OPINION:
THE PITY PARTY: A MEAN-SPIRITED DIATRIBE AGAINST LIBERAL COMPASSION
Broadside Books, $26.99, 320 pages
William Voegeli’s “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion” is required reading for all political animals.
The yet-to-confirm-or-deny presidential candidates and their essential consultants are presently consumed figuring out how they can get elected come November 2016. If they can do so by offering a unifying vision along with a set of policies that can solve our nation’s problems, even better. For the sake of both their ambition and the good of the Republic, they need to read this book and let its wisdom reorder what they think they know.
The president’s masterful State of the Union address had a dual purpose: cement his legacy to date, but more ambitiously, to place his stamp on the 2016 election by framing liberalism as the caretaker of a new middle-class economics. This level of rhetorical generality allows for a range of democratic expressions. Hillary Clinton’s challenge will be to triangulate — a term familiar from her husband’s tenure and a nod to their shared political DNA. She will have to go left early and enough to keep the Obama-Warren wing satisfied but not so far left that she can’t retain enough wiggle room to move to the center in the general election. The president also set the terrain on which the Republican rivals to his legacy must compete. For those exploring a run, Mr. Voegeli’s “The Pity Party” offers a philosophic and rhetorical pathway for an ascendant conservatism. “The Pity Party” is made for this middle-class economics moment.
Interestingly, it is also a boon to Democrats who might be forced by political necessity to speak honestly about the products of their party’s labors, and in so doing, counter the charge of malpractice that will soon be coming their way. Any speechwriter or strategic consultant that doesn’t read “The Pity Party” and share its wealth with his or her principal is committing dereliction of duty.
Mr. Voegeli starts his “Pity Party” with the promise of showing “how conservatives could explain their reservations and objections more persuasively.” It’s an enlightening read throughout, but the author is cruel and makes the reader wait for the last chapter before revealing the unifying strategy on how conservatism can win persuasively against liberalism: “Paradoxically conservatism would oppose liberalism more effectively if they opposed it less fundamentally.” This sentence puts the philosophic and cultural brilliance of his book directly into political play. It’s worth noting that Mr. Voegeli is not a consultant or messaging guru, but a political theorist at the Claremont Institute. He is one of the best at asking and answering big questions about first principles.
Then why not a tete-a-tete? The Republican disadvantage is that Democrats convincingly make a claim to be the party of greater human equality and compassion, making them the electoral scissors to the Republican paper. The claim of equality on the heartstrings of a democratic people is naturally stronger and resonates more than the claim of liberty. The democratic pitch — the promise of free stuff and fairness — is near impossible to beat head on, so Mr. Voegeli’s advice is not to do so. Where liberalism is weak is with delivering the promised goods. This failure to deliver is the less fundamental, more effective route to check liberalism’s march.
In many ways, Mr. Voegeli is using Saul Alinsky’s cornerstone rule for radicals by making the opposition live up to their own book of values. Mr. Voegeli is also more radical in his use of political language. Whereas liberals like to play the race, class and gender cards to close down the conversation, he provides conservatism a new trump card that will threaten liberalism’s chip count and can be expressed in one populist word: “Bull[expletive].” Liberalism as it turns out, is full of it in the author’s accounting.
But conservatives do not speak in such demotic ways. I think our culture has imbibed enough “South Park” and “Family Guy” to survive bull’s entrance into polite political parlance. In the effort to help conservatives get over it, the author shows bull[expletive]’s serious academic pedigree. Princeton professor Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a small pithy tract titled, “On Bull[expletive],” outlining what he saw as being new to modern sensibility with regards to an orientation to the truth. One enters the world of bull when truth matters much less than our commitments and our feelings. Liberal bull, writes Mr. Voegeli — in a sentence sized for campaigning — is “preferring to feel good than to do good.” This is a distinction that can make a huge political difference. MIT professor and Obamacare architect and salesman Jonathan Gruber is a central casting example of a liberal bull weaver.
While conservatives are not immune to the charge of bull, the Democrats’ focus on “compassion” and “empathy” as paramount political virtues make them more susceptible to stepping into it. It turns out that compassion is a modern doctrine with a selfish-center. Christ didn’t coin the word compassion, Rousseau did, and it reflects an interest in the “sufferer for the love of myself.” The emphasis is on the “I” in “I feel your pain.” The bull card, when applied to the legacy of liberal compassion, has the capacity to decouple the “reactor core” of liberalism, the “alliance of experts and victims.”
Let the final word be the author’s: “Any political cause that has arrived at the determination that the truth will set you back needs to consider its predicament carefully.”
• David DesRosiers is president of Revere Advisors.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.