Is This Why Liberals Are Liberal?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I realize that it is naive to think that a single author could have the power to change the thinking of American liberals. Still, I went through a time in my life when I thought Charles Murray’s books Losing Ground and Coming Apart might do just that.
Murray presented empirical evidence that things have become worse for the poor and minorities since the welfare state and the panoply of Great Society programs were put into place. Specifically, that the more the government has tried to solve the economic dislocations of the lower classes, the more it destroys self-reliance and the inner disciplines necessary for those on the lower rungs of society to thrive as free men and women.
In Losing Ground, Murray provides page after page of graphs and charts that document the increase in poverty, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime that have followed upon the introduction of government programs designed to alleviate these social ills. These programs don’t work; they make things worse. Murray has the facts to illustrate that.
As Murray notes in Coming Apart, we now have an America where fewer than 50 percent of lower-class whites are married. Their divorce rate is around 35 percent. Nearly 25 percent of children in these communities are being raised by single mothers. Only 30 percent of them are living with both biological parents when their mothers turn 40. Sixty percent of the children of mothers who drop out of high school are illegitimate. Lower-class white males in their prime years as wage-earners are dropping out of the workforce in increasing numbers and are dramatically more likely to be in prison than their counterparts in 1960.
Murray goes so far as to contend that the morally depressed state of this segment of our population “calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.” (Murray focused on lower-class whites to avoid the racial component to this debate. He is not talking about the “legacy of slavery.” He is talking about the impact of the welfare state. If it needs to be said, the social pathologies he describes among lower-class whites are even more pronounced among minority groups.)
Murray attributes much of the blame for this dissipation on what he calls the “Europe Syndrome,” a “view of life that goes something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible.”
Why didn’t the liberal elites listen to Murray? Why do they continue to propose more government spending on more government programs when the track record shows this approach to poverty does not work?
I recently came across a theory that I had not considered before as the answer. It appeared in the October 2014 issue of Imprimis (a publication of Hillsdale College, free upon request at Hillsdale College, 33 E. College Street, Hillsdale, MI 49242). The author, William Voegeli, is a widely published author and the senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books. His latest book is Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State.
What is Voegeli’s theory for why American liberals ignore the facts about the effects of the welfare state, for why “liberals do not seem all that concerned about whether the machine they’ve built, and want to keep expanding, is running well”? For why liberals actually seem “happier when it fails than when it succeeds”?
He argues the liberal agenda provides liberals “psychic benefits,” “compassion points” that they and other liberals “will admire,” as well a method to distinguish themselves from “mean-spirited conservatives.”
Voegeli quotes the political theories of Jean Bethke Elshtain to make the point: “Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.” Voegeli concludes that this means for a liberal “it’s more important for me to do something than to accomplish something. Once I’ve voted for, given a speech about, written an editorial endorsing, or held forth at a dinner party on the salutary generosity of some program to ‘address’ your problem, my work is done.”
The bottom line for Voegeli is that liberals “always want a bigger welfare state . . . because the politics of kindness is about validating oneself rather than helping others, which means the proper response to suffering is always, ‘We need to do more,’ and never, ‘We need to do what we’re already doing better and smarter’.”
If the “point of liberalism were to alleviate suffering, as opposed to preening about one’s abhorrence of suffering and proud support for government programs designed to reduce it, liberals would get up every morning determined to reduce the proportion of that $3 trillion outlay that ought to be helping the poor but is instead being squandered.”
But “since the real point of liberalism is to alleviate the suffering of those distressed by other’s suffering, the hard work of making our $3 trillion welfare state machine work optimally is much less attractive — less gratifying than demanding that we expand it, and condemning those who are skeptical about that expansion for their greed and cruelty.”
Is Voegeli correct? I think he is onto something, but I hesitate to come down on all fours in agreement with him, mainly because those who back the liberal agenda will reject his thesis out of hand — and they know their motives better than Voegeli and I do.
Intelligent and honest proponents of the welfare state — such as those in the Vatican and among the American bishops — would respond that it is preposterous to think that they care more about their own self-esteem than the fate of the poor; that, while they realize that some of their programs do not work as envisioned, it is important to not give up on the poor; that it is a moral society’s responsibility to seek government answers for the economic dislocations that are left in the wake of the operation of the free market.
Fair enough. But, even if Voegeli is not entirely correct about the motive behind the liberals’ willingness to back expensive social programs that do not work, he is right that they do not work; and that those who back the expansion of the welfare state have an obligation to press their case with that fact front and center.
The plight of the rural poor and inner-city minorities has not been alleviated by the welfare state, even though, in Voegeli’s words, “federal welfare state spending was 58 percent larger in 1993 when Bill Clinton became president than it had been 16 years before when Jimmy Carter took the oath of office. By 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated, it was 59 percent larger than it had been in 1993. Overall, the outlays were more than two and a half times as large in 2013 as they had been in 1977.”
We should keep in mind “Stein’s Law,” the name given to the observation by Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The failure of the welfare state to achieve its objective must be addressed, regardless of the motives behind those who defend it.