Are you a liberal?
August 9, 2006, 12:01 am
Posted by Grant Gallicho
Here’s a sure-fire test, as offered by Stephen H. Webb, professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, courtesy of the new First Things blog:
You know you are a liberal if you think that the poor need money more than they need moral discipline.
Stephen Webb grew up working in a soup kitchen founded and run by his father.
You know you’re a conservative if you think of everything in terms of money rather than human dignity.
Webb’s “get a job, hippie!” summarizes the sentiment of all conservatives towards those struggling just to survive: if you are poor, it’s because you are lazy.
Webb predictably dismisses the long-held American liberal providential ideal of America as provider of shelter and justice based on the notion that all are beloved by God (ie, universal human rights), and that sometimes it doesn’t matter how disciplined you are . Webb’s money-obsessed fantasy of liberalism ignores the reality of the struggles that accompany survival even in our cushy country. Does Webb think Martin Luther King Jr. was asking for money when he said
“I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of excessive trials and tribulation. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.”
Does Webb really believe the appropriate answer to this is “you’re lazy”?
———-
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Is this a continuation of the thread on labels?
It strikes me that this is another piece of oversimplified idiocy much like the palaver the talking heads of TV dispense. For them, I switch channels -for this, I shut down!
Stephen Webb is talking only about his “peers” and that leaves quite a few of us out. Perhaps he thinks only his peers are worth noticing. Can a conservative be a narcissist?
To subscribe to Webb’s view of life, wouldn’t parents have to deny their child meals and a roof over their head if he/she had done something immoral? I guess you know you are a conservative when “moral discipline” trumps common sense and compasssion.
Here’s my contribution:
You know you’re a liberal if you:
Hate Walmart
Wear Birkenstocks
Eat only organic foods
Think Al Gore is a great prophet
Think Hillary Clinton is too consrevative
Are rejoicing at Lieberman’s defeat
Hate George Bush
Believe hate is a very destructive emotion
Hate Dick Cheney
Believe hate is a very destructive emotion
Hate Donald Rumsfeld
Believe hate is a very destructive emotion
Use the phrase “Speak truth to power”
Think all big corporations are evil
Believe that the monogamous hetereosexual family is the nest of fascism
Believe that terrorists’ grievances are all legitimate
Believe that an angry conservative is full of hate
Believe that an angry liberal is passionate
I could go on (and on, and on…)
NOTE: One must believe at least 90% of the above list ;))
Enjoy!
Please don’t (go on and on).
the tags “liberal” and “conservative” are subjective and often polarizing. how we view ourselves and how we are perceived by others can be very different. one man’s liberal is another woman’s conservative. very little pure black or white, mostly varying shades of grey. if we drew a venn diagram: one circle liberal, the other conservative, i suspect there would be at least some overlap for almost everyone. at least i hope so.
Truly a thread deserving of the post.
What do you mean, MLJ? And how do you know about Webb’s upbringing? Where did you get your information?
Uh, he’s a good friend of mine. Hi Steve if you’re reading this.
Maybe your image of Webb’s understanding of work and morality would be enlarged by reading his acclaimed work “The Gifting God: A Trinitarian Ethics of Excess.”
If you think it would soften my disagreement with the post I linked to, especially with the idea of liberalism he seems to be working with, then maybe I’ll give it a shot. I’d appreciate a snapshot of how you believe the book would enlarge my image of Webb. (Is this the business about “God the giver,” “God the given,” “God the giving/sustaining”?) Perhaps that would make for a more worthy thread in your view.
Grant,
You are not helping. I am really trying everything in my power to stop wasting my work day trawling through RC blogs. Asking me thoughtful questions is not going to make this happen. Maybe I should try get banned?
Liberals are equally guilty of myopic thinking on the matter of morality and poverty. Often they attribute poverty to exploitation in the marketplace at the hands of greedy employers. Their solution is to limit options with minimum wage legislation and the mandating of fringe benefits even for entry-level jobs. The increase in unemployment and poverty that follow these interventions seldom shake the complacency and even vanity of those who feel they are upholding a moral vision, regardless of consequences for the poor.
Just for the record, many conservatives favor use of the Earned Income Tax Credit as an especially effective measure to alleviate poverty. Money is dispensed with no intrusive disciplinary requirements and without the interference in the workplace favored by too many liberals.
