Political Care Package

Expect to hear that refrain delivered more and more often as Republicans take control of the Senate early next year. For no matter the subject—health care, food stamps, immigration, marginal tax rates—the preferred insult for conservatives these days is not that they’re wrong, or misguided, or even stupid. It’s that they’re cruel.

We live in an age of conspicuous compassion. Modern White House aides earn their salaries scouting the most dejected victims to adorn the next press conference or State of the Union address, and woe betide any politician who fails sufficiently to demonstrate his sympathy for the wretched and the disaffected. One of the more chewed-over statistics from the 2012 election involved what more than one pundit termed the “empathy gap.” Exit pollsters for NBC gave voters four options for the quality that most affected their choice of candidate. Mitt Romney handily won Americans looking for a man who “shares my values,” “is a strong leader,” and “has a vision for the future.” But more than a fifth of the electorate was most interested in having a president who “cares about people like me.” Barack Obama won that group, 81-18.

Republicans have two options for dealing with such a problem: the easy way, and the right way. 

The easy way is to soften the GOP’s image. Find the party’s most proficient brow-furrowers and stage a few photo ops where they can shake hands sympathetically with pensioners. Talk less about tax cuts and more about tax credits. Maybe recruit a few professional actors. The right way is to harden the electorate, attack the premise, convince voters that public empathy is a poor yardstick for choosing officeholders and government policies. This is, of course, a longer project, and a more difficult one. 

But William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has done yeoman’s work with The Pity Party. He methodically demonstrates that a political movement built on empathy leaves its adherents leaning haphazardly on a rickety pile of unexamined assumptions and logical leaps. As he points out, there’s a reason why “Aristotle examined compassion, which we treat as a moral virtue, in the Rhetoric, discussing it solely in terms of the power to move an audience. He does not mention the subject in the Ethics or the Politics.”

Since the emotional calculus involved in snap decisions is unknowable, we shouldn’t be surprised that, when politicians do the math of pathos, they never seem to come up with a limiting principle. Every problem is as tragic, urgent, and worthy of action as every other. Consider this gem of an argument Voegeli pulls from Matt Miller at the Washington Post: “If you feel it’s urgent to help the victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, then deep in your heart you also support Obamacare.” The line is funny because it proves too much: Matt Miller might just as easily have compared hurricane relief to taxpayer-subsidized automobile insurance or federal research on Exploding Head Syndrome. What he really means is: “Here are two causes that only a monster could oppose.”

Once ingrained, this kind of thinking leads to a society that (as Voegeli puts it) cares less about actually helping others than it cares about caring. Public compassion becomes an end in itself, and the machinery of government is simply a means of catharsis. Hence, the people who push the hardest for expanding government programs are the ones least interested in whether the programs actually work. Confront a progressive friend with a few statistics—the study that suggests patients on Medicaid fare even worse than those with no insurance at all, or the paper that shows enrollment in Head Start makes zero long-term difference to students’ academic success—and he will reply, almost without fail, that the problem is funding. If only we had more dump trucks to ferry pallets of crisp 100-dollar bills from the Federal Reserve to various federal offices. 

All this emoting leaves little room in our public discourse for much else—say, for example, calm examination of moral hazards or unintended consequences. President Obama once quoted the late movie critic Roger Ebert in a speech, saying, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs.” A conservative is likely to suggest that this explains the problem precisely.

Conservatives aren’t unfeeling—no one, save the psychopath, needs to be taught empathy—but they do subordinate their emotions to higher beliefs: duty, for example, or family, or God, among others. This past summer the Pew Research Center conducted a survey that asked Americans to pick, from among a set of values, the three they think most important to inculcate in children. Across the political spectrum, the top choice was “responsibility.” Thereafter, ideological skew set in. Consistently liberal respondents next chose “empathy for others” (34 percent) and “helping others” (28 percent). Consistent conservatives picked “religious faith” (59 percent) and “hard work” (44 percent).

Voegeli puts it this way:

That’s a sentence every Republican member of Congress would do well to memorize. The federal government, a bureaucratic monolith of 2.7 million civilian workers, cannot empathize with its citizens, and to suggest otherwise is to anthropomorphize. Individual employees of bureaus and agencies are capable of feeling compassion—but as the VA and IRS have recently shown, they do not make a habit of it. A president should be chosen for his competence, vision, and fortitude, not his ability to project benevolence on television. 

Kyle Peterson is managing editor of the American Spectator.