The Pity Party (15 page)

Even as a rhetorical trope, however, the idea of the nation as one big family, or village, is unpersuasive and unsettling. Clinton's description of the modern village as the “network of values and relationships that support and affect our lives” doesn't exclude anything, and a “category” that encompasses everything doesn't really designate anything. Similarly, adults who truly succeeded in overcoming the inclination to distinguish between their own and other people's children would be monstrous, not virtuous. Normal, decent people array their affections and obligations in concentric circles. We take care of our own, but do not regard all people as equally and identically our own, so we do not care for all in the same way or to the same extent.

There are things to be said in favor of heeding then-senator Obama's admonition to broaden the ambit of our concern. His call, however, to “empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers,” implies we should empathize with distant strangers in ways increasingly similar to, and ultimately indistinguishable from, the ways we empathize with close friends. Such advice, taken seriously, would do more to make us bad friends than good strangers.

Broadening the ambit of our concern would be more plausible, promising, and admirable if its advocates respected the existing ambits of our concern. The point should not be to regret or fight against our particularist inclinations, nor to somehow replicate our feelings for those who are closest to us when arranging our feelings and conduct toward those who are distant and anonymous. Whatever prospects there are for expanding empathy rest on first honoring the operation of our compassionate impulses in their natural ambits. As the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain argued, we “cannot possibly blur all the lines and generate a generic, all-purpose ‘love' for all children everywhere. Indeed, we cannot even recognize our more diffuse and less direct responsibilities to ‘children' unless we understand what it means to be responsible to the particular children who have been entrusted to our care.”
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There's a second dangerous oversimplification in ideas like Cuomo's and Clinton's. It's true that nations are not big families or villages, but it's also true that even families and villages have internal relationships far more varied and subtle than simply sharing benefits and burdens by feeling one another's pain. Even the simplest human associations embrace complex, often contentious, arrangements about the internal allocation of authority, functions, status, rights, and duties. If the personal is political, as feminists contend, it's safe to conclude the political is really political. Waving the word “mutuality” at obstinate psychological and sociological realities does not banish them from either the smallest or largest human groupings.

The politics of kindness, taken seriously, seeks to subordinate all these other considerations to the compassionate desire to take care of our own. It reduces all relationships in a nation to the dichotomy posited to govern families and villages: the subjects who experience feelings of compassion and the objects whose sufferings give rise to those feelings. The empathizers and the empathizees, in other words, who become the helpers and the helpless. To assess the feasibility and desirability of the politics of kindness, however, we need to keep other kinds of relationships in mind. The helpless are not just helpless, and the helpers not just helpful. There are, instead, complex circumstances and relationships within each group, and also between them.

Helplessness, for example, is not binary but scaled, not uniform but diverse. The helpless include some who could have done things in advance to prevent or mitigate their suffering, such as buying insurance or making more prudent, less risky choices. Even natural disasters raise questions of “moral hazard.” If people choose to live on floodplains or fault lines, compassionately rebuilding their homes and neighborhoods with disaster relief funds might encourage them to stay in such places rather than relocate to regions that would be safer for them and cheaper for us. According to William Galston, a former Clinton administration official now at the Brookings Institution, only 8 percent of Americans who: (a) finish high school; (b) marry before having a child; and (c) postpone marriage until after the age of twenty wind up impoverished. By contrast, of those who fail those life assignments, 79 percent are poor.
¹³

Such achievements are not always easy, but neither are they heroic. Compassion that responds to suffering as such, however, without considering how the sufferer's decisions or habits might have inaugurated, perpetuated, or aggravated his suffering harbors the potential for great harm. Charles Blow demolished a straw man when he ascribed to conservatives the belief that “Whatever your lesser lot in life, it's completely within your means to correct.” That “completely” misrepresents both his political targets and the sociological reality. Each of us will live a life that turns out a particular way. That outcome will be the result of some things we can control, such as the choices we make and habits we cultivate, and some things we cannot control: how we fare in the genetic lottery of cognition, health, and attractiveness; the time and place we're born; the usefulness of the cultural starter kit we get from the family, ethnic group, and religion in which we're raised; and so on. It's impossible to make a tidy, confident distinction between what's in our control and what's beyond it.

But it certainly
seems
, given the epistemological impossibility of definitively apportioning causality between pluck and luck, better advice to emphasize the former than the latter. That is, individuals who dwell on or even exaggerate their ability to overcome, through discipline and determination, the obstacles in front of them are more likely to fashion lives well lived than those who dwell on or exaggerate the height of the mountains standing between them and their goals. Liberals work constantly to make us aware of the dangers of blaming people for things beyond their control. They're equally determined, though, to deny the opposite danger: giving people reasons and incentives to do less than they might to live successfully and admirably.

The admonition against blaming the victim is, on its own terms, redundant. Victims are, by definition, not to blame for their plights. The hard and important question is not whether to blame victims, but to figure out whether and in what sense any particular sufferer
is
a victim.

