Powerful Article

I found this article today and have been enthralled by it's pointed commentary this morning.

Left, Right, & Wrong
by Garret Keizer

"To be honest, I have begun to lose patience with "compassion," be it the conservative version that sees poverty as a moral disease to be cured with a benevolent dose of 19th-century rectitude, or the liberal version that views poverty as an exotic culture to be scrutinized through the kindly lens of tolerance. Poverty is not a culture to be understood; it is a condition to be eradicated. The only people who think otherwise have never sat down in the places where I've sat down, including the house with all the dogs (and the mold and the burns and the bruises and the blank-eyed toddlers and the interminable cough).

But "compassionate conservatism" is now the ascendant and thus the more insidious form. Like other kinds of demagoguery, it is based on a partial truth: the idea that individuals and civic groups can meet needs that no government can. This is a claim guaranteed to resonate in any place where the fire department is staffed by volunteers.

But none of us lives entirely in a small town (no more than a city dweller lives exclusively in Chicago or New York). We live as beneficiaries of a society that is complex, affluent, centralized, and -- when it operates as intended -- democratic. This is the level on which compassionate conservatism becomes completely disingenuous. It is also the level on which it wouldn't hurt to borrow some "faith-based" language. How can you practice the Golden Rule or obey the injunction to "love your neighbor as yourself" without wishing your neighbor a standard of living on a par with your own, a standard that can be achieved only through the apparatus of the state, including the apparatus of progressive taxation? Once the Good Samaritan starts to vote and his money starts to earn interest, his charity must become either political or quaint. He may still choose to engage in freelance philanthropy, and we hope that he will, but he cannot relegate the welfare of his neighbor to the whims of good-hearted volunteers without loving that neighbor considerably less than he loves himself. The privatization of social welfare advocated by the right is not compassionate conservatism; it is anemic compassion.

The challenge is to make this point both forceful and clear. This is where the left may be at its greatest disadvantage. Reactionary politics work well with electronic media because reaction is electric; that is, immediate, automatic, and superficial. Revolutionary politics, on the other hand, have always been tied to a dogged willingness to teach: to raise consciousness, to show how the ties that bind include those invisible economic cords that bind the disadvantaged to their fates. You may ask who would go to the trouble of writing up the lesson plans; it might be better to ask who's writing them now."

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"THE ESSENTIAL PROBLEM of the American left is not that it uses the wrong language or doesn't read the Bible or doesn't know how to relate to just-plain folks. The essential problem of the American left is that it has been displaced. Its current position in the liberal imagination is that of a dumped first wife.

What now sleeps on her old side of the bed is a purportedly leftist solution to the same bourgeois conundrum that faces the right: namely, how to maintain a semblance of moral decency while enjoying the spoils of a winner-take-all economic system. Or, put another way, how to maintain the illusion that you can be a good person and want a good society without either kind of goodness costing you a dime."

To read the complete article, go here and enter code MJJ9AK.