The Dangers Of Conservative Compassion

As slogans go, "compassionate conservatism" is a work of genius. It combines the left's favorite adjective with the right's favorite noun in the most spectacularly effective recombination since Procter & Gamble rolled out the fat-free potato chip. But while we all can imagine what a fat-free potato chip would be, the meaning of "compassionate conservatism" is not immediately self-evident.

Thoughtful analysts have hazarded guesses over the past 10 months about what Gov. George W. Bush might have in mind. But it was not until two weeks ago that the candidate himself began to offer an authoritative and detailed explanation. Like some of the early prototypes of the fat-free chip, George W. Bush's product lacks crunch.

On Sept. 3 Mr. Bush delivered the first in a promised series of major policy addresses on education. In the speech, Mr. Bush boldly broke with mainstream conservative thinking about schools. He called for enlarging the federal Department of Education. He accepted a federal role in overseeing local systems and intervening against those that fail. And while he praised the value of competition, he made clear that his administration would regard school choice as an emergency measure, to be invoked only in the direst cases.

"If the disadvantaged children in a school are not making progress, the school will be warned that it is failing," he said. "It will be given time to adjust, to reform, to change. But if, at the end of three years, there is still no progress, its Title I funds will be divided up, matched by other federal education money given to the state, and made directly available to parents."

In a by-now-familiar pattern, conservatives have responded to Mr. Bush's repudiation of their principles with enthusiastic applause. After eight years of Bill Clinton, they are willing to sacrifice a lot to regain the White House. But their sacrifice will be futile unless the candidate for whom they are swallowing their doubts really is sure to win.

"Compassionate conservatism" began as a defensive strategy: a search for a rhetoric and a set of policies that would protect Republicans from the accusation that they care only for the rich. Over the 10 months since Mr. Bush emerged as the Republican frontrunner, however, the slogan has evolved -- not into a positive program (it's still much too vague for that) but into a political orientation built into the very structure of his campaign. His first important speech after announcing his candidacy for president, delivered in Indianapolis on July 22, focused on the themes of faith and charity. Likewise, when Mr. Bush chose to speak about education, he opened with the educational problems of the disadvantaged. The very order of Mr. Bush's speeches conveys his message: The needs of the poor must come first.

In a recent newspaper column, Policy Review editor Tod Lindberg cited these speeches and others, contrasted them with Al Gore's attacks on suburban sprawl, and mischievously wondered whether the 2000 election would reverse a 32-year pattern by which it was the Democrats who obsessed over the poor and the Republicans who championed the middle class. But while savoring this irony, it is worth pausing to remember that over those same 32 years, the heartless Republicans won five of eight presidential elections, two by landslides. The compassionate Democrats won just three and only once, in 1976, surpassed 50% of the vote.

A poor-first orientation can often end up alienating middle-class voters. This is so for many reasons, but two are particularly relevant to the fortunes of Mr. Bush. One of them is that the very same activist government that Mr. Bush hopes to deploy to aid the poor can seem very threatening to the middle-class majority. In the field of education, for instance, it may or may not be true that a vigorous federal government can raise the quality of the worst schools. What is unquestionably true is that over the past two decades federal bureaucrats and judges have been a destructive and unwelcome presence in the nonworst schools.

It's the feds who outlawed the neighborhood school for the sake of racial integration, the feds who have bloated local budgets with costly mandates for special and bilingual education, the feds who originally ordered the "mainstreaming" that thrusts often seriously disturbed youngsters into regular classrooms. The public may cheer when a candidate promises to "improve" education. But voters may develop second thoughts when those improvements end up strengthening and emboldening the same bureaucrats who banned father-son softball games at the local middle school. Americans don't like noblesse oblige quite as much as Mr. Bush and some of his supporters imagine. The big-hearted aristocratic politicians of the 1960s -- Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Leverett Saltonstall -- came to grief when their electorates came to feel that they were running a conspiracy of the top and bottom against the middle.

The second, perhaps even more ominous danger in a poor-first orientation is that Mr. Bush's compassion can end up clashing with an ideal to which Americans attach even more value: equality. The material deprivations suffered by the poor tugs at the national conscience, but so even more does the widespread image of the poor as a group cut off from the opportunities of American life -- consigned to schools that don't teach, locked out of labor markets, victims of random violence, bereft of the medical technology that extends and enriches the lives of everyone else, denied even a fair chance to learn the national language. Many fear that in our postindustrial society the poor are hardening into a semipermanent dependent caste. Whether or not these fears are accurate, they are pervasive and important.

Mr. Bush proposes to confront the problem of dependency by uplifting the poor. But his project actually aggravates the very problem he is trying to solve. To see the poor as a group of people whom government can and should uplift is to see them as something less than equal citizens. It is one thing to think that the severely mentally ill or abandoned children need special protection from the government. But the poor constitute more than 13% of the U.S. population. They cannot all be treated as wards of the state.

One of Mr. Bush's rivals, Steve Forbes, delivered an impressive speech to the National Baptist Convention last Thursday, in which he posed a very stark alternative vision. He proposes using federal education funds -- all of them -- to finance school-choice programs immediately and shifting a portion of the payroll tax into personal retirement accounts so that lower-income people can accumulate nest eggs of their own. These two proposals are only the first steps toward a reinvention of the welfare state. But they are steps along a path that treats all Americans, even those earning $5 an hour, as self-governing individuals rather than mendicants.

The "compassion" of the liberals of the 1970s was discredited because its costly and intrusive projects so often made things worse for the poor and the nonpoor alike. Instead of warm-heartedness, the word compassion came to stand for weak-mindedness -- that is, when it did not stand for cynical payoffs to feather-bedding public-sector unions, corrupt municipalities and racial hustlers. Could the conservative compassion of the 1990s succumb to the same fate? So long as conservatives conceive of "compassion" in the same terms liberals once did -- as something "we" do for a pitiful "them" -- that danger beckons.