The Pity Party Read online

  There’s no need to belabor the advantages liberals secure, on Election Day and in policy debates, by contending the republic’s essential choice is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. Again, however, this way of framing the question yields not only political advantages but psychological and sociological ones. Given compassion’s centrality, both to the modern understanding of moral decency and to liberal politics, liberalism offers those who embrace it a reliable basis to feel good about themselves, which includes ample reason to revile those deemed compassion-deficient. On the floor of the House of Representatives, for example, Democratic congressman Alan Grayson declared in 2009 that Republican colleagues who opposed the health care proposals advanced by Democrats had a plan of their own: “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”20 Following Obama’s 2012 reelection, one blogger spiked the football in an open letter to Republicans, to which many websites provided a link. “Koolking83,” apparently the nom de pixel of Chicagoan Steve Sanchez, gloated that the conservative campaign to “take back the country” had failed because that country, along with its moral failings, is at long last vanishing. In “your Country,” the letter asserted, “Voters don’t cast their ballots with the welfare of the guy or woman next to them in mind—they don’t vote for universal prosperity and equality, they don’t vote with a heart full of compassion and a mind with a vision for a more fair and a more inclusive Country.” Mitt Romney lost because he was “the embodiment of everything that is wrong with YOUR Country,” in that he was both “insatiably greedy” and “invariably self-interested.”21

  One of compassion’s advantages is that the scorn for the uncompassionate it validates is all-weather gear, which can be worn during both triumphs and setbacks. Krugman’s colleague, Times columnist Charles Blow, reacted to the 2013 House vote on Food Stamps by deploring not just “the pariahs who roam [America’s] halls of power” but also “the people who put them there” for being “insular, cruel and uncaring.” He lamented a public opinion survey showing a plurality of Americans believed high poverty rates persisted because excessive welfare benefits stifle initiative. “How did we come to such a pass?” Blow demands. “Why aren’t more politicians—and people in general—expressing outrage and showing empathy?”

  Part of our current condition is obviously partisan. Republicans have become the party of “blame the victim.” Whatever your lesser lot in life, it’s completely within your means to correct, according to their logic. Poverty, hunger, homelessness and desperation aren’t violence to the spirit but motivation to the will. If you want more and you work harder, all your problems will disappear. Sink or swim. Pull yourself up. Get over it.

  This callousness reflects not only the deficiencies of Republican politicians, however, but the broader phenomenon that “many Americans look at the poor with disgust.” Washington, D.C., is a “town without pity,” he concludes, because too many Americans desire and have succeeded in making the United States a nation without pity. “If some people’s impulse is to turn up a nose rather than extend a hand, no wonder we send so many lawmakers empty of empathy to Congress. No wonder more people don’t demand that Congress stand up for the least among us rather than on them.”22

  Some readers who have come this far may, like Democratic politicians and New York Times columnists, hold these truths to be self-evident: that compassion is the essence of moral and political decency; that liberalism is fundamentally noble because it places compassion at the center of its political efforts; and that conservatism is fundamentally odious because its central purpose is to reject compassion in favor of selfishness, greed, and cruel indifference to suffering. Those readers should get off the train at this station, since they will find a book interrogating these propositions as pointless as one that examines whether the world is round or the sky blue.

  For those of you still on board, at least for a while, I readily confirm the subtle hints given by the preceding pages and this book’s title: I am indeed a political conservative, so approach the claims made for liberal compassion skeptically, not reverently. During the Reagan-Thatcher era, some conservatives felt free to dismiss such claims as the whining of collectivists who could not accept the demise of the only alternative to market economics. Electoral setbacks—only one Republican nominee (George W. Bush with 50.7 percent in 2004) has won a majority of the popular vote in the six presidential elections beginning with Clinton’s victory in 1992—and well-documented demographic trends indicating future elections are likely to grow even more difficult have drained this triumphalism from the American Right. As they did when reading the first issue of National Review in 1955, conservatives once more stand athwart history, yelling Stop!

  Especially, however, if liberals realize their hopes of dominating the landscape as they did in the 1930s, we need to examine—less for the sake of reinvigorating conservatism than for the more general imperative to advance clear thinking and good governance—what the politics of kindness means, and how it works. If American politics is becoming an ecosystem where liberalism’s natural enemies are too weak to challenge it, the only remaining restraints on the politics of compassion will exert their influence from within liberalism, rather than by opposing it from the outside. But if political compassion proves to be confused, futile, or destructive in ways that neither interest nor inhibit liberals who believe that platitudes about warmhearted empathy for the least among us constitute a political philosophy, America faces dangers it needs to understand. They are what this book is about.

