Posted on 01/14/2005 1:27:43 PM PST by pissant
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.
Useful Idiots was fabulous.
thanks for the pic.
".....she has some answering to do for why divorce rates are significantly higher in the red states where conservatives live."
The answer might be that since less liberals even bother to marry, it stands to reason that less would get "divorced"
"Starting in the 60's"
Hmmmm? I find that date interesting. I've always thought the decline of America began with the assassination of JFK.
I still believe that.
Maybe because many marriages in the BLUE states are in the same vein as the stellar marriage of convenience as mr and mrs klinton's.
maybe the red states are packed with libs and others who don't or can't marry and would rather live in "sin".
This is the money line that discloses the reviewer's real thoughts. How you can make a robust argument without facts is beyond me. In fact, just making stuff up about human nature and politics is exactly what that cur Rousseau did!
"Of course, she has some answering to do for why divorce rates are significantly higher in the red states where conservatives live."
Perhaps this is because people in blue states don't bother to get married, so they don't get divorced.
Started in the 30's...with the crappy FDR admin, it was put on steroids in the 60's by another great socialist, LBJ.
The policies of the D-rats has been abject destruction of this country!
What we need is to bring back that one income is enough to support your family; but our government and politicians are too greedy. But they and the rest of the elitists have got the country believing this bogus theory that you will be much happier working like a mule and eventually becoming if not already enslaved. Such control is effective if you want a mindless society.
Mona Charen...one smart cookie!!
I just heard her interviewed on the Dennis Prager show & her book sounds interesting. I love this line in the article above:
" If Charen's chronicle of failure were successful it would have rested less on facts"
I say, "If her book did not rest on facts, it would have been written by Michael Moore."
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