Attn: Apathetic America! We’re Watching You!

November 7, 2014January 25, 2019 RilalyLeave a comment

Getting out the vote is a term that most of us know, but few of us define. When we hear that politician A beat politician B, because politician A was better able to get out the vote, we all accept that as a standard measure of a successful campaign, but few of understand what that term actually means. We assume this means that politician A’s platform encouraged groups who normally don’t vote to vote, we also assume that politician A has built a ground game that has state and local supporters encouraging their friends and family to vote. We may even think of local people who drive to elderly people’s homes to assist them to their local voting booth. Those who were fortunate enough to receive a letter similar to the one in the accompanying photo, with an accompanying post card, before the November 4, 2014 election, now have an alternative definition of getting out the vote.

Chances are if a voter is a resident of North Carolina, New York, Kansas, Alaska, Illinois, or Florida, and they are a registered voter with a spotty record of voting, in one of these “projected-to-be” close elections, they received something along the lines of this letter. Chances are they were shocked and outraged at the ominous, threatening, Orwellian, and some would say invasive language used in this mailing. Chances are, at one point or another, they’ve heard others complain, and grow outraged, at the invasion of privacy that is occurring in America, but it’s never affected them, so they’ve always found it difficult to get worked up over it. Chances are, if you were one that received one of these mailings that has now changed for you.

Voter-Indimidation-back — Photo from Jim Lakely’s http://blog.heartland.org/

Various election commissioners, and spokesmen, gained some distance from this activity by saying that voters have nothing to worry about with these letters, because they did not write these letters. A public relations firm, they said, wrote the mailings. The election officials may have approved the mailings, but they did not read them, and they had no input into the language used. We can guess that the public relations firm who wrote the mailing devised an answer for the campaign to use in this defense. We can also guess that this is a ‘go away’ answer that PR firms develop to answer the question without really saying anything. The answer follows the Clintonian blueprint of delay, delay, until the situation goes away.

For those who don’t find this answer acceptable, one election official floated a trial balloon that suggested this ‘get out the vote’ campaign was “Used by Democrats to counter the suppression efforts that Republicans employ” –the most prominent of which is the requirement that a voter provide identification when they register to vote. This tactic attempted to take focus away from the activity in question by focusing it on the enemy.

This election official, a New York State Democrat Committee spokesman named Peter Kauffmann, then added, “The difference between Democrats and Republicans is they don’t want people to vote and we want everyone to vote.” If that doesn’t do it for you, how about something along the lines of ‘We all need to do whatever it is we have to do rid our country of the politics of hate!’ This might seem like a silly tactic, but it works for those who hope it’s true.

If the reader is still not satisfied after all that, well, they’re just going to have to accept the fact that they received this ‘get out the vote’ mailer, because they are perceived to be a lazy, apathetic person who needs to be threatened with language that a New York Post piece characterizes as “better suited to a mob movie” that culminates in a “Democrats: vote or we’ll kick your ass!” type of message that may intimidate you into turning off the Minecraft to vote!

If the voter is still upset after Democrats remind you that “Our democracy works better when more people vote, not less”, and they consider these tactics to be along the lines of public shaming and a “we’re watching you” form of personal intimidation, they’re probably just going to have to well … shut up. It’s the new way of getting out the vote, as a result of the findings from various behavioral studies, including a 2008 Yale University study, that suggest that these tactics are very effective, so we had all better get used to it.

One would have to assume that if market testers put these mailings before the American public, and they asked these Americans how effective they thought these tactics would be in turning out the vote, these mailings would never go out. We can guess that 99 to 100% of the test subjects would suggest that not only would these tactics not work, and that they might cause a reflexive rebellion. What would be that form of rebellion? One would have to guess that a majority of these test subjects would say that they might include the recipient voting for the opposite party, if they had access to the party responsible for sending them the intimidating letter. “Americans won’t respond well to such intimidation techniques,” is something that most of us would say in our exit interview.