  My argument will have this structure: Chapter One’s subject is compassion’s meaning in modern discourse, and how it became central to the moral outlook, not just of American liberalism, but of social and political life in general. The next two chapters take up the question raised by Barack Obama’s entreaty to broaden our ambit of concern. Some liberal polemicists to the contrary notwithstanding, most people, even registered Republicans, do not really need to be shamed into empathizing with their family members, friends, or neighbors. The question, then, is not whether to be compassionate or indifferent to the suffering of others, but the proper scope of compassion’s ambit. This issue is best examined from the outside in: Chapter Two works through the implications of empathy that stretches across international borders. Those problems explicated, in Chapter Three I consider liberal compassion within America, an ambit better suited to the theory and practice of liberalism. Even so, the politics of kindness cannot be judged a success at the national level, either in terms of making sense or making a difference for the better. Why liberal compassion’s good intentions translate so unreliably into good results is the subject of Chapter Four, which argues that the quality of mercy is a more consequential problem than, as liberals posit, its chronically insufficient quantity. Finally, Chapter Five examines the conservative response to liberal compassion to see how it has fared, why it hasn’t done more to make liberals fear that the political risks of denouncing conservatives’ alleged heartlessness might exceed the rewards, and how conservatives could explain their reservations and objectives more persuasively.

  Chapter 1

  HOW COMPASSION DEFINES AND ANIMATES LIBERALISM

  To understand how, in order to safeguard Casey the rabbit, Marty the Magician ended up filling out a federal disaster plan with professional help, we must first understand the suffering situation of Pepper the Dalmatian and the family who owned her. Pepper disappeared from the yard of that family’s house in 1965. By the time they located Pepper she was already in the custody of a “dog farm,” whose owners refused not only the family’s request for access, so they could identify and claim their dog, but also a request made on their behalf by their congressman, Joseph Resnick. Before Pepper’s owners were able to take additional measures, the dog farm transferred Pepper to a New York hospital, which euthanized her after a laboratory experiment.1

  Pepper’s story, publicized in a Sports Illustrated article, motivated Resnick to introduce a bill that became the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. One of its provisions required laboratories using dogs and cats for research to have licenses for the animals. A 1970 amendment extended the requirement to “exhibitors,” understood at the time to include zoos, circuses, and carnivals, but subsequently interpreted by U.S. Department of Agriculture officials to apply to solo practitioners like Marty Hahne, a magician who performs for school groups and children’s birthday parties. Thus it was that in 2005, after a show at a library in Missouri, an official from the USDA approached Hahne. Did he have a license for the rabbit he had pulled out of a hat during his performance?

  He does now, a USDA rabbit license granted in exchange for a forty-dollar annual fee, along with Hahne’s agreement to take his exhibited animal to the veterinarian regularly and to submit to department officials’ unannounced inspections of his home. The 1965 law, four pages long, has led to fourteen pages of regulations solely on the treatment of rabbits. As with many regulatory regimes, it includes a fair sampling of the arbitrary and risible. The rules don’t apply to animals raised for consumption, for example, so Hahne would not need a license if Casey were destined to be part of a stew rather than a show. Nor does it cover cold-blooded animals, leaving the performer at liberty to pull an unlicensed lizard out of his hat.

  In January 2013 the Department of Agriculture ruled that exhibitors needed, in addition to a license, a “disaster plan” for all animals subject to the license requirement. It announced the intention to create such a regulation in 2008, three years after pets, livestock, and lab animals were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina, some dying, others complicating already difficult efforts to relieve afflicted areas. USDA proposed that any exhibitor required to have a license for an animal must also have a written plan to keep it safe during each of many contingencies listed by the department. It posted the suggested regulation for public comments and received 997, of which 50 were endorsements. Based on that groundswell of support, USDA went ahead and announced it would begin enforcing the new requirement in 2013.

  Some magicians, ignoring abundant evidence that the Department of Agriculture has an underdeveloped sense of the absurd, took a minimalist approach. “Note: Take rabbit with you when you leave” was the entirety of one’s plan. Hahne, by contrast, chose to err on the side of caution, filling out thirty-two pages with the volunteered assistance of an attorney who writes disaster plans for a living. It covers how Hahne will protect Casey in response to disasters familiar from the Old Testament, such as floods and windstorms, as well as modern perils like broken air conditioners and chemical spills.

  When the Washington Post first ran a story about Hahne’s encounter with the new disaster plan regulations, a USDA spokesman praised the policy’s “flexibility,” but within a few hours announced that the secretary had called for its review in the hope that “common sense be applied.”2 Hahne told one reporter, “I always thought I had a fun, easy job, and I would never have to worry about the government bothering me about it. But our government has gotten so intrusive, their tentacles are everywhere.”3

  COMPASSION, DEFINED AND PROCLAIMED

  Comprehending where compassion can take us requires, first of all, a clear understanding of what it is. The terms “compassion” and “empathy” have come to be used interchangeably in modern discourse. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “compassion” means, literally, “suffering together with another,” and is also defined, more substantively, as the “feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour.” The OED notes a subtle but significant distinction between those two senses of the term: the first is an emotion shared by “equals or fellow-sufferers,” while the second “is shown toward a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior.” The earliest instances of both senses appeared in the fourteenth century. Some three hundred years later, “compassion” shows up in Shakespeare and in treatises and translations by Thomas Hobbes. “Compassionate” is now strictly an adjective, but it was also a transitive verb until sometime in the nineteenth century, used in a manner similar to “commiserate,” as in, “Men . . . naturally compassionate all . . . whom they see in Distress,” from a 1726 sermon. “Empathy,” defined as “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation,” first appeared in English in 1904. The term came into existence as an attempt to translate the German word einfühlung, used in aesthetic and psychological theory to convey the act of “feeling into” a painting or statue. I’ll treat “compassion” and “empathy” as equivalents, the way most twenty-first-century Americans do in speaking or writing.

  The reader with access to a search engine, newspaper, or remote control can easily add examples of the rhetoric of compassion to those I’ve already provided. My inclusion of one by Franklin Roosevelt from 1936 might leave the impression that compassion has been a constant, dominant force within liberalism right from the beginning of the New Deal. That isn’t quite true. In 1947 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. expressed his confidence about America’s ability to achieve “democratic socialism”—or, more disquietingly, “a not undemocratic socialism”—through the rise of the “politician-manager-intellectual type—the New Dealer,” provided he is “intelligent and decisive.”4 As this stipulation suggests, mid-twentieth-century liberalism reflected a conscious effort to be, and be seen as, tough-minded rather than softhearted. Of course, the choice to undertake such a rebranding argues that at least some liberals at the time believed their ranks contained, and their cause was harmed by, a considerable number of sob sisters.

  The desentimentalization of liberalism reached its apogee in the presidency of John Kennedy. His inaugural address spoke of a new American generation “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,” which would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In a speech silent on domestic issues, the only line that invoked social justice—“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”—came in the context of a call for aid to “peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” both because it was right and in order to fortify democracy against the spread of communism. When, in March 1962, a reporter asked JFK about military reservists who resented being called for active duty as tensions in Vietnam and Berlin increased, he replied, “there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. . . . Life is unfair. But I do hope that . . . these people recognize that they are fulfilling a valuable function, and . . . will have the satisfaction afterwards of feeling that they contributed importantly to the security of their families and their country at a significant time.”5

  A great irony of modern political history, to be examined in Chapter Three, is that these efforts to make liberalism tough, pragmatic, and unsentimental collapsed, immediately and decisively, upon Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That liberals so quickly redoubled their commitment to emotionalism does not prove, but strongly suggests, that the effort to purge it was misbegotten from the start. The tough liberals, that is, wanted to turn liberalism into something at odds with its fundamental character. Ever since that day in Dallas, the only reason a liberal politician or intellectual will note that life is unfair is to insist a decent society’s most compelling obligation is to make it more fair. Suggesting that any inequity or suffering may lie beyond a government’s capacity and rightful power to remedy is the dodge employed by mean-spirited conservatives, not compassionate liberals.

  John Kennedy’s younger brothers both devoted the rest of their lives to the cause of making empathy paramount over pragmatism. When Edward Kennedy eulogized Robert in 1968 he asked that his brother be remembered “simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” Most of Kennedy’s speech, however, consisted of passages from those his brother had given. In one, Bobby Kennedy had said about their father, Joseph Kennedy Sr.:

  Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.

  Ted Kennedy then quoted more extensively from a speech his older brother had given in 1966:

  There is discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility towards the suffering of our fellows. But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.6

  There are three other statements—by a politician, a journalist, and a professor—that amount to manifestos for compassion. I quote them at some length to offer grist I’ll mill subsequently. The first is Mario Cuomo’s keynote address to the 1984 Democratic convention, delivered during the second of Cuomo’s twelve years as governor of New York. It is remembered as one of the most effective in the era of televised political conventions. Nearly four years after Ronald Reagan had been elected president, Cuomo conceded nothing in defending New Deal and Great Society liberalism: