The Pity Party Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR MY PARENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There’s a very good chance that I never would have started this book without encouragement from Adam Bellow, who became its editor. Once I did begin writing, there’s an even better chance I never would have finished it without his help. I’m grateful to Adam and his colleagues at HarperCollins, in particular Eric Meyers, Broadside Books associate editor, and Tom Pitoniak. I’m equally indebted to Carol Mann of the Carol Mann Agency for her reassurance and wise counsel.

  I worked on Pity Party to the detriment of my obligations to the Claremont Review of Books, and with the help of my colleagues there: Patrick Collins, Lindsay Eberhardt, Christopher Flannery, Charles Kesler, John Kienker, and Ryan Williams. I also thank Brian Kennedy, CRB’s publisher in his capacity as the president of the Claremont Institute, and Tom Klingenstein, the institute’s chairman. I am fortunate as well to be affiliated with Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center, and I am grateful to Mark Blitz, the center’s director, and Elvia Huerta, its administrator, for their help.

  My deepest debt is to Martha and Bailey, my wife and stepdaughter, the best reasons I could have to turn the computer on, day after day, and grind out more paragraphs.

  This book is dedicated, with great affection, to Beverly and Robert Jones, and to Carol and the late William J. Voegeli.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  SUFFERING SITUATIONS

  CHAPTER 1

  HOW COMPASSION DEFINES AND ANIMATES LIBERALISM

  CHAPTER 2

  HOW EXAMINING LIBERAL COMPASSION IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT REVEALS ITS ILLOGIC

  CHAPTER 3

  HOW LIBERAL COMPASSION’S PROBLEMS ARE NOT RESOLVED EVEN WHEN WE RESTRICT CONSIDERATION OF IT TO DOMESTIC POLICY

  CHAPTER 4

  HOW LIBERAL COMPASSION LEADS TO BULLSHIT

  CHAPTER 5

  HOW CONSERVATIVES HAVE COUNTERED THE ARGUMENTS PUT FORWARD IN THE NAME OF LIBERAL COMPASSION, AND MIGHT REBUT THEM MORE EFFECTIVELY

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY WILLIAM VOEGELI

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION: SUFFERING SITUATIONS

  The accomplished actor had read better lines, but none better suited to that particular stage, audience, and moment. Eighteen years after Superman had made the absurdly handsome Christopher Reeve a movie star, one year after an equestrian accident had left him a quadriplegic, Reeve addressed the 1996 Democratic National Convention. The amount of federal funding for research on spinal cord injuries, he declared, was deplorably meager. More spending would give Americans afflicted by injuries like his a better quality of life, allow them to become economically productive, and even give them hope for a complete recovery. He went on to urge increased government spending for research on the causes and cures of other ailments, naming Parkinson’s disease, stroke, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS, along with famous people who suffered from each. Reeve closed by invoking another man in a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt, telling the delegates that FDR’s “most important principle” was “America does not let its needy citizens fend for themselves.”1

  Who could hear that speaker give that speech and object to the additional funding Reeve endorsed? No one, of course—which was the whole point, and the whole problem. The quality of the arguments and evidence Reeve offered was irrelevant, and any rebuttal would have been futile. The strategy of placing him in that setting before a national television audience was not to win a political debate but to preclude one. The emotional force of Reeve’s speech reminds us why Aristotle examined compassion, which we treat as a moral virtue, in the Rhetoric, discussing it solely in terms of the power to move an audience. He does not mention the subject in the Ethics or the Politics.2

  Reeve’s appearance was perfectly consonant with the central purpose of the 1996 convention: renominating and reelecting President Bill Clinton, who had assured voters four years before, “I feel your pain.” Clinton’s skill set included speaking empathy fluently, which only compounded the difficulties of his less-talented vice president, Al Gore, who expressed himself in that idiom forcefully but ineptly, a speaker of a second language never mastered. Gore concluded his 1996 acceptance speech with an account of his sister’s deathbed as she succumbed to lung cancer, three decades after becoming a heavy smoker. “And that is why until I draw my last breath,” he told the delegates, “I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.”3 As the New York Times put it diplomatically the next day, Gore “took a chance by speaking about his sister in such raw terms,” given “the thin line in politics between poignancy and exploitation.” The political risks looked even greater after the Times joined other publications in pointing out that in 1988, four years after his sister’s death, Gore had assured a North Carolina audience that he, too, was a tobacco farmer, and had been one all his life. Gore did not stop accepting contributions from political action committees affiliated with the tobacco industry until 1990.4

