The Pity Party

Progressives will always claim that no matter how badly their plans go wrong, at least their terrible policies were well-intentioned.

The regimes that shot orphans, starved entire cities into submission and committed genocide were “caring” in comparison to the heartless Dickensian capitalists who did nothing for the poor except create cheap products and jobs. They might have killed millions, but their red hearts were in the right place.

They didn’t just spend all their time gobbling caviar and diving into swimming pools full of all money like the millionaires of the West. Instead they gave speeches about Marxism-Leninism, killed anyone who wasn’t up on their dialectical materialism and then gobbled working class caviar and dove into proletarian swimming pools full of money.

The path to everything from death panels to gulags was paved by outrage over the oppressed and compassion for the less fortunate… even if the real less fortunate turned out to be those on whom the tender-hearted compassion of progressives was practiced on.

That compassion is the theme of William Voegeli’s “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.” Going from Bill Clinton’s “I Feel Your Pain” to Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can,” Voegeli challenges the conspicuous compassion and self-centered emotional displays on which the contemporary progressive argument is built.

Rather than dealing with the issues, the left deals in narratives. Its pornography of misery bypasses facts, particularly those which demonstrate that it is the left’s policies that create misery, thereby showing the dangers of placing compassion above any other value; including truth. And that is one of the subjects explored in Voegeli’s book whose themes occupy the moral realm as much as the sphere of government policy.

“So many Americans,” Voegeli writes, take for granted, “that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting and being more compassionate.”

The conspicuous compassion of progressivism results in the appearance of goodness, without its substance. It is easy to mandate social welfare. Especially at someone else’s expense. What is difficult is grappling with human limitations and aspirations. That’s why the War on Poverty failed.

FDR explicitly laid out the moral double standard for the right and the left. The Pity Party quotes him as saying, “Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

There lies the high-minded formula for dismissing the crimes of the left as the “occasional faults” of warm-blooded leftists over the neglect of a conservative government. FDR was saying that it was better to do something, even if it was the wrong thing, than to do nothing. It was a left-wing indictment of nothing less than the United States Constitution. The argument is echoed today in defense of amnesty and any other disastrous Obama policy by asserting that doing something is better than nothing.

The good leftist may destroy lives, but at least he doesn’t neglect his warm-hearted duty to meddle. Better a caring killer, than a constitutionalist who doesn’t care enough to death panel the sick.

In The Pity Party, Voegeli explores the failure of progressive ideas and the immunity of those failures to reform. Looking at the global and national consequences of progressive policymaking he shows that the politics of conspicuous compassion are self-contradictory and lead to bad results and advises conservatives on how to counter the caring spin cycle of the left.

In the age of Tumblr and Twitter when the Social Justice Warrior deploys limitless outrage, bile and spleen in empathy’s name, progressive pathos has become a revolutionary hysteria that trips easily into riots and violent threats. The primacy of compassion as the only significant virtue makes it impossible to distinguish between empathy and self-serving rhetoric, between caring and egotistical hysteria.

At the big government and big media level, every argument is triangulated as being between caring progressives and uncaring conservatives. Their human shields; children, the elderly, designated minority victim classes and gentle giants, are infinite. Their personal stories, even if they happen to be those of Democratic activists covertly posing as ordinary people at a State of the Union address, negate the facts.

Every dispute, no matter how technical, eventually culminates with the left trotting out its human shields to take the debate out of the realm of facts and into the realm of personal anecdote. Since creative types can figure out how to personalize every debate, every debate becomes an empathy test. The issue stops being whether a policy will work, but whether a politician represents our values of caring. And this is where Democrats routinely trounce Republicans in polling questions.

The longstanding tactic of the left is to turn every debate into a question of which side consists of good people and which side consists of bad people. It is a tactic that Republicans have done a very poor job of fighting because they do not believe of the left what it believes about them.

A secularized empathy provides religion without deity or scripture. The new temple becomes the government building and its new bible is a million pages of ObamaCare regulations that no one reads. Its messiahs are community organizers. Its clergy hold “die-ins” and seek absolute power to regulate every detail of human life. Thus the tyranny of compassion transforms America into a Socialist theocracy.

