The Pity Party (21 page)

The liberalism revealed by Smiley and Savage—smiley toward those deserving compassion, savage toward those who fail to extend empathy or are unworthy of receiving it—validates the assessment Christopher Lasch made ten years before their tirades in his posthumously published
The Revolt of the Elites
. “Upper-middle-class liberals,” he wrote, do
not
regard their agenda or worldview as matters about which decent and reasonable people can disagree.

When confronted with resistance to [their] initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant. In the heat of political controversy, they find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light—those who “just don't get it,” in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude.

For such liberals,

“Middle America” . . . has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: “family values,” mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing—not because they wish to overthrow the old order but precisely because their defense of it appears so deeply irrational that it expresses itself, at the higher reaches of its intensity, in fanatical religiosity, in a repressive sexuality that occasionally erupts into violence against women and gays, and in a patriotism that supports imperialist wars and a national ethic of aggressive masculinity.
⁷⁴

Speaking at a 2008 campaign fund-raising event in San Francisco, unaware his remarks were being recorded, then-senator Barack Obama managed to express empathy and disdain for Middle Americans at the same time. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.” So far, so good: one more item on the endless roster of suffering situations liberalism exists to ameliorate.

Obama went on, however, to explain the situation in a way that wounded his campaign and reputation. Either he shared the worldview of the urban liberals seated before him, or understood that he needed to frame his point for this audience as an anthropologist would report on an exotic though primitive tribe. In any case, Obama asserted that he understood the red-state voters better than they understood themselves, and reduced their opinions and concerns to economic epiphenomena: “And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

For a century, going back to the Progressive era, the reactor core of American liberalism has been an “alliance of experts and victims,” according to political scientist Harvey Mansfield.
⁷⁵
The experts and victims may not add up to a majority, however, the basis for gaining power in a democracy. There are two ways to deal with this political problem. The first, which Occupy Wall Street took to its outer limit, is to argue that nearly all Americans are victims, and therefore depend for relief on the experts' ministrations. The difficulty with this course, as Smiley discerned, is that many Americans really don't like to be told what to do, and understand that self-pity will lead to being the objects of others' pity, and then to the objects of their directives. “No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture,” writes Walter Russell Mead, than the “belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help' of experts and professionals.”
⁷⁶
The second response to this problem, if experts plus victims (self-identified and willing to be rescued by experts) is less than 50 percent of the voters, is to gain the votes needed to secure a majority by persuading or intimidating enough voters who are neither experts nor victims to vote for the alliance of those who are. The key argument for this purpose is that those who do not recognize the expertise of the experts are stupid, preferring ignorance, and those who do not recognize the victimhood of the victims are wicked, lacking compassion.

Despite their cognitive limitations, the Americans reviled by Savage and Smiley, and patronized by Obama, have figured something out. Even people so ignorant they happily remain in Oklahoma rather than relocate to Seattle infer, with good reason, that the alliance of experts and victims is not on the up-and-up. The experts are not always as expert or as disinterested as they like to think. In particular, the victims are not necessarily as helpless as the experts posit, as the latter are endlessly eager for venues to apply their expertise, assert the authority it bestows, and demonstrate their compassion. Red-state rubes who haven't heard of Goethe are smart enough to share his fear of a world that turns into one big hospital, where each is the other's humane nurse. Blue-state types may know something about Goethe, but not enough to grasp why a republic of wards and wardens might be a problem.

According to one 2012 exit poll, Mitt Romney won clear victories among the three-fourths of the electorate who believed a presidential candidate's most important quality was either his “vision for the future” (54 percent to President Obama's 45 percent), whether he “shares my values” (56 percent to 42 percent), or was “a strong leader” (61 percent to 38 percent). Obama carried the one remaining category so decisively, however, as to win reelection. Of the 21 out of every 100 voters who believed the most important quality in a presidential candidate was that “he cares about people like me,” 17 voted for Obama and 4 voted for Romney.
⁷⁷
Red-state primitives join with Goethe in their apprehensions about a nation that chooses its leaders on this basis, fears prefigured by Barbara Walters beseeching President-elect Carter, “Be wise with us, Governor. Be good to us.” A vigorous republic should be defined, not by how much its public officials care for people like (or even unlike) me, but by how well people can and do care for themselves, their families, and their communities. The greater our capacity and determination to assert that prerogative and take advantage of the opportunities it defends, the less the quality of our lives will depend on presidential empathy.

Apart from the civic debilitation begotten by the politics of kindness, the correlation between politicians who care about people like me and policies that benefit people like me is, as I'll discuss in the next chapter, highly tenuous.

