The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion - Hardcover

Voegeli, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062289292 ISBN 13: 9780062289292

Publisher: Broadside Books, 2014

Synopsis

When liberals don't have reason, authority, or the American people on their side, they turn to the one thing they never run out of: Pity.For decades, conservatives have chafed at being called "heartless" and "uncaring" by liberals who maintain that our essential choice as a nation is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. In The Pity Party, political scientist William Voegeli turns the tables on this argument, making the case that "compassion" is neither the essence of personal virtue nor the ultimate purpose of government. Over the years, liberals have built a remarkable edifice of government programs that are justified by appeals to compassion: Head Start, immigration reform, gun control, affirmative action, and entitlements, to name only some. As Voegeli amply demonstrates, the liberals who promote these massive programs are weirdly indifferent as to whether they succeed. Instead, when the problems they are intended to solve fail to disappear, liberals double down, calling for yet more programs and ever greater expenditures in the name of "compassion." Meanwhile, conservatives who challenge the effectiveness of these programs are slandered as "heartless right-wingers." Yet rather than challenge this tendentious liberal argument, the many conservatives it intimidates feel it necessary to insist that they really do "care." However, liberal compassion's good intentions consistently fail to translate into good results. Voegeli walks the reader through a plethora of programs that have become battlefields between conservatives fighting for more efficiency and liberals fighting for more budget-busting federal programs to address an ever-expanding catalog of social ills. Along the way, he explains the underpinnings of the liberal philosophy that reinforce this misapplied ideal and shows why today's self-described compassionate liberals are ultimately unfit to govern.

About this title

Review:

A brilliant turn of a phrase with every turn of a page. Literally.--Randy E. Barnett, Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University, and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution

About the Author:

William Voegeli is the author of Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State, a visiting scholar at the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, and a senior editor of The Claremont Review of Books. His reviews and articles have also appeared in City Journal, Commentary, First Things, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and The New Criterion. He was formerly a program officer at the John M. Olin Foundation. Voegelli lives in Claremont, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadside Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0062289292
• ISBN 13: 9780062289292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 289