• William Voegeli, The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion, Broadside Books, 2014, 289 pages, $26.99.
By Lloyd Billingsley
“How Liberal Compassion Leads to B.S. [expletive abbreviated],” would have been a better title than The Pity Party, but it actually heads up chapter four, with sections on Gun B.S., Green B.S., Diversity B.S., Comprehensive B.S., and even Generosity B.S.
William Voegeli, visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College, and author of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, explains how all the B.S. got there.
“Liberals believe compassion is the quality that defines liberalism, certifying its moral excellence,” writes Voegeli, “This belief corresponds to their conviction that a shocking lack of compassion, manifested in callous indifference to human suffering, is the quality that defines conservatism, certifying its moral depravity.” Liberals also have turned the Democratic Party into the pity party, boasting the ability “to make compassion the political sea we swim in.”
By way of example he cites radio host and author Garrison Keillor, who says, “I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” But as the author shows, liberals are not kind to those on the other side. The late Tip O’Neill, former House speaker, said that “the evil is in the White House at the present time.” That would be Ronald Reagan and “He’s cold. He’s mean.” More recently Paul Krugman, in his gentle way, charges that “conservatives take positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable,” and are guilty of “almost pathological meanspiritedness.”
In the age of Twitter and a nation with the attention span of a hummingbird, Voegeli provides a helpful guide to the debate. On the liberal side, the classic works include A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center. More recently we find Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by George Lakoff. Readers also encounter material by Teddy Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Mario Cuomo, along with Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, and even Susan Sontag’s nuanced pronouncement that the white race is the “cancer of history.”
The author also taps Hillary Clinton’s “politics of meaning” and It Takes a Village, along with Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. In Obama’s telling, Voegeli writes, “the American experiment was conceived less to prevent government from doing harmful things than to enable it to do splendid ones.”
On the other side, Voegeli is well schooled in the Federalist Papers and on the theoretical level cites Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and even Leo Strauss. For some readers, The Pity Party will be a welcome introduction to works such as The Liberal Mind by the late Kenneth Minogue, and free-market classics such as Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.
Voegeli also has tracked down liberals capable of self-examination. For example, in 1986, during the second Reagan administration, Mickey Kaus observed that compassion is “mushy-headed because it provides no principle to tell us when our abstract compassionate principles should stop.” Kaus added that liberals deploy compassion for both the working poor and the “unmotivated delinquent who would rather smoke PCP than work.”
The author crunches some numbers and the material on “Poorlandia” and “Richistan” is informative and entertaining. The book is not about immigration, but the author sees merit in the treating the issue the way Harvard treats college admission, or the New England Patriots handle the draft. That is, immigration is a way to invite the talented who can benefit the country, as opposed to a sacred civil right possessed by 7 billion foreigners.
On the central theme of liberal compassion The Pity Party makes a strong case, but the author is well aware that liberals often remain unaffected by argument and even facts. He cites the late William F. Buckley that liberals are often shocked to learn that there are other points of view. Arguing with liberals, Buckley observed, “is as futile as presenting a devout worshipper with syllogisms constructed to refute his faith’s central revealed truth.” In the liberal view, a city like Dallas can be responsible for the assassination of president Kennedy, with Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald, according to George Packer of The New Yorker, “merely an unstable figure breathing the city’s extraordinarily feverish air.”
For all its virtues, The Pity Party may wind up as more preaching to the choir, and it does leave a loose end. There is a brand of conservatism that places social pedigree above ideas, and tends to disdain ordinary working Americans. The Pity Party does not indicate that Voegeli is of this brand, but it is well-known that the phenomenon is “not inconsiderable,” as the author says on another theme.
A number of American politicians fully agree with the arguments Voegeli advances. They tend to talk a good game but when they gain office fail to deliver. Even Ronald Reagan failed to eliminate federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education.
Likewise, an energetic conservative such as Jack Kemp found himself in charge of a useless and counterproductive agency such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Given the opportunity, politicians claiming to be conservative have failed to roll back the limitless welfare state that never has enough, and which liberals hail as the flywheel of compassion. If anyone dares to call this “conservative b.s.,” one could hardly blame her. A chapter on these lines would have made The Pity Party a better book.
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.