Justice
Member
- Dec 28, 2002
- 2,866
- 0
Book takes broadside at liberals' sacred cows: December 31, 2004
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/b ... 83,00.html
The New York Times boasts "All the News That's Fit to Print," but Mona Charen is not so gullible.
Following up on her best seller Useful Idiots, Charen gives the public another book, Do-Gooders, that seeks to debunk liberal discourse and unearth the facts that never made "All the News That's Fit to Print."
To carry out this task, she must become a genealogist of how liberal discourse emerged and now shapes (or distorts) our thinking and public policies.
In the introduction, she writes: "Starting in the 1960s, liberal ideas on crime, welfare, education, mental illness, family structure, and race relations - among many other things - gained preeminence. Brimming with arrogant self-righteousness, liberals of the 1960s announced that they would eliminate poverty, reverse injustice, abolish rote learning, introduce sexual liberation, free the mentally ill, and compensate for the sin of racism. They thought of themselves as do-gooders, but with only a few exceptions, their ideas have yielded harm."
Consequently, Charen conceives of her book as "a chronicle of failure" and a "moral challenge."
Although she mentions him only once, a key figure to understanding liberal discourse is the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who posited an idyllic view of human nature as basically good and corruptible because of societal constraints. After the protracted human evil of the 20th century, marked by the totalitarian movements of Nazism, fascism and communism, it's quite surprising, writes Charen, that American liberals would still hold to Rousseau's naively optimistic view.
These "do-gooder Don Quixotes" inaugurated what Charen calls "a compassion binge" and "comfortable morality play" where society, an empty abstraction, is always blamed and individuals are exonerated. If only people could be freed from the chains of society, peace and goodwill would reign.
Criminals are the good guys, made bad by the "root causes" of poverty and racial injustice, while cops are vilified and prisons are deemed antiquated. This is the problem, Charen posits, of confusing the cause for the effect. The author uses data to show that crime causes poverty and not the other way around.
Reaching out toward children in trouble, liberals have lionized single mothers while marriage and traditional families are decried, in the words of feminist Betty Friedan, as "comfortable concentration camps." Turning popular opinion on its head, Charen claims: "The children of divorce and illegitimacy have paid the price for liberalism's attachment to free love and radical individualism. Abused and neglected children have paid the price for liberalism's tendency to sentimentalize the poor."
What children need is not a government program to enable single parent families but a loving home with a mother and father, Charen notes. Of course, she has some answering to do for why divorce rates are significantly higher in the red states where conservatives live.
Charen adds that the refusal to support the mushrooming welfare state, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and expanding with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, is judged as heartless when statistics reveal that dependence on government aid sustains poverty rather than eliminates it. She reminds us that the Victorians distinguished between the "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor," a distinction that no liberal will make because handouts keep them in political power.
In 1996, welfare ended, as we know it, which Charen describes as "the greatest domestic policy success of the last thirty years." Welfare reform has not deepened poverty, she writes, but increased economic mobilization.
Charen rightly asks what kind of compassion is involved when mentally ill patients are thrown out of institutions and abandoned on the streets, when alcoholics and drug addicts receive "the warm shower of entitlements and no-strings-attached goodies," when "African Americans who question the catechism of quotas, welfare, preferences and abortion" receive "the full pariah treatment," and when mediocrity in schools is protected instead of demanding academic performance and qualified teachers.
These are all good questions, and the book amasses empirical evidence to buttress Charen's point of view. Such facts seemingly leave little wiggle room for liberals who might rush to discredit her.
But facts require interpretation. We've all grown suspicious of cherry-picked facts used to advance an agenda. And Charen introduces thoughts she expects us to take at face value.
Charen says "the ideas that took root in the 1960s were uniformly self-indulgent, childish, anti-intellectual, irresponsible, and destructive. They failed because they were inconsistent with human nature."
Where we might expect Charen to then develop a discourse on human nature, she is silent. We are never told why humans might flourish under conservative policies; we are only told they flounder under liberal policies.
