The Pity Party (14 page)

A serious difficulty for liberalism, then, is that there appears to be a strong, reliably negative correlation between humans' “take care” impulses and their “our own” ones. Very much to his consternation, sociologist Robert Putnam (of
Bowling Alone
fame) determined in 2006 that diversity ravages the fellow-feeling that undergirds cohesive societies and generous welfare states. In the “presence of diversity,” he told the
Financial Times
, “we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us.”
⁶⁵
One analysis of neighborhoods did a large-scale comparison between measures of homogeneity and measures of social cohesion. According to social scientist Richard Florida, “the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.”
⁶⁶

Putnam's solution to this problem is deeply unpersuasive. “What we shouldn't do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us,” he told a reporter. “We should construct a new us.”
⁶⁷
The Ellis Island paradigm of assimilation was, by that standard, exactly wrong. The point should have been not to Americanize immigrants but to immigrant-ize America. The problem of taking care of our own, already severe, is sure to be compounded by the principle that those who choose to join our society, whom we have a tenuous right to keep out in the first place, are entitled not only to be taken care of, but to have our society's contours altered until they feel as at home here as they did in the countries they left. To hope that the political will to take care of our own will survive a proscription against telling those who want to become our own that they should be more like us cannot be squared with any conception or experience of social cohesion.

There's a final problem connected to immigration. The enterprise of taking care of our own will not be confined to taking care of our own more than we take care of others. It can also entail immigration policies that take care of our own at the expense of others. David Goodhart points out that the nation of Malawi, with a per capita GDP of $900,

has lost more than half of its nursing staff to emigration over recent years, leaving just 336 nurses to serve a population of 12 million. Rates of perinatal mortality doubled from 1992 to 2000, a rise that is in part attributed to falling standards of medical care. Excluding Nigeria and South Africa, the average country in sub-Saharan Africa had 6.2 doctors per 100,000 of population in 2004. This compares with 166 in the [United Kingdom], yet about 31% of doctors practising in the UK come from overseas, many from developing countries.
⁶⁸

We can be sure that when the Bombokus learn that the one clinic where they could take Mpinga in emergencies has closed down, because its staff has emigrated to the Global North to care for children like Betsy Wilson, they'll be keen to learn more about the politics of kindness.

Chapter 3

H
OW
L
IBERAL
C
OMPASSION
'
S
P
ROBLEMS
A
RE
N
OT
R
ESOLVED
E
VEN
W
HEN
W
E
R
ESTRICT
C
ONSIDERATION OF
I
T TO
D
OMESTIC
P
OLICY

S
o, liberals have boundary issues. They want us to take care of our own without getting all harsh and restrictive about disqualifying anyone from being one of our own. While these issues, which have no obvious or imminent resolution, put a question mark after liberal compassion, they do not draw a line through it. Given the trouble posed by international issues, it's no surprise the liberal disposition includes a strong preference to alleviate intranational suffering.

Hard cases make bad law, say the legal scholars. Mpinga Bomboku presents liberals with a hard case, and they have no clear path to make good policy from it. This chapter will look at the other end, easy cases. I'll examine how liberal compassion takes care of our own when we remove questions about who constitutes our own from the equation.

When we set aside boundary issues, and consider only those people clearly our own, the remaining questions concern whom to feel sorry for, why to feel sorry for them, and how to act on our compassionate feelings. As Hubert Humphrey's formulation about the supreme moral importance of helping children, the aged, and those in the shadows of life suggests, liberals have long believed that the way to put their cause's best foot forward is to put their clients' worst foot forward. Emphasizing the helplessness of those whom liberals want to help has been a staple of liberal thinking and discourse since the New Deal. “I'm getting sick and tired of all these people on the [Works Progress Administration] and local relief roles being called chiselers and cheats,” Harry Hopkins, one of FDR's closest advisors, said in 1936. “These people are just like the rest of us. They don't drink any more than us, they don't lie any more, they're no lazier than the rest of us. . . . I have gone all over the moral hurdles that people are poor because they are bad. I don't believe it.”
¹

President Obama sounded the same theme in his second inaugural address: “We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm.” From that premise he proceeded directly to the conclusion, “The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us.”
²

The poor are “just like the rest of us,” only less fortunate—Rawlsianism in a nutshell. Hopkins and Obama were each speaking a few years after the onset of a severe economic contraction, so one could reasonably assume that many of their listeners, even those who kept their jobs or homes, had known people who suffered such losses, and had experienced the dread of downward mobility. The poor seem less different from the rest of us in hard times than in other times.