“The increase in unemployment and poverty that follow these interventions…”
“The evidence appears to be against the simple-minded theory that a modest increase in the minimum wage causes substantial job loss.”
The radical Alan Blinder, fmr Federal Reserve vice chairman who teaches economics at Princeton University.
Raising the minimum wage improves local economies. Bloomberg:
———-
This view once was widespread. A 1978 American Economic Review survey found that 90 percent of economists said the minimum wage boosted unemployment among low-skilled workers.
Today, that number would probably be cut in half, says Robert Solow, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics.
A turning point in the debate came in the 1990s as states such as New Jersey began boosting their mandated wages above the federal level.
In 1995, Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger published research on unemployment trends among fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and neighboring Pennsylvania. They found that the number of jobs rose in New Jersey compared with Pennsylvania, even though New Jersey had a higher minimum wage.
The study, while not perfect, “provided evidence that went against the common view,” Solow says. “It changed the way many economists look at minimum wage.”
———
Here’s my favorite test of the difference between liberals and conservatives, enumerated by George Lakoff in the introduction to Moral Politics:
“When the baby cries at night, do you pick him up?”
Let me offer more to Carolyn’s spot-on pile of commentary:
If I were in a tart mood, I might say the corollary to Webb’s principle:
“You know you are a conservative if you think that the rich need money more than they need moral discipline.”
But maybe I shouldn’t go there.
Aside from the liberal and conservative labels (which I don’t mind as much as long we’re willing to treat the people behind the labels and not use them as personal behavior software for our reaction to life’s speed bumps) we’re more accurately talking about people who approach life simply (as in simpleton) or who see issues as being something of great depth and subtlety. We’re talking tens of millions of poor people (not to mention as many liberals) in a modern society of great complexity.
If Webb thinks the whole issue is about giving money to the lazy poor, then I would need to stretch to avoid thinking of him as being deficient in the arena of subtlety. Then again, we are talking about First Things, which sort of says they can’t or don’t want to go deep..
Gene Sperling is another economist (in addition to Solow and Blinder) citing the New Jersey study mentioned in Carolyn’s post. Greg Mankiw observes: “To me, Gene looks like a doctor prescribing a drug relying on a single controversial study that finds no adverse side effects, while ignoring the many reports of debilitating results.”
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/sperling-on-minimum-wage.html
The Bloomberg article that Carolyn cites goes on to quote Blinder:
“Binder acknowledges that it’s an ‘intellectual puzzle’’ why a boost in the minimum wage wouldn’t lead to wider unemployment, because the economic laws of supply and demand dictate that it should.”
My original point was that many liberals claim that employers must be restrained from exploiting the poor. Immorality (of the employer) causes poverty is frequently a belief as strongly held by liberals as any alleged belief of conservatives that immorality (of the poor) causes poverty.
This isn’t the first stupid and vicious thing that Webb has written. He recently published a book entitled American Providence: A Nation with a Mission. The “mission” is to get Freedom on the March, in the words of our illustrious War Criminal in Chief. In this view, genocide and the violence attendant on American imperial expansion, while regrettable, are all part of God’s inscrutable plan for the redemption of our souls. So stop fretting, he concludes, and get with the divine program. It’s an old and rancid argument — a favorite of Southern slaveholders, I might add — and it’s worthy of the moral and political standards now in use at First Things.
So I guess you’re a liberal if you think the poor need money more than they need, say, employment in the armed forces as cannon fodder.
Prof. Eugene of Villanova,
1) I believe you just made the FT blog!
2) Somehow, someway, you just degraded the conversation even more.
Gene, I have to ask you to ratchet it back a bit. Spirited debate: good. But there’s no need to start a rhetorical arms race here.
With all respect, Grant, I don’t see how my contribution to this discussion was a heat-seeking missle, nor do I see how it “degrades” the conversation, in mlj’s view. If I’m misrepresenting Webb’s argument in American Providence, let mlj show me how, and I’ll cheerfully retract. If he can’t, then I’ll have to assume that “degradation” of the conversation means that I’m saying something he doesn’t want or like to hear.