I’m sorry, but you’re wrong, these behavioral studies suggest, and the New York Post piece furthers, reporting that “Such attempts to shame people to vote –what politicos call “social pressure” or peer pressure– has become more common place, and it was used in the ‘get out the vote’ 2012 Obama campaign.”

The Democrat National Committee (DNC), feared a backlash from voters when the idea of attempting to shame them into voting was first presented to them (circa 2006). As evidenced by the mailings received by registered Democrats, in 2014, and an October, 29 2010 New York Times piece on this matter by Sasha Issenberg, the DNC is reported to have received enough evidence between 2006 and 2014 to suggest otherwise.

“Before the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial primary,” writes Issenberg, “Three political scientists isolated a group of voters and mailed them copies of their voting histories, listing the elections in which they participated and those they missed. Included were their neighbors’ voting histories, too, along with a warning: after the polls closed, everyone would get an updated set.

“After that primary, the academics examined the voter rolls and were startled by the potency of peer pressure as a motivational tool. The mailer was 10 times better at turning nonvoters into voters than the typical piece of pre-election mail whose effectiveness has never been measured.

“Political consultant, and manager of Al Gore’s first Senate campaign Hal Malchow, was intrigued by the results of that initial mailer. Machow started a direct-mail firm and attempted to coerce its clients, The DNC and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., to use these tactics to increase their voter turnout. As stated earlier, these clients blanched at first, fearing that the language sounded intimidating, and that they could result in a backlash.

“In reaction to those fears, Malchow softened the language of a future mailer sent to over 11,000 New Jersey residents, as that state prepared for a gubernatorial election. The language in this letter was less ominous “while still making it clear that recipients’ voting habits would continue to be monitored.” The softened language of that mailer went as follows: “We hope to be able to thank you in the future for being the kind of citizen who makes our democracy work.” The result was less effective than the original mailer Malchow had proposed, but it increased voter turnout by 2.5%. Future letters also thanked voters for their past participation while hoping to encourage current participation at the same time. ”

The Issenberg article goes on to describe the various behavioral science techniques employed by others, and the history of behavioral science influencing elections. It does not describe, however, how the language in this mailing went from the softened, thankful language Malchow employed in the New Jersey campaign and the ominous “We’re watching you!” letters received by the residents of the states listed above in 2014.

Another website, called Outside the Beltway, doesn’t provide an explanation either, but it does provide a reason stated by a spokesman of the New York State Democrat Committee, a Peter Kauffmann, behind the need to intimidate people. The exact question put to Mr. Kauffmann regarded why the state of New York would tacitly approve such a mailer:

“This flyer is part of the nationwide Democrat response to traditional Republican voter suppression efforts – because Democrats believe our democracy works better when more people vote, not less.”

The site also lists the intimidation some Floridians experienced from a letter sent by a group funded by the state and national realtors association that included the message:

“Your neighbors will know. It’s public record.”

The final “vote shaming” letter the site presented on this site is one received by residents of North Carolina. The North Carolina Democrat Party sent this particular letter, and as the author of the Outside the Beltway piece, Doug Mataconis suggests, it “contains some of the exact same wording as the New York letter.”

“Public records will tell the community at-large whether you vote or not. As a service, our organization monitors turnout in your community,” the letter says, according to WRAL in Raleigh. “It would be an understatement to say that we are disappointed by the inconsistent voting of many of your neighbors.”

Some versions of these letters include an ominous warning at the bottom that anyone that has had a stern grandmother, or a strict nun for a teacher, will know well:

“If you do not vote this year, we will be interested to hear why not.”

If you had that stern grandmother, or strict nun for a teacher, you know that piercing glare that often follows such disappointment. That piercing glare rises over the horn-rimmed glasses, into the subject’s soul, until we all experience a reflexive shudder. Another, similar version of this letter states:

“We will be reviewing (Your) County official voting records after the upcoming election to determine whether you joined your neighbors who voted in 2014.”

