Freddie issues a powerful challenge:
My least favorite conservative trope– my very least favorite– is the “liberals are naive” meme. Drives me a little crazy, both because as I said above I have never seen a compelling reason why we should abandon pursuing impossible goods, and because conservatives simply have their own naivete. Where liberals are supposedly naive about the ability of government to create happiness/security/fulfillment, conservatives either naively think that the market, community or society will provide these things, or they elide those concerns altogether….
I long for a conservatism that publicly says what some conservatives say privately, that they don’t care what happens to people with needs that they can’t fill themselves. It used to be that libertarianism was a bastion for this kind of cruel but honest conservatism, where people were fine with saying “sucks for them”. But libertarianism, as it has grown in popularity, has become just another ideology of free market utopianism, where people conveniently assert that, if government disappears, there won’t be any suffering. Because the question of a real social safety net of last resort is so intractable for these thinkers, they think them away. They can’t confront the problem of people who can’t feed or house or clothe themselves in any responsible way, so they don’t. Instead they contribute to the popular and growing project of asserting that capitalism is a system that eventually is going to mean no suffering, no one left behind.
In a follow-up post, he continues:
Suffering exists in the world, and in the United States. That is an inevitable consequence of life. The fact that it is inevitable does not obviate our responsibility, as individuals or a society, to make good faith efforts to ameliorate that suffering. In a sense, any individual’s thoughts about how far that responsibility extends determines whether they are a liberal, or a conservative, or a libertarian, or a socialist, or whatever else…
I promise you, there are very many people who think we should do nothing at all about suffering adults. In fact, I’d wager that their number includes the majority of libertarians and many conservatives. So… what happens to those people? What happens to those people if government does not provide for them? Again, you will hear reasons why it’s bad for government to provide for him, from conservatives, and you’ll hear reasons why it’s unfair for government to provide for him. But you’ll find precious few conservatives that will have anything whatsoever to say about what, exactly, will happen to such a person. You can say that they’ll just continue to suffer, or you can say that we should care for them, or you can come up with an alternative scheme for how they can be cared for. You can’t, however, act like pointing out the difficulties inherent in this caring for people amounts to an answer about what exactly will happen to them without government.
There are indeed such people, and shame on them. I’ve a certain affinity for some aspects of Objectivism — how was that for weaselly? — but the Randians-Are-Jerks stereotype exists for good reason. Excess compassion can have ill side effects, but cliched responses involving upward force applied to bootstraps can be heartless.
That being said, Freddie makes a really irksome error: one’s thoughts about how extensive the government’s role should be in ameliorating suffering determines which of those political labels fit. Those labels have nothing to do with one’s willingness to help others privately. One might argue — perhaps successfully — that conservatives’ expectations of their own non-coerced generosity are naive, but that’s not the same as saying they don’t care. Indeed — depending on how much money/time a person gives — they could easily out-compassion the biggest bleeding heart liberal.
If I get my druthers and government takes a back seat to private charities in these matters and people fall through the cracks, am I willing to let them starve? I suppose I am, though I’d be saddened that nobody helped them (and that people, including me, didn’t donate more). But if Freddie gets additional government sponsored/operated safety nets and someone falls through the cracks, is he willing to live with that? I imagine he is, though he’d be saddened that the government wasn’t there to help him and advocate they do more. That hardly makes either of us a horrible human being.
Regardless, conservatives’ belief that social safety nets should be handled through private charities creates a great obligation for us to be charitable. That’s something I need to do personally and I’m thankful for the impetus.
Posted by Tom in Conservatism