Webb’s argument in that book sheds light on his “definition” of a liberal. Webb contends that the spread of (evangelical) Protestantism across the globe is the enterprise of the Great Commission, and that the American nation-state has been chosen as the great vehicle for that purpose. He does the usual “for all of her faults and limitiations” shuffle, which is a way of brushing two hundred years of carnage and oppression under the carpet.
As any cultural historian will tell you, part of that Protestant mission has been the inculcation of something called “moral discipline” in the putative heathen (often considered to include Catholics, I might add) — the usual array of pseudo-virtues like sobriety, cleanliness, hard work, etc., all of which are intended to convert the unwashed into clean, sober accumulators. (Temperance and Prohibition are two illustrious examples.) Again, this is standard cultural history — there’s nothing “p.c.” or even leftish about it.
Invoking the need for “moral discipline” has always been a favorite gambit of evangelicals who don’t see the distribution of wealth as a real moral issue. If you’re poor, in this view, it’s your fault — not the fault of historical repercussions (as with slavery) or of unjust and unregulated arrangements (as with, I would argue, contemporary capitalism). “Injustice,” if that word is used, is considered the sum of individual failings, and “justice” becomes the unadjusted tally of personal regenerations — in other words, the achievement of “moral discipline,” where “morality” is a solely individual trait. This strikes me as an impoverished conception of morality, to say the least, as well as a classic piece of ideological mystification.
Thus, Webb’s “definition” of a liberal illustrates his commitment to a particular narrative of Protestant triumphalism — one which, while popular among many evangelicals, isn’t shared by many others.
This is from a Pew Research Center poll on Religion & Poverty from 2002:
“the public shows strong support for individual responsibility. Fully 61% say most people are poor because of their own individual failures, while far fewer (21%) blame society’s failures….Experience with the welfare system has only a modest effect on these views. Current and former welfare recipients say individual failures, not society, are to blame for poverty by more than two-to-one (53%-25%). And a narrow 44% plurality of those who have received welfare affix responsibility for child poverty on the failures of parents, while 36% blame social and economic problems.”
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=388
Apparently it’s not enough to experience poverty first hand to escape the ideological mystification that Mr. McCarraher invokes. Becoming a cultural historian may make one immune.
Prof. Eugene McC,
If memory serves, Jean Bethke Elshtain gave a fairly positive review of Webb’s book. She noted some minor points of disagreement with the last chapter, but thought that the book, on the whole, was convincing and should be widely read and discussed.
Is suppose this would also make her an exponent of stupid, malicious, and rancid arugments that were once made by slaveholders?
(Positions, you add, that reflect the “standards now in use at First Things,” which would also, I guess, include her, since she’s on the Editorial Board of that magazine.)
I’m not convinced that “direct experience” of something necessarily issues in a clearer perception. “Experience” is always refracted through some lens, and the most powerful lens, in the case of poverty, is this culture’s reigning mythology of individual responsibility. The poor are educated in this mythology no less than the rest of us. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone, and it doesn’t discredit my argument, that many poor people blame themselves for their predicament.
By the same logic, Saddam Hussein really was linked to Al-Queada — why, despite the complete lack of evidence? Because more than half of those polled say so. By the same logic, Irish immigrants were responsible for their starvation. Why? The structures imposed by (evangelical) British economic policy can’t be blamed. The Irish lost their “moral discipline” — which was, indeed, the argument made by the Webbs and Malloys of the mid-19th century.
During the Great Depression, with unemployment rates at 25%, millions of American workers blamed themselves for being jobless and destitute. So are we to say that a quarter of the workforce suddenly lost its “moral discipline”? Are we to say that the near-collapse of financial markets and manufacturing in the 1930s was just a left-wing excuse for moral dissolution?
According to the Webb-Malloy thesis, the de-skilling of labor, the evisceration of labor unions, the increasingly hostile attitude and conduct of the government toward workers, etc., has nothing to do with stagnant or declining wages, or with poverty.
As for the snide comment about being a cultural historian, let me be forthright — yes, cultural history does immunize one against a lot of sophistry and nonsense. I invite Mr. Malloy to get an inoculation.
In the interests of accuracy, I apologize for my misspelling of Mr. Molloy’s name.