The compassion of the left exists in a space formerly occupied by religion and is therefore immune to analysis and factual critique. It serves as the supporting ideology for leftist policy and cloaks it in the same self-serving air of a spiritual compassion that should not be examined to see how many people ended up in the gulags or death panels.

Voegeli’s critique serves as a warning that a policy based on the theatrics of compassion without moral substance or factual analysis is doomed to destroy its own unexamined founding virtues. In the name of compassion, the left hurts the very people it claims to want to help while serving its own interests.

Every crime, from Green Energy corruption to totalitarian health care regulations, is justified by an appeal to compassion. But the truly compassionate attribute is not the arrogant paternalism of leftist policymakers, but the empowerment of our fellow man through political and economic freedom.

I have no illusions or doubts of Leftists.

They wish us all dead.

I will never trust them in times of plenty, and when this nation inevitably collapses, Leftists will reap the whirlwind they have created.

In The Pity Party, Voegeli explores the failure of progressive ideas and the immunity of those failures to reform.

It is the immunity of those failures to be reformed that is so striking. The recent election in Greece in which the left has been placed in power demonstrates the truth of Nathan Bedford's maxim of government: the cure for failed socialism is invariably more socialism.

The should be seen on two levels: 1) the failure to reform occurs because whole constituencies for socialist largess understandably to oppose the breaking of their Rice bowls; 2) the right has never found a way to indict and convict socialists of their crimes.

Witness the recent election in Greece. Witness also the failure of the right to blame the 2009 recession on socialist policies in the housing industry. This failure is not merely a failure to communicate it is a failure of will. There is no stomach within the Republican leadership to fight these fights so the left wins by default.

Until we change the climate, elected officials are smart enough to play it safe and we will continue to lose the battles over who writes history.

“What is difficult is grappling with human limitations and aspirations.”

That is the key sentence. Greenfield sees it in the masses.

Use this brilliant sentence to slice open the bloated corpse of Liberalism in this country.

All of the Liberal Leaders.....Obama, Hillary, Pelosi, Reid, etc....believed in socialism when they were younger. All of humanity would be better off if we just “shared” with each other.

Then, reality socked them in the face. People weren’t just like them. Some people are just lazy. Some are criminal. Some have unbounded greed.

The world wasn’t what they thought it was, or should be. Great sadness overcame them. Humanity was a completely unhelpable mess.

After the sadness came the anger. Their hearts were pure and true. Yet, the masses weren’t pure and true. The masses ignored their wisdom and compassion. rhe Liberal leaders weren’t battling for noble but downtrodden people. They were battling for people whose concerns were sex, steak and some entertainment.

Cruel world.

The Liberal leaders had a lot of life left ahead of them after reality deflated their melodrama. What to do with it?

If the masses were only concerned with themselves, well, then they would be only concerned with themselves. There is no one so fallen as a fallen zealot. They would use the greed and self-centeredness of the masses to enrich themselves and those close to them.

This is where our Liberal leaders are. They are bitter. They are disillusioned. They are single-minded in their drive to enrich themselves while sneering at the people they use to gather their wealth.

The Liberal leaders are not moonstruck children who believe in fairies and unicorns. They are bitter, hardened souls out to get as much for themselves, and those close to them, as they possibly can.

It is a huge mistake to treat them as children instead of the greedy, self-serving liars that they are.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776) Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver . . .
This is what Rush has been almost succeeding in saying, when he says that government is not the “community.”
‘Way back in the 1950s I had a teacher who informed me, but did not convince me, that “government” and “society” were the same thing. I was a FReeper a long time before I saw the Paine quote above, tho . . .

That compassion is the theme of William Voegeli’s “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.” Going from Bill Clinton’s “I Feel Your Pain” to Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can,” Voegeli challenges the conspicuous compassion and self-centered emotional displays on which the contemporary progressive argument is built.

Greenfield's amazing...

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