In addition, a book crammed with statistics quickly bores a reader. If Charen's chronicle of failure were successful it would have rested less on facts, which are less self-evident than she would have her readers believe, and instead have made a robust argument about human nature and politics.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/b ... 83,00.html
The New York Times boasts "All the News That's Fit to Print," but Mona Charen is not so gullible.
Following up on her best seller Useful Idiots, Charen gives the public another book, Do-Gooders, that seeks to debunk liberal discourse and unearth the facts that never made "All the News That's Fit to Print."
To carry out this task, she must become a genealogist of how liberal discourse emerged and now shapes (or distorts) our thinking and public policies.
In the introduction, she writes: "Starting in the 1960s, liberal ideas on crime, welfare, education, mental illness, family structure, and race relations - among many other things - gained preeminence. Brimming with arrogant self-righteousness, liberals of the 1960s announced that they would eliminate poverty, reverse injustice, abolish rote learning, introduce sexual liberation, free the mentally ill, and compensate for the sin of racism. They thought of themselves as do-gooders, but with only a few exceptions, their ideas have yielded harm."
Consequently, Charen conceives of her book as "a chronicle of failure" and a "moral challenge."
Although she mentions him only once, a key figure to understanding liberal discourse is the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who posited an idyllic view of human nature as basically good and corruptible because of societal constraints. After the protracted human evil of the 20th century, marked by the totalitarian movements of Nazism, fascism and communism, it's quite surprising, writes Charen, that American liberals would still hold to Rousseau's naively optimistic view.
These "do-gooder Don Quixotes" inaugurated what Charen calls "a compassion binge" and "comfortable morality play" where society, an empty abstraction, is always blamed and individuals are exonerated. If only people could be freed from the chains of society, peace and goodwill would reign.
Criminals are the good guys, made bad by the "root causes" of poverty and racial injustice, while cops are vilified and prisons are deemed antiquated. This is the problem, Charen posits, of confusing the cause for the effect. The author uses data to show that crime causes poverty and not the other way around.
Reaching out toward children in trouble, liberals have lionized single mothers while marriage and traditional families are decried, in the words of feminist Betty Friedan, as "comfortable concentration camps." Turning popular opinion on its head, Charen claims: "The children of divorce and illegitimacy have paid the price for liberalism's attachment to free love and radical individualism. Abused and neglected children have paid the price for liberalism's tendency to sentimentalize the poor."
What children need is not a government program to enable single parent families but a loving home with a mother and father, Charen notes. Of course, she has some answering to do for why divorce rates are significantly higher in the red states where conservatives live.
Charen adds that the refusal to support the mushrooming welfare state, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and expanding with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, is judged as heartless when statistics reveal that dependence on government aid sustains poverty rather than eliminates it. She reminds us that the Victorians distinguished between the "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor," a distinction that no liberal will make because handouts keep them in political power.
In 1996, welfare ended, as we know it, which Charen describes as "the greatest domestic policy success of the last thirty years." Welfare reform has not deepened poverty, she writes, but increased economic mobilization.
Charen rightly asks what kind of compassion is involved when mentally ill patients are thrown out of institutions and abandoned on the streets, when alcoholics and drug addicts receive "the warm shower of entitlements and no-strings-attached goodies," when "African Americans who question the catechism of quotas, welfare, preferences and abortion" receive "the full pariah treatment," and when mediocrity in schools is protected instead of demanding academic performance and qualified teachers.
These are all good questions, and the book amasses empirical evidence to buttress Charen's point of view. Such facts seemingly leave little wiggle room for liberals who might rush to discredit her.
But facts require interpretation. We've all grown suspicious of cherry-picked facts used to advance an agenda. And Charen introduces thoughts she expects us to take at face value.
Charen says "the ideas that took root in the 1960s were uniformly self-indulgent, childish, anti-intellectual, irresponsible, and destructive. They failed because they were inconsistent with human nature."
Where we might expect Charen to then develop a discourse on human nature, she is silent. We are never told why humans might flourish under conservative policies; we are only told they flounder under liberal policies.
In addition, a book crammed with statistics quickly bores a reader. If Charen's chronicle of failure were successful it would have rested less on facts, which are less self-evident than she would have her readers believe, and instead have made a robust argument about human nature and politics.
