ALL WE NEED IS LOVE [AND RESPONSIBILITY]

Conservative Compassion Vs. Liberal Pity (Michael Knox Beran, Summer 2003, City Journal)

A remarkable feature of President Bush's pronouncements is his unashamed use of the "L" word. Mr. Bush calls his political philosophy "compassionate conservatism," but he is not afraid to say the older, stronger word that gives that philosophy its meaning. The word is love.

Mr. Bush used the word when, during the presidential campaign, he was confronted by a man who spoke loosely and negligently of illegitimate children and the welfare system. When the man uttered the word "bastards," Mr. Bush became angry. "First of all, sir," he said, "we must remember that it is our duty to love all the children." The president was similarly unflinching in his inaugural address, in which he spoke of "failures of love." In that address Mr. Bush spoke, too, of "uncounted, unhonored acts of decency," an allusion to Wordsworth's lines describing

that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

Many conservatives are skeptical of the notion of mixing love and politics. Memories of the sloppy radicalism of the 1960s, with its "Summer of Love," can sour almost anyone on love's "significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe," as T. S. Eliot put it. But the taint goes deeper than the sixties. Long before the hippies exhorted a now-defunct counterculture to "make love, not war," the parties of the Left sought to make love a first principle of politics. The socialists invoked the idea of love in their struggle against market liberalism: they believed that the modern system of loveless labor could be replaced by a model of community grounded not in competition but in mutual care. In their idea of the "communal" or "social" man, the socialists disclosed the deeper image of their hearts, the idea of the loving man, the man who is not alienated either from himself or the things and people around him.

In the twentieth century, many liberals adopted this vision of love's place in society. They embraced the modest socialism of the welfare state partly because they hoped to stave off more draconian forms of socialist organization, but also because they genuinely sympathized with the plight of the less fortunate, whose condition they hoped to improve through social legislation. In nationalizing almsgiving, the liberals were motivated, too, by the belief, so characteristic of the last century, that compassion exercised under the supervision of government experts is more likely to be effective than the charitable impulses of private individuals. Charity would no longer be a gift but a right. The liberals hoped, through this change of terms, to make taking alms less humiliating to the taker. They failed to see that the taking of charity is always humiliating-except, perhaps, when the gifts are accompanied by an affection so palpable as to diminish the shaming quality of the transaction.

The error the socialists and the welfare-state liberals made was to suppose that love's efficacy can be gradually extended beyond the bounds of the family and the tribe, where it spontaneously creates desirable patterns of order, into larger communities, where it does not. Wherever we see love required to perform a large, public role, we find that it almost always degenerates into pity.

If you thought the atmosphere mysteriously smelled a little cleaner today and the sun shone a little clearer, it was probably because there's a new edition of the great City Journal on-line, always a breath of fresh air.

Conservatives well understand that the great structural weakness of democracy is that the majority soon figures out that it can transfer the wealth of others to itself--thus Social Security and whatnot--but this essay nails the problem that was not anticipated, though it was early identified by Alexis de Tocqueville: that governmental charity, even if well intended, tends to harm the recipient, the givers (taxpayers), and, worst of all, the connective tissue of society. Here is how he described the process in his tragically underread Memoir on Pauperism:

[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case. Public alms guarantee life but do not make it happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving; legal charity does not thereby eliminate wealth or poverty in society. One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy. Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link which could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat.

It seems not too much to say that if the American republic is to be preserved and strengthened for future generations, conservatives must find a way to remedy these foreseen and the unforseen flaws. We are never going back, however much the most reactionary among us might long for it, to a wholly private system of social welfare. So how can we reform the public sector so as to ameliorate the worst effects of these two problems? Compassionate conservatism, though the name disturbs many on the Right, is really just an attempt to answer this question.

Here's how George W. Bush has, in part, described compassionate conservatism:

I've described myself as a compassionate conservative, because I am convinced a conservative philosophy is a compassionate philosophy that frees individuals to achieve their highest potential. It is conservative to cut taxes and compassionate to give people more money to spend. It is conservative to insist upon local control of schools and high standards and results; it is compassionate to make sure every child learns to read and no one is left behind. It is conservative to reform the welfare system by insisting on work; it's compassionate to free people from dependency on government. It is conservative to reform the juvenile justice code to insist on consequences for bad behavior; it is compassionate to recognize that discipline and love go hand in hand.

Note that this is a tough love, that requires people to meet standards, accept responsibilities, and discipline themselves. As it happens, we are arrived at a time in our history when the genius of the markets can be united with our desire for a social safety net in order to essentially transform the welfare state so that we transfer money not from others but from ourselves to ourselves and this can be done in ways that reinforce personal responsibility. We've already begun reforming welfare so that it requires people to work, but besides the condition of general poverty, there are three key moments in all our lives when we want there to be some support available to us: when we're ill, when we're unemployed, and when it's time to retire. All three of these can be provided for by personal savings accounts: individual retirement accounts; medical savings accounts; and personal unemployment accounts. Once can chafe at the coercive nature of such a scheme, the regulation that will be necessary to guarantee the savings aren't squandered, and the government contributions that may be needed to keep especially the working poor fully invested in these devices, but the choice is not between this regime and absolute freedom; it is between such a freer and more free-market oriented system and the current abomination.

Meanwhile, in the realm of social services, we can seek to transfer as much of the actual provision of these services as possible to private charities and faith-based institutions, not simply out of some reflexive anti-government animus, nor some clandestine desire to fund churches, but because we need to rebuild community and reconnect the providers and recipients of such services. There is no shame in needing help from time to time, but the obligation you accept when you ask a neighbor for that help has a far different quality than the sense of entitlement with which you make a claim on government. Similarly, it is all to easy for us all to pay our taxes and believe we've done our part, but quite another to know that at the church around the corner our friends and neighbors are actually providing assistance to those in need. Where schools are concerned, a system where child A automatically attends school B places few demands on the parents, while a system where child A can choose between schools B, C, D, & E affords the parents a threshold opportunity to get more involved. So too would getting the government out of the business of funding nursing homes make elderly parents once more a responsibility of their children. Such reforms, which are often portrayed as merely ways to defund government are instead ways of reknitting families, neighborhoods, communities, and so on so that civil society resumes its central place in our lives and government recedes to the background somewhat. This is not the death of government, but the return to the rule it fulfills well, as an organizer of national values, and a recession from the role at which it has proven ineffective, providing myriad social services to every individual. Most importantly it is a way to reconnect each of us to the decisions that affect our lives and to the people around us. So can a compassionate conservative philosophy produce a society that combines greater personal freedom with greater personal responsibility while creating greater reserves of social capital. This would be no mean achievement.


MORE:
-George W. Bush's Acceptance Speech (Republican National Convention, August 3, 2000) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2003 9:15 PM