  At the 2000 Democratic convention, Gore’s first act upon accepting the presidential nomination was to share with his wife, onstage before a television audience, a kiss the Associated Press described as “awkward” and “uncomfortably long.”5 Even for a notably unsubtle politician, it was a blatant signal to voters that a Gore presidency would, unlike Clinton’s, spare the nation bimbo eruptions and amorous interns. What the self-defeating phoniness of Gore’s “authenticity” really made clear, however, was that Clinton had already established the outer limit of the Empathizer in Chief role, requiring his successors to try something different rather than attempt more of the same. The next Democratic president turned out to be Barack Obama, who is always effortlessly cool and measured in public. It’s impossible to imagine him giving his wife an openmouthed kiss on national television.

  So central is the rhetoric of compassion to modern American liberalism, however, that even a reserved politician like Obama relies on it constantly. And, like Gore, he avails himself of the principle that if an autobiographical snippet conveys a politically resonant emotional truth, the speaker has no obligation, and the audience no right, to be exacting about its literal truth. In a 2008 debate against Senator John McCain, Obama said, “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of fifty-three and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a preexisting condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.” A 2012 biography of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, revealed, however, that health insurance did pay for her medical care, and she argued with an insurance company about benefits from a disability policy. When asked by reporters about the discrepancy, the White House did not dispute the book’s account, but took what refuge it could in the statement “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than fifteen years ago.”

  Nevertheless, in a subsequent 2012 campaign video Obama attempted to have it both ways, conveying that his mother had suffered because of poor health insurance but without explicitly repeating the contentions he had made in 2008. In the 2012 documentary, Michelle Obama says of her mother-in-law, “She developed ovarian cancer, never really had good, consistent insurance. That’s a tough thing to deal with, watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented. I don’t think he wants to see anyone go through that.” The film’s narrator then explains that Obama’s personal tragedy left him sensitive to the suffering of others, and determined to alleviate it: “And he remembered the millions of families like his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.”6

  Obama did not mention his mother at the White House ceremony in March 2010 when he signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (more commonly referred to as the Affordable Care Act or, simply, “Obamacare”). Standing next to him at the desk, however, was an eleven-year-old boy, Marcelas Owens, whose mother had died of pulmonary hypertension in 2007, at age twenty-seven. She “didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford the care that she needed,” Obama said. He went on to say he was also signing the bill for Natoma Canfield, whose sister was in attendance. Canfield “had to give up her health coverage after her rates were jacked up by more than forty percent,” the president explained. “She was terrified that an illness would mean she’d lose the house that her parents built, so she gave up her insurance. And now she’s lying in a hospital bed, as we speak, faced with just such an illness, praying that she can somehow afford to get well without insurance.”7 (As of October 2013, Canfield had gotten better but not well—she still had leukemia, but was living at home rather than in a care facility. She had also gotten insurance, not as a result of the Affordable Care Act, but through the biggest government health programs in operation prior to 2010, Medicare and Medicaid.)8

  It was inevitable that the signing ceremony for the Affordable Care Act would present ordinary Americans whose sufferings could be attributed to defects in the health care system, ones the new law purported to fix. Such citizens, after all, were featured prominently in the campaign for the bill. A series of town hall meetings in 2009 followed the same format: a local resident who suffered from both a specific ailment and a problem with health insurance would describe those troubles, then warmly introduce th
e president. In one city, it was a father whose family’s health insurance was nearly canceled after the costs of treating his son’s hemophilia approached the policy’s lifetime cap. “If you think that can’t happen to you or your family, think again,” Obama said. At another forum, a woman who lost her insurance after being diagnosed with cancer introduced him. Yet another event featured a woman who could not find insurance because of a preexisting condition.9 At a Capitol Hill “Forum on What Health Insurance Reform Means for Women and Families,” three women told an audience what they had endured trying to afford health care and insurance under the existing system. Mrs. Obama then praised them for recounting their experiences because “these stories are happening all over this country, not just for thousands of women—for millions of them. For two years on the campaign trail, this was what I heard from women, that they were being crushed, crushed by the current structure of our health care. Crushed.”10