Remember, while reading the full-fledged letters, and the excerpts contained herein, that registered, Democrat voters are the most common recipients. Those that read such letters may reflexively conclude that the party of Big Brother, the Republican Party, is sending them out. Other than a 2014 letter that Mitch McConnell sent to Kentucky voters that some call intimidating, that after reading numerous times I find difficult to call intimidating, and a 2012 letter in Virginia, I was not able to find another Republican engaging in any similar tactics.

“Who you vote for is your secret,” one of these campaign mailers state, “But whether or not you vote is public record.”

Anyone that has watched the TV series, The X-Files, can imagine these words coming from the smoking man, bad guy –with pictures of Republicans in his background. To show you how shocking this would be if it were on TV, as opposed to real life, this chunk of The X-Files’ dialogue would be coming come from the good guy —with Democrats pictures in the background— the Fox Moulder character.

The sites that show these letters, report the activity, and comment on the text therein, are careful to add that none of these tactics are illegal. The letter, with the accompanying post card, even instructs you that there is nothing-illegal going on here, with its qualifier, “Who you vote for is secret, but …” One has to wonder why they felt the need to include this qualifier? We can guess that they knew the outrage they would receive, but they were willing to endure that if they saw a 2.5-to-10% increase in turnout? Did they fear lawsuits, voluminous calls to the election commissioner, or the secretary of state? Did they add the bit about “Whether you vote or not is public record” to assure you of the letter’s legality? If it did, did it also assure you that the letter wasn’t, in any way, treading along the line of ethics? Did it assure you that this letter wasn’t the least bit creepy? Did it lead you to believe that it wasn’t, in anyway, infringing upon your right to be apathetic? The latter may seem a goofy right to champion, but among the many rights we have in this Republic, is our right to sit on our couch and play Minecraft straight through an election if we want to.

A site called Gothamist listed some reactions from recipients of this mailing in the state of New York:

“I’m a regular voter and loyal Democrat, so I was taken aback by this creepy and almost threatening letter from the New York State Democratic Committee that I got in the mail today,” one disturbed reader in Downtown Brooklyn told us.

“Another who received the mailer on the Upper West Side added, “I can’t believe they think this will actually make anyone more likely to vote, and it certainly doesn’t make me want to vote for any of the Democratic establishment candidates.”

The unofficial target of these letters appears to have been registered voters that do not vote 100% of the time. Another unofficial target, in most of these states, appears to have been registered Democrat voters that do not vote 100% of the time, and the final unofficial target of these letters –that we assume through inference– was uninformed registered Democrat voters that do not vote 100% of the time. (The latter inference is made based on the reasonable assumption that a number of young, Democrat voters registered in the past for the sole purpose of voting for Barack Obama as president, but that they did not have the same passion for the candidates of a midterm election in their state and locale. We also base this inference on the assumption that most informed-to-well-informed voters need less prompting to vote.) For all of these apparent targets, there are other stories of twelve-year-olds being the subjects of these mailings, and others that do not meet the age requirement, and still others that happened to live in another state during an election that they were reported to have missed.

One could say, based on the public shaming and “we’re watching you” form of personal intimidation contained in these letters, that their primary message is that citizens need to fulfill their patriotic and civic duty and vote. Some might suggest that this campaign tactic dates back to the campaign to elect George Washington, but the “we’re watching you” text, the “If you do not vote this year, we will be interested to hear why not,” that the New York Post characterized as a: “Democrats: Vote or we’ll kick your ass!” tactic is new to some of us.

It’s not new that politicians, and political parties, and election commissions, call upon you to vote. What has not been a point of concentration of theirs, or that of our society in general, is the call for people to educate themselves before they vote. Friends and family may call upon you to vote, to fulfill your civic and patriotic pride. They inform the uninformed of the thousands that have died to maintain this right/privilege/honor for them, but if the undecided voters decides not to educate themselves –for whatever reason— on the issues, or the politicians, how is going through the motions of voting doing a service to those in the past, present, or future? They will be filling in ovals, touching computer squares, or punching out chads.

