Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

The Best Explanation of Compasionate Conservatism

You may learn something about economics as well.

Implicit in compassionate conservatism was an epochal paradigm shift that is now all but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism’s elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half-century’s worth of experience had discredited. If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform, free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing, give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable, and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly or not at all. For the worst off—those hampered by addiction or alcohol or faulty socialization—let the government pay private organizations, especially religious ones, to help. Such people need a change of heart to solve their problems, the president himself deeply believed; and while a clergyman or a therapist might help them, a bureaucrat couldn’t.

In fact, a welfare-department worker might do harm even beyond providing money to fuel self-destructive behavior. Rather than understanding that an inner transformation is what such a person needs, the welfare worker might well try to convince him that his plight stems from an unjust economy, which provides him insufficient opportunity, or even purposely keeps a fraction of the population unemployed, so as to hold down the wages of those who are working. His problem thus is the result of vast, impersonal forces of which he is the victim (and doubly the victim if he is black in supposedly racist America). In other words—and this is the theory that undergirded the War on Poverty and has persisted to this day on the political Left, from Barbara Ehrenreich to John Edwards—capitalism is inherently defective and unjust, and therefore we need a welfare state to mitigate its harshness.