As I suggested in Chapter One, liberals' understanding of the victimhood of victims was reshaped in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963. Compassion had been an important element of liberalism since the New Deal, but one constrained by other political considerations during the middle of the twentieth century. Journalist Joe Klein argues that the Roosevelt marriage was a microcosm of these political tensions. In 1941, as it became increasingly doubtful America could avoid war with Germany, which had used aerial bombing against civilian population centers in Europe, the president thought the Office of Civil Defense should attend to . . . civil defense: fire departments, air-raid shelters, evacuation plans. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who spent four embarrassing months as the agency's assistant director, thought morale boosting and social justice were equally important to civil defense, and wanted to use some of the allocated funds for public housing and day-care centers. When Congress rebuked her by explicitly banning civil defense funds for “instruction in physical fitness by dancers,” which was a pet project designed to impart rhythmic training in order to keep children relaxed in air-raid shelters, she resigned her position. Even a sympathetic biographer called Mrs. Roosevelt's ideas about defense “absurdly broad” and “naïve.”
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Through the end of her life in 1962, the Eleanor tendency was restrained by other facets of liberalism. Midcentury liberalism was, as conservative author John O'Sullivan has argued, “meliorist, pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving.”
¹⁵
November 22, 1963, marks the breaching of the walls that had confined and tempered liberal compassion.

It's not just that Kennedy's assassination was a terrible and shocking tragedy, but that liberals decided instantly and emphatically to make it a meaningful rather than a senseless tragedy. The facts, especially those about Lee Harvey Oswald's communist sympathies, were not allowed to get in the way of a good martyrdom. JFK died for civil rights, a cause to which he had been decidedly cool throughout his political career, and as a victim of right-wing extremism. James Reston of the
New York Times
wrote the day after the shooting that the president was a “victim of a violent streak he sought to curb.” His death meant that “something in the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.” Chief Justice Earl Warren declared Kennedy had “suffered martyrdom as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” Democratic Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield said that Kennedy had given his life so “there would be no room for the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice and the arrogance which converged in that moment of horror to strike him down.”
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Fifty years have not sufficed to get liberals to abandon sophistries about right-wingers' guilt for Kennedy's death. In 2013 the
New Yorker
's George Packer conceded that Oswald's avowed Marxism “might seem to absolve [Dallas's] right wing of any responsibility” for the assassination—but not really, of course. In fact, villains sent over by liberal central casting were to blame. Through a process of psychological osmosis, the “potent brew of right-wing passions . . . suffused many people in Dallas with the spirit of dissension and incipient violence during the early sixties. . . .” The fact that “Dallas was the last large American city to desegregate its schools” augments, somehow, its culpability in Kennedy's murder. In this context, according to Packer, Oswald was merely “a malleable, unstable figure breathing the city's extraordinarily feverish air.”
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Liberals had gone into the 1960s declaring that America was in such great shape—thanks to liberalism itself, they boasted, which had secured prosperity, contained communism, and promoted racial harmony—that bold new improvements were attainable. After the inflection point of Dallas, it came out of the 1960s insisting that America was in such terrible shape that enacting, generously funding, and successfully implementing a maximally transformative liberal policy agenda was imperative if the country was to avert an imminent and deserved collapse.

Two of the most influential books on political economy published during America's extraordinary economic boom in the quarter century after World War II—John Kenneth Galbraith's
The Affluent Society
(1958) and Michael Harrington's
The Other America
(1962)—provided liberals a frame to appeal to voters' compassion in the same way charities appeal to donors' compassion. America was an affluent society where most people enjoyed greater wealth, better prospects, and more economic security than they had before. They were, indeed, better off than any people in any nation had ever been before. Not only were the terrible memories of the Great Depression receding, but politicians and commentators spoke expansively about how the acquisition of Keynesian tools for macroeconomic management ensured no such depression would ever happen again. Instead, affluent America could look forward confidently, almost complacently, to getting more and more affluent.

There were, however, stubborn “pockets of poverty” in the other America—urban slums, the hollows of Appalachia, and Indian reservations—not yet prospering from the rising tide that had lifted so many boats. The scandal of poverty in the midst of plenty conduced to an obvious solution: government programs would use an affluent society's affluence, redirecting a portion so small the prosperous majority would scarcely miss or even notice it, to lift the impoverished denizens of the other America into a nation rendered more unified and decent. “Today, for the first time in our history,” President Johnson said in his 1964 message to Congress calling for a War on Poverty, “we have the power to strike away the barriers to full participation in our society. Having the power, we have the duty.”
¹⁸

Four years to the day after LBJ sent that message, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York declared his presidential candidacy, challenging Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination. He made clear during his brief, doomed campaign that one of the worst things about the war in Vietnam was that it deprived the War on Poverty of both fiscal resources and moral urgency. In his biography of RFK, Arthur Schlesinger notes approvingly that Kennedy decried the “madness” he encountered at a college campus in 1967 when a majority of the students in an audience favored more rather than less bombing in Vietnam. “Don't you understand that what we are doing to the Vietnamese is not very different than what Hitler did to the Jews?” Kennedy said.
¹⁹

So brief and modest were the sacrifices required to eliminate poverty, as characterized by Johnson, that they barely qualified as burdens: “Our history has proved that each time we broaden the base of abundance, giving more people the chance to produce and consume, we create new industry, higher production, increased earnings and better income for all.” Kennedy, by contrast, offered himself as a Savonarola who would summon affluent Americans to redeem themselves by renouncing their smug, callous self-indulgence. Campaigning in his first primary contest after entering the race, Kennedy found himself in a tense confrontation at the Indiana University medical school. A questioner in the audience for his speech asked, “Where are you going to get all the money for the federally subsidized programs you're talking about?” Kennedy looked at the “incipient M.D.'s about to enter lucrative careers,” as Schlesinger described them, and said, “From you.” He went on to tell the students: