Reviewed by Mary Grabar @ Selous Foundation For Public Policy Research April 15, 2015
The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion
Click here to buy The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion
In a speech for
Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, Ronald Reagan pointed to the
burgeoning costs for anti-poverty programs. Americans were being told that “9.3
million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning
less than 3,000 dollars a year.” Each year 45 billion dollars was being spent
to alleviate this poverty, a figure ten times greater than what it was in “the
dark depths of the Depression.”
Reagan then asked
his audience to “do a little arithmetic” and divide the amount spent equally
among the poor. The answer was “we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars
a year.” Voila! Solution to the poverty problem.
Yet, each poor
family received only 600 dollars as direct aid.
“It would seem that
someplace there must be some overhead,” said Reagan with perfect timing.
Still, President
Lyndon Johnson felt there was a need to declare a “War on Poverty.”
Clearly, government
“charity” is not working. In spite of human welfare spending two and a half
times greater in 2009 than in 1977, the poverty rate rose to 11.1 percent in
2009 from 9.3 percent in 1977. It has never gone lower than 8.7 percent, since
the launch of the War on Poverty in 1965, when it stood at 13.9 percent.
Yet, liberals
continue to attack conservatives relentlessly for their hard-heartedness
whenever they question or criticize such wastefulness.
Why liberals do
this is the subject of The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal
Compassion (HarperCollins 2014) by William Voegeli. Voegeli, a visiting scholar
at Claremont McKenna College and a senior editor of The Claremont Review of
Books, uses statistics, humor, and psychological deconstruction to expose the
pretensions of the Pity Party.
One of the sources
for rebutting their claims is Charles Murray’s 2006 book, In Our Hands: A Plan
to Replace the Welfare State, which offered a detailed plan implementing what
Reagan had presented as hypothetical–a negative income tax that would eliminate
the middle man, the massive welfare bureaucracies. It’s estimated that if
Murray’s plan of giving direct payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 to every
citizen (depending on income) and of eliminating every agency (except in public
education, transportation, and the U.S. Postal Service) were applied to 2012
figures we would have spent about one-third less than actual federal, state,
and local outlays on the welfare state that year. William F. Buckley, Jr. had
proposed a similar scheme at a state level in 1973.
There is the
question of whether the experts in the bureaucracies do a better job with the
money.
No. Head Start, the
federal preschool program, is a prime example. A 2010 study by the very same
agency that administers the program, the Department of Health and Human
Services, showed that Head Start’s positive influence on children’s school
readiness dissipated by the time children reached the end of kindergarten and first
grade. According to HHS’s own data, “by the end of the third grade children who
had been enrolled in a program were no better off than those in a
nonparticipating control group.”
Such facts,
however, do not matter to those who present themselves as the fount of
benevolence: “Speaking in 2011 at a Head Start center in Pennsylvania,
President Obama referred obliquely to the report chronicling the program’s
deficiencies. ‘I firmly believe that Head Start is an outstanding program and a
critical investment,’ Obama insisted before criticizing Republicans for their
plans to cut its budget.”
Yet, Voegeli points
out that Obama announced new rules to ensure that for “‘the first time in
history that Head Start programs will be truly held accountable for performance
in the classroom’ (emphasis added).”
Voegeli wryly adds,
“The president did not explain the basis on which, other than its good
intentions, a forty-six-year-old program that had never been held accountable
for delivering on those intentions could be judged outstanding.”
The motivations for
such declarations of success include, of course, the desire to win votes. But
perhaps an even more compelling reason is ego, the satisfaction liberals get
from declaring their superiority in the compassion department.
But pity is no way
to order a society. It is an emotion based on “accident,” or arbitrariness, not
principle. The Pity Party decides which groups get pity, a method that invites
totalitarianism and sometimes suffering when the pity object of the moment pushes
aside the usual object. Voegeli uses the case of immigration, where liberals’
global, supra-national compassion conflicts with their traditional objects of
compassion, such as the urban underclass. When a black conservative, such as
Carol Swain, points out that illegal immigrants often take away jobs from black
men, she is attacked. “Hell hath no grievance like a white liberal accused of
callousness by a black conservative,” Voegeli quips, in describing the liberal
response to the law professor.
When evidence is
presented, even evidence that points to the harm programs are doing, it is
ignored. Always, it is the Pity Party’s needs that prevail.
Examples come from
classical sources and current events. Simply presented with little commentary
they illustrate the pomposity and self-congratulatory frame of mind of the
average liberal. Compassion, writes Voegeli, “not only helps Democrats win
votes but also helps rank-and-file Democrats feel worthy.”
Voegeli finds great
self-indicting statements: “‘I am a liberal,’ public radio host Garrison
Keillor wrote in 2004, ‘and liberalism is the politics of kindness.’ 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. . . .’”
This is a good game
plan for fighting the relentless attack from the Pity Party. Expose their own
absurdities. Ask them for the fruits of their “charity.”
Such a lively
exposé is much welcome at a time when many Republicans are on the defensive. We
don’t need another round of compassionate conservatism. We need a head-on
rebuttal of the logical fallacies, self-aggrandizing delusions, and harmful
contradictions of the Pity Party. This is what William Voegeli gives us in a
lively and funny polemic.
Mary Grabar,
Ph.D., has taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of
the Dissident
Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that
offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The
motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her
perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia
(Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to
SFPPR News & Analysis.
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