.
A reasonable post. The fact that no one went to jail for the stuff you mentioned in your first para is unconscionable to me. Still, what I hear is that since unscrupulous characters found a way to skirt the regulation, the real problem is regulation rather than the behavior the encouraged them to cheat. The reason regulation is poorly designed is because the legislators are bought to make it so or because a certain delegation screams that regulation will kill jobs, which goes back to saying that we must allow abuse in order preserve jobs.
DeleteRegarding the CRA, I have tried to read as much as possible. Again, the CRA did not force banks to make NINJA loans and moreover, if wiki can be believed, is was not CRA type loans that were blowing up. I see a difference between tweaking the rules to let someone with a lower credit rating borrow some multiple of a verified income and simply letting someone with no verifiable job being allowed to borrow 350k with no money down. Respectfully, I don't think you have supported this point.
Your last para is hard to dispute. Companies like WalMart have ruthlessly bled communities and used their power to obtain favor from the government. Am I to believe that you are saying that if there were no food stamps than there would magically be enough social outrage to demand that Wal Mart pay living wages?