The Pity Party (19 page)

“We need a moral adjustment,” Benedikt believes, “not a legislative one,” so she opposes outlawing private schools. This makes her a diffident opponent of private schools compared to her
Slate
colleague Matthew Yglesias, who not only agrees that sending children to such schools is shameful, but believes continuing their tax-exempt status is “outrageous.”
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In stopping short of advocating the abolition of any alternative to public education both Benedikt and Yglesias are squishes compared to John Cook (who happens to be Benedikt's husband), a proponent of “forcibly transferring ownership of all existing private schools to the school district in which they reside.” Though his prescription is the most radical, Cook's diagnosis is the same: “Wealthy people tend to lobby effectively for their interests, and if their interests were to include adequate public funding for the schools their children attend, and libraries, and air-conditioning, those goals could likely be achieved without having to resort to unpleasant things like teachers' strikes.” Cook has not, thus far, extended this logic to conscripting millionaires to live in public housing projects. “Radical inequality” may be “OK for adults,” he allows, but “when it comes to children, it's perverse to dole out educations based on arbitrary circumstances completely beyond their control.
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Thus does twenty-first-century liberalism reconcile, in a manner very different from eighteenth-century liberalism, private interests and the public welfare. The old civic architecture arranged for ambition to counteract ambition, thereby supplying the defect of better motives. The new civic architecture fuses ambitions. The defect of better motives is to be overcome by condemning or prohibiting practices through which people seek to advance the interests of their own families, unless those actions are of a sort that advances the interests of all families similarly situated.

Even when parents try to do what Kristof and Benedikt consider the right thing, however, this regrettable penchant to care especially for one's own children keeps posing problems. New York City's Public School 163, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, offers both General Education and Gifted and Talented programs to its students, pre-kindergarten through the fifth grade. Of the 652 students enrolled in 2013, according to the
New York Times
, some 63 percent are black and Hispanic, 27 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian. Of the 205 children in gifted classes, however, 47 percent are white, 15 percent are Asian, and 32 percent are black and Hispanic. By contrast, only 18 percent of the 447 students in the school's other classes are white.
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Those Upper West Side parents with fond memories of Lester Maddox may be untroubled by such disparities, but they're a source of distress to others. One P.S. 163 teacher told the
Times
that “there's no way I'd put my kid in a general-education class here, no way, because it's right next to the project and all the kids in general education come from the projects.” In her experience, “many of the children in her general education classes were at grade level or below and did not get the same support from their parents that the children in the gifted classes got. ‘They're tougher kids,' she said of the general education students in the school.”

According to the
Times
, “several parents and teachers wondered whether white parents would stay if not for the gifted classes.” One parent, who “requested anonymity for fear of reprisals,” said, “I don't see any white families coming to register their children for general education. They come straight to gifted and talented.” Another parent, who also “did not want to be identified for fear of animosity from other parents,” explained the selection of P.S. 163 and its advanced program:

I guess it is a question of, “How much diversity do you feel comfortable with?” Do I want him to be the only white kid in an all-black school? No. Would I like it if the racial mix was more proportionate? Yes, whatever the percentage of the makeup. That's an honest answer, from my soul. Is it hypocritical for parents to say, “We're sending our kids to public school,” but they're sending them to an all-white gifted and talented program? But it's not our fault. We want the best for our children.
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Are you a bad person—not murderer bad, but still worthy of loathing and self-loathing bad—if you send your children to a public school, but then maneuver to get them into one of its academically challenging but demographically disproportionate programs? Wouldn't truly compassionate parents insist that
all
students not only go to public schools but receive the same education there, even if it meant their own children would study with tougher kids from the projects reading at grade level or below? A political persuasion that leads those who endorse it to apologize—anonymously, for fear of reprisal—about wanting the best for their children has two options. It can either become a cult that demands its members devote themselves to self-abnegation, or reassess whether the reconciliation of interest and duty it has formulated is either as morally compelling or as realistic as its adherents have long supposed.

I have, so far, not only relied on the distinction between empathizers and empathizees in assessing the politics of kindness, but treated that distinction as one with a clear boundary upon which all agree. That stipulation, though analytically useful for certain purposes, is also clearer than the truth. A better understanding of liberal compassion requires attending to the fact that the citizenry is
not
neatly divided between those who feel sorry and those who are felt sorry for.

This ambiguity is especially important in a democracy. One way to assemble a governing majority in such a polity would be if sufferers, united by the demand for policies to alleviate their suffering, constituted a majority of the voters, and refused to let any other political consideration distract them from voting on the basis of that one, overriding interest. This is the logic that governed the political career of Huey Long or Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The compassion operative in such political calculations would be the solidarity of the suffering majority, motivated to secure what it believes it is rightfully owed and has been wrongfully denied. Empathy from others may be appreciated or resented but will not alter the movement's goals or progress toward them.