Liberals
always
want America to be more compassionate than it is, however, not just during economic downturns. It is no coincidence, then, that liberals who go to great lengths to express their compassion are especially apt to stress their empathy for children. Kids are equally cute during booms and busts. Children are also unqualifiedly not responsible for whatever suffering they endure. Their sufferings are, instead, entirely the result of other people's mistakes, neglect, improvidence, or sheer bad luck. All the other sufferers in Humphrey's roster of the afflicted may, at least in theory, present more complicated cases. Some of the aged might have made better provision for themselves when they were young, for example, just as some of the sick might have taken better care of themselves when they were healthy.

Children, as a class of sufferers, don't raise such problems, so they are often front and center when liberals make their case—sometimes literally. In January 2007, as Representative Nancy Pelosi waited on the floor of the House of Representatives while the newly elected Democratic majority voted to make her Speaker, she was surrounded by a group of children assembled for the occasion. Pelosi held an infant in her arms as the votes were cast and counted, then concluded her first speech as Speaker with the words, “For these children, our children, and for all of America's children, the House will come to order.”
³
President Bill Clinton had stood at the same podium to give his 1996 State of the Union address, and did not physically drag children with him to make his arguments, but went to unusual lengths to drag them into the text of his speech. “For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age,” he informed a bemused nation, “there is not a single Russian missile pointed at America's children.”
⁴

Such mawkish excess challenges conservatives to decide: (a) whether their liberal friends are mostly cynical or mostly sappy; and (b) which is worse. It's not really necessary to choose, though. People can be moralistic
and
cynical, really believing what they believe, while convinced that certain ways of presenting their ideas are especially resonant. The liberal activist Marian Wright Edelman told an interviewer that she founded the Children's Defense Fund because in 1973 America “was tired of the concerns of the sixties. When you talked about poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience.” However, “I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.”
⁵

Natural disasters work, too, occasioning President Obama's allusion to a “terrible storm,” three months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the Atlantic Coast. Columnist Matt Miller used a subsequent disaster, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, to say if “you feel it's urgent to help the victims” of that storm, “then deep in your heart you also support Obamacare,” and a bigger welfare state in general. The connection? “When human beings are left vulnerable and desperate by events beyond their control, we want to help. Empathy for human frailty and powerlessness in such a tragedy evokes compassion. We say such victims ‘deserve' help because they are suffering through no fault of their own.”
⁶

Liberals believe the thing to do for helpless people is to help them. The way they impart this view to a democracy of some 300 million people is to insist that the emotional responses and moral duties that would come naturally to the most intimate human associations are, for all practical purposes, the ones that apply in the same way within the most extensive ones. Mario Cuomo, as we have seen, said Democrats believe in a “single fundamental idea,” that of “family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings. . . .”

Cuomo's idea has a long tenure in the rhetoric of social reform. In
What Eight Million Women Want
, published in 1910, the suffragist Rheta Childe Dorr argued, “Woman's place is in the home. . . . But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery.” If the reformers' goals are achieved, then

[t]he city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms.
⁷

According to Hillary Clinton's 1996 book,
It Takes a Village
, “Parents bear the first and primary responsibility for their sons and daughters,” but children “exist in the world as well as in the family,” and “will thrive only if their families thrive and if the whole society cares enough to provide for them.” The African proverb about what's required to raise a child, which gave her book its title, remains applicable in modern America, even though a village “can no longer be defined as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations.” What matters is that the village's “essence remains the same: it is the network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives.”
⁸

It's not clear how far liberals are prepared to take the conceit of America as one very big family or village. Some begrudge Clinton's stipulation about parents' primary role. Marian Wright Edelman praised the way her parents had raised her to honor “the life-giving values of faith, integrity, and service,” and claimed that in her vocation as a political activist she was doing “exactly what my parents did—just on a different scale.” Indeed, if America is going to be serious about the welfare of children, as such, then we need to overcome the inclination to “distinguish between our own and other people's children.”
⁹

Similarly, in a 2013 announcement promoting her cable network, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said:

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of “These are our children.” So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it's everyone's responsibility and not just the household's, then we start making better investments.
¹⁰

When some conservative writers derided Harris-Perry's message, she pushed back against her “hateful” and “vitriolic” critics. “I have no designs on taking your children,” she wrote on the channel's website. Rather, “my message in that ad was a call to see ourselves as connected to a larger whole.” As such, it was just common sense and common decency, not part of a sinister campaign to raise children collectively. Harris-Perry sees her call as part of the encompassing sense of responsibility that scales up from volunteers who serve as crossing guards even if they don't have children in the schools they're protecting, to childless homeowners who ungrudgingly pay the property taxes that support public education, to parents who become gun control activists in cities that have suffered armed violence against children.
¹¹