Chapter 4

H
OW
L
IBERAL
C
OMPASSION
L
EADS TO
B
ULLSHIT

H
ead Start, a War on Poverty initiative, provides federal funds for preschool programs intended to prepare three- and four-year-olds from impoverished families for elementary school. Democrats constantly extol and promise to expand the program, and attack Republicans for criticizing and seeking to diminish it. The 1988 Democratic platform, for example, declared that few federal programs were more successful than Head Start.
¹

If that praise is accurate, all Americans should be apprehensive, liberals especially. “Head Start simply does not work,” according to Joe Klein's summary in
Time
magazine of a long-term study released in 2010 by the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the program.
²
The official HHS reaction to its Head Start Impact Study shed more light on why it was a failure than on how it might be improved. According to the department, the study showed that Head Start “positively influenced children's school readiness”—but only if you tested them after they finished Head Start but before they started kindergarten. On this basis the assistant secretary for children and families declared, “Head Start has been changing lives for the better since its inception.” The department acknowledged, however, that “measured again at the end of kindergarten and first grade,” children who went through Head Start “were at the same level on many of the measures studied” as ones who did not.
³

Less vaguely, the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson sifted through the study's data to discover that when researchers gave both Head Start participants and an economically and socially similar control group of students never enrolled in the program “44 different academic tests at the end of the first grade, only two seemed to show even marginally significant advantages for the Head Start group. And even those apparent advantages vanished after standard statistical controls were applied.”
⁴
HHS subsequently released data showing there were no latent benefits from Head Start, either, ones that manifested themselves as its graduates proceeded through their school years. Thus, 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.
⁵

Head Start, in other words, did a good job preparing children for school—right up until the day they started school, when it quickly became clear they were no more academically ready than children from outside the program. That HHS could, nonetheless, congratulate itself on improving the “readiness” of Head Start participants, who turned out not to be ready for the thing Head Start was supposedly getting them ready for, helps explain how a program that costs the federal government $8 billion a year, and has run up more than $180 billion in outlays since its inception in 1965, could spend so much and accomplish so little. Liberals' speeches and editorials routinely insist Head Start must be “fully funded,” which means Congress should appropriate enough funds for the program to permit every eligible child to enroll.
⁶
But serious concern for the program's ostensible beneficiaries—as opposed to concern for its providers and administrators, who might be rewarded irrespective of children's progress—would make it more important for Head Start to be fully
functional
than fully funded.

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. Nevertheless, he announced new rules to ensure for “
the first time in history
that Head Start programs will be truly held accountable for performance in the classroom” (emphasis added). 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 historic rules Obama announced would require Head Start programs to meet “clear, high standards” and allow new providers to bid for grants going to agencies that fell short.
⁷

That it can be characterized as a bold departure for the federal government to give money to social service providers only if—as opposed to whether or not—they do what they're supposed to with it is a more damning indictment of liberal government's business-as-usual than anything you'll read in the most scornful
Wall Street Journal
editorial. According to journalist James Fallows, conservatives believe “government is simply evil, that it is wasteful, oppressive, misguided and inefficient.”
⁸
It would follow logically that American conservatives govern badly when given the opportunity because they don't really want to govern at all. A 2006 essay by social scientist Alan Wolfe argued that this contradiction explained how the Republican president and Congress in power that year “imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.” The fundamental problem is that conservatives confront an irresolvable tension inherent in “managing government agencies whose missions—indeed, whose very existence—they believe to be illegitimate.” They fail when in power due to a “learned incompetence,” resulting from their conviction that government has no business undertaking many of the tasks it now discharges.
⁹

This theory of the case, resting on motive, has a corollary. If conservatives govern badly because they stand outside the boundary of the modern state yelling “Shrink!,” then liberals should govern brilliantly. The mission that defines liberalism, after all, is to vindicate the activist state's right, duty, and capacity to handle all the responsibilities entrusted to it over the past century, and then assign it new ones. Mitch Daniels, Republican governor of Indiana from 2005 to 2013, told an interviewer in 2009 that disciplining government according to “measured provable performance and effective spending” ought to be a “completely philosophically neutral objective.” For a green-eyeshade conservative, who wants the government to throw nickels around like they're manhole covers, getting the most bang for the fewest bucks is an obvious way to lighten the burden of taxes and regulations. Daniels went on, however, to voice a second implication: “I argue to my most liberal friends: ‘You ought to be the most offended of anybody if a dollar that could help a poor person is being squandered in some way.' And some of them actually agree.”
¹⁰