Ideological mystification continues to be a theme for Mr. McCarraher. Apparently it’s not only reprobates such as myself that he has to battle. He claims I attribute the Great Depression to a lack of moral discipline and that I have a faulty “thesis” about Irish starvation. If he wants to set up straw men, fine. But also a majority of the poor, he now agrees, are afflicted with this consciousness. No matter. He is undaunted: there is a clear Protestant mission to instill “the usual array of pseudo-virtues like sobriety, cleanliness, hard work, etc., all of which are intended to convert the unwashed into clean, sober accumulators” that must be exposed. In a similar vein Max Weber instructed us about the nefarious maxims of Benjamin Franklin. And his views he tells us are the universally accepted, standard cultural history. If there is any dissent he doesn’t seem to notice.
Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that no higher a percentage of cultural historians would agree with his views than he finds among the poor. He does probably have a better chance of persuading them than actual poor people, but of course that’s because he and his peers, unlike the rest of us, have transcended vulgar ideological mystifications.
My guess is that the poor get more benefits from the misguided and the unwashed than they ever will from those who flaunt the profundity of their historical consciousness.
I had never heard of Stephen Webb before encountering this thread, and I’m not qualified to comment on the cultural history debate that has dominated the discussion above, but while reading Tom Roberts’ column at the online version of NCR, I came across a book by an evangelical Protestant pastor that looks very interesting and which Roberts recommends:
“In The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, Dr. Gregory A. Boyd, speaking to evangelical Christians, warns that in aligning Christianity with America’s ambitions and in trying to reclaim the country for God, evangelicals (and others who play to the same script) are compromising the church’s essential mission. ‘Instead of living to sacrifice for others, we become the official ‘sin-pointer-outers.’ Instead of gaining a reputation for being humble servants who manifest Calvary-quality love, we gain a reputation for being moralistic and self-righteous. And predictably, we drive away the tax collectors and prostitutes of our day, just as the Pharisees did, rather than attracting them, as Jesus did.’
When Boyd, founder and senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., refused to back particular candidates or political parties, or to endorse “America’s mission” to bring freedom to the world, or to stop preaching on essential differences between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, a quarter of his congregation left. But many enthusiastically thanked him for speaking such clarity.
His language is not Catholic exegetical language, and Catholics may also find a bit too Manichaean his division of the world, but what he says about how churches compromise their fundamental purpose by aligning too closely with political strategies, candidates, programs and parties is a worthy warning to all denominations and church leaders, including bishops, and all political points on the spectrum.”
IMO, I think Dr. Boyd is on to something.
Bill, I could not agree with you more. I’ve only seen reviews of Boyd’s books, but he certainly comes across as “right on target” in his focus on Christ and not on any partisan cause. I consider myself a progressive Catholic who can easily relate Dr. Boyd’s outlook to the content of the gospels. More power to this man and his ministry! I just wish more of our Catholic hierarchs and clergy would follow his lead.
Joe–
There’s also an interesting cover story in this week’s Newsweek about the “twilight” of Billy Graham and his ministry. It’s interesting reading for many reasons, but what I found especially fascinating was the ‘agree to disagree’ philosophies of Graham and Jerry Falwell about the role of religion in politics. Sure, Graham has hobnobbed with every president since Eisenhower, but on the whole he has refrained from mixing religion and politics. Falwell, for his part, says Graham’s ministry is limited to evangelization, and that he can therefore understand that an evangelizer would want to shy away from politics. But, says Falwell in defending his immersion in politics, and I’m paraphrasing, my ministry is pastoral, and I therefore have a duty to lead and advise my congregation about political issues, too.
Interesting, yes? :)
Decidedly uninteresting to use “interesting” three times in a short post. One day I’ll learn to read and edit before hitting the post button.
Dennis Prager discusses why liberals are so afraid of global warming over at townhall.com, one of my favorite blogs, and comes up with a list of essential differences between liberals and conservatives.
His parsing of liberal vs. conservative mindsets was enlightening and useful until he got to the last point: Liberals are afraid of dying.
It seems to me that liberals aren’t so much afraid of dying–Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Mohandas Ghandi might be cited as counterpoints to Mr. P’s argument–as of sending other people’s kids off to fight for what they, the conservatives, believe in.
https://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2006/06/20/201891.html