Since its founding in 1865, every issue of the
Nation
magazine has heralded the imminent arrival of a Chavez-like majority coalition of America's dispossessed, but the United States continues to dismay those who harbor such hopes. In 1932, when the unemployment rate was 25 percent according to some economists' retrospective estimates, the socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, received 2.2 percent of the popular vote, and all other leftist parties combined for another 0.5 percent. Despite FDR's rhetorical invocations of altruism, and Eleanor Roosevelt's fusion of politics and social work, the New Deal coalition depended more on self-sufficiency, collectively pursued, than on compassion. Labor union activists in that era spoke of “rescuing” members “from demoralization at the hands of sentimental almsgivers.”
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The greatest New Deal achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935, was structured and promoted as social insurance, a more encompassing version of private insurance but operating on the same principles. Benefits, accordingly, were paid for reasons having nothing to do with pity or charity. As Vincent Miles, a member of the original Social Security board, explained in a 1936 speech, Social Security benefits will be paid “by the United States Government in monthly checks—like the installments on annuities from an insurance company.” And, “Like an insurance company policy, the worker's old-age benefit from the Government must be paid for in advance. Instead of weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly premiums, however, the Government collects weekly or monthly payments which are called taxes.”
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Another Social Security architect, J. Douglas Brown, spelled out the insurance paradigm's political rationale in a 1955 speech celebrating the program's twentieth anniversary:

The first and foremost element in our philosophy of social insurance, is that the system must provide protection as a matter of right and not as a benevolence of a government, an institution or an employer. In establishing social insurance, our Federal and State governments reversed the presumption that a payment to an eligible individual was a generous act of mercy by a sovereign, to the presumption that such a payment, under social insurance, was the honest fulfillment of a contract between citizen and state.
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Eight decades of social insurance in America have demonstrated that benefits constantly outpace the “contributions” set aside and supposedly sufficient to pay for them. The programs were explained so misleadingly and beguilingly, however, that Americans cannot be dissuaded from supporting them. The programs, that is, combine the political strength of welfare with the moral strength of insurance. Voters believe they're getting only what they paid for, but regularly receive a great deal more than they paid for. Without running payroll taxes through a wealth augmentation machine, this formula generates bad logic and bad policy but impregnable politics.

Compassion of empathizers toward empathizees became important to the Affluent Society liberal coalition: the poor in their pockets of poverty could not amount to a majority, so the majority had to be assembled by combining the poor with other voters who would gain moral validation rather than material benefits from the War on Poverty. Even under exceptionally favorable economic circumstances, however, this was a political challenge. For Robert Kennedy to tell medical students, none of whom would be as comfortable for one week as he had been his entire life, that funds for a bigger welfare state were going to come “from you,” wins points for candor but not political judgment. His strategy presupposed a large number of voters would feel both prosperous and empathetic enough to welcome, rather than resent, political campaigns based on the theme “Let's talk about what you're going to do for them.” Lyndon Johnson, who had secured ten electoral victories on his own over the course of a political career that spanned four decades, had a better grasp of what voters would and would not tolerate when he promised that the War on Poverty would require very little of them—and, even then, its modest burden would quickly be repaid by rising prosperity for everyone.

The slight chance for appeals like Robert Kennedy's to secure a majority vanished after the 1973 Arab oil embargo marked the end of the Affluent Society boom. A more precarious economic era, continuing to this day, finds most Americans unable to recall or believe the bland postwar confidence about readily securing and maintaining a place in the broad middle class. In the Affluent Society's aftermath, liberalism faced a political problem: middle-class Americans viewed their obligations to help the poor through the prism of their own economic anxieties, which argued against sacrifices more painful than the ones LBJ had promised. As Kaus contended, “If citizens believe the welfare state is a big charity drive, they will naturally stop contributing when they feel they have nothing left over to give.”
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In the era since the Affluent Society's sunset, liberals have struggled to adapt the rhetoric of compassion. Securing a Democratic majority by contending that
we
should feel sorry for
them
is impossible. Assembling one by saying we should feel sorry for ourselves, or they should feel sorry for us, suits the economic realities better but remains awkward. In 1972 Democrats challenged an incumbent Republican president they loathed, during an unpopular war. There had been inflation, resulting in wage and price controls, and a recession that began in 1969. Still, they chose to make their case in Affluent Society terms. Their party platform used the term “middle class” just once. There were six other uses of “middle income,” all in the context of discussing housing programs for the continuum encompassing the poor and the less poor, as in “the lack of housing is particularly critical for people with low and middle incomes.”
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In 2004 Democrats were, again, seeking to defeat a Republican incumbent they despised during an unpopular war. The party's platform
that
year went on and on about the middle class, using the term twenty times. An entire section was devoted to “Standing Up for the Great American Middle Class,” which it hailed as a source of pride and prosperity, both the “heart of the American promise” and “the greatest engine of economic growth the world has ever known.” Under Republicans, however, the “bottom line” is “Instead of working hard to get ahead, the middle class is working hard just to get by.”
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Old habits die hard, however, and Democrats found it easier to change their language than their focus. In the summer of 2010, as the Tea Party was on the verge of recalling the GOP from an unexpectedly brief political exile, journalist Joshua Green explained that Democrats had suffered by offering an ersatz middle-class agenda: “Most Democratic policies, such as the earned income tax credit or increasing the minimum wage, were geared not toward the middle class but the poor. When middle-class Americans heard Democrats describe their problems, it did not resonate because they were actually the problems of the working poor.” Green interviewed Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who took over the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee after the 2004 election and masterminded a comeback as the number of Democratic senators grew from 45 to 60 over the next two election cycles. Schumer said the key to securing middle-class votes for the liberal agenda was offering “aspirational policies” carried out by “a government active on behalf of the middle class.” Schumer never brought into focus the qualities that define such an agenda, but does make clear how far the Democrats retreated in the four decades since Robert Kennedy sought the presidency by upbraiding the middle class for their callous indifference to the poor. “People will choose a government that helps them over no government at all,” according to Schumer. “But they'll choose no government over one they believe is helping somebody else.”
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