  The child who would grow up to become First Lady was less than a year old in 1964, and Barack Obama was only three, when NBC canceled the television game show Queen for a Day. Though they could not have known about it, the show previewed the modern Democratic Party’s stagecraft and statecraft. Its contestants were women who would tell the host, studio audience, and viewers at home about their travails, usually financial or medical. An applause meter would then let the studio audience “vote” on which woman had told the most affecting story, making her Queen for a Day. The winner received prizes, some selected to alleviate her particular troubles, and the other contestants also received gifts. The host closed every show by saying, “This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every woman a queen, for every single day!” In 2010, television writer and critic Mark Evanier wrote that Queen for a Day was “tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting and utterly degrading to the human spirit.”11

  Be that as it may, the line between poignancy and exploitation is not only thin, but moving inexorably: expressions once condemned for exploiting are eventually hailed for their courage and candor. Elected officials like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reflect citizens’ sensibilities more than they shape them. As the disappearance of “Blue Dog” voters and politicians has made the Democratic Party increasingly liberal, liberals have turned it into the pity party, committed to doing good socially and thereby doing well politically. People have interests, of course, and a political party that promises the government will give things to them and do things for them will never lack a constituency. But people also have pride: they desire approval, including self-approval. A modern American who doubts his compassion would have as hard a time sustaining a good opinion of himself as a medieval European lacking religious faith, or an ancient Roman convinced his life and character were devoid of honor. The term “compassion”—or “empathy,” or even “kindness”—is routinely used not just to name a moral virtue, but to designate the pinnacle or even the entirety of moral excellence. Precisely because this moral conviction is ambient, with so many Americans taking for granted that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting, and being more compassionate, it’s an important yet difficult subject to analyze. Compassion is the moral sea we swim in, which works against our awareness of it, much less efforts to chart its depths and currents.

  Compassion encompasses modern American liberalism, then, not the other way around. The most important source of their political strength, however, has been liberals’ ability to make compassion the political sea we swim in. It not only helps Democratic politicians win votes but also helps rank-and-file Democrats feel worthy. “I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.”12 A more politically formidable analyst than Keillor has seconded that motion. In a 2013 speech President Obama quoted the late film critic Roger Ebert: “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs.” And, Obama continued, “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.” This empathy is not primarily vertical, however, the noblesse oblige the world’s most powerful man feels toward ordinary citizens. Rather, it works best when practiced horizontally and reciprocally, as the disposition Americans have for one another. It’s “what binds us together, and . . . how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”13

  This subject has been a recurring theme throughout the president’s public career. As a U.S. senator he gave a college commencement address that urged graduates “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.” To what end? “When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.” After his victory in November 2008, President-elect Obama responded to a schoolgirl who had written to him by advising, “If you don’t already know what it means, I want you to look up the word ‘empathy’ in the dictionary. I believe we don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”14

  By speaking in these terms, Obama carries on a tradition older than he is. In The Liberal Mind, a book published two years after Obama was born, the late Kenneth Minogue wrote that liberalism is defined by the commitment to find and then rectify “suffering situations,” thereby transforming politics into “an activity not so much for maximizing happiness as for minimizing suffering.” The belief there can be no neutrality in this war to rid the world of one social evil after another—if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem—reduces politics to “a melodrama of oppressors and victims.”15 Thus, in a 1977 speech dedicating the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Washington headquarters, which was being named after him, Senator Hubert Humphrey said, “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Those words are inscribed on the building’s wall.16

  Equally important, by making an unqualified commitment to empathy, liberals put conservatism on trial. “Which side are you on?” asked the old labor movement anthem. In the rhetoric of modern liberalism, there are only two sides, and an easy choice between them. “Divine justice,” Franklin Roosevelt told the 1936 Democratic convention, “weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”17 Nineteen thirty-six was the year Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill won his first election, at the age of twenty-three, for a seat in the Massachusetts legislature. By 1984 he had become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the most powerful Democrat in Washington. FDR’s rhetoric apparently made a lasting impression on O’Neill, who echoed it when he denounced President Ronald Reagan: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.”18 In 2013, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made similar accusations, employing the language of epidemiology rather than hematology. Conservatives take “positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable,” he wrote. Denouncing House Republicans for voting to cut funds for the Food Stamps program, Krugman said they were “infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness. . . . If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick.”19