No one is saying that this duty to cast an informed vote requires that the voter buy a subscription to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or the local newspaper. No one is saying that the uninformed voters become political junkies, but every civic-minded patriot that plans to vote should know the basics of the politicians, the initiatives, and the judges they vote on. These people will affect the voter’s community, state, and country. If the undecided voters grows sleepy at the mere mention of the word politics, or you get so irritated by the subject that you run out of the room screaming, once your Uncle Joe starts in, and you’re going through the motions in the voting booth so everyone will shut up about you dishonoring those that have sacrificed their lives. Don’t vote.

Don’t vote if you have a proclivity for voting for the cutest candidate. If you are one that has a propensity for voting for the candidate that is taller than their opponent is, or one that you’d most like to have a beer with, don’t vote. Don’t vote for a person that makes you feel more comfortable, but you can’t put your finger on why. People, and now parties, will try to make you feel guilty for failing to vote, but you should do everything you can to resist heir intimidation tactics. Don’t listen because you know enough to know that your vote could lead to you voting for the worst possible candidate for your community, state, and country. Don’t vote, no matter how guilty others try to make you feel for not doing so, because you know that the best thing you can do to fulfill your patriotic/civic duty to your community, state, and country is to avoid inflicting upon them your willful ignorance.

If, however, you are an apathetic citizen that is wearing down under the weight of all this pressure to vote –even if you don’t educate yourself– just vote! You may not understand it, but you just can’t fight it anymore. If this is you, and you were further intimidated into voting by this letter, with an accompanying post card –even though you find it hard to believe that all of these behavioral studies suggest this works, and that they will continue to use it in upcoming election based upon their findings– go ahead and vote. Take note of the political party that approved this mailing, be it Democrat or Republican, and vote the opposite. If an exit pollster pesters you about the candidate to whom you cast your vote, tell them, and tell them why. Tell them that you don’t care about its legality, or the information they’ve gleaned from their precious behavioral studies. Tell them that you regard the letter as an attempt at personal intimidation, and that you want to punish such behavior.

Poking the Televised Frog

November 3, 2014September 14, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

If it’s true, as the Chinese proverb states, “A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark” could the same principle be applied to TV shows and our sense of humor?

Has anyone ever informed you that they have something of a twisted, dark, and “some would say” sadistic sense of humor? Have the two of you entered into an unspoken agreement that no one has a sense of humor as unusual as theirs? Have they tried to leave the impression that they sat in some dark room and gestated into the character that stands before you? If you press this person, they will walk you through all the dark caverns of their sense of humor and point out all the bearded ladies, wolf boys, and evil dwarfs that have informed their sense of humor. No matter how common you may find the material that has informed their “twisted, bizarre, and some would say sadistic sense of humor”, these people will insist their sense of humor is more advanced, more sadistic, and more quirky than yours.

How many of us loved The Simpsons for over a decade? How many of us still watch the show? The Simpsons seemed groundbreaking at one point in our definition of comedy, until we we were provided other, “more groundbreaking” humor from the likes of Family Guy and South Park. After seeing those shows break new ground, The Simpsons no longer seemed as cutting edge as it once had. Our sense of humor evolved somehow, and those at the water cooler that continue to mimic the humor from The Simpsons no longer seem as funny as they once were.

The question that some of us have regarding TV comedies, in particular, is are these comedies popular because they broke new ground, or does it have more to do with the manner in which they tap into the spirit of the age, or the zeitgeist? Family Guy and South Park have both paid homage to The Simpsons, and it could be stated that they both operated from the template that The Simpsons created, but at some point they may began to expound upon it. If that’s true, could it be said that these two shows created something that moved us past The Simpsons, or did The Simpsons become such an obvious staple in the culture that it lost its provocative edge in the zeitgeist? Put another way, if The Simpsons somehow managed to outdo both of these shows in the next couple of years in a provocative manner, could it recapture the audience, or is it impossible to recapture that perceived edge once it’s gone?

Those looking to be cutting edge, among their friends, are constantly updating their sense of humor. Whereas The Simpsons used to be perceived as “on the cutting edge” of all forms of groundbreaking humor, it reached a point that TV people call a “Jump the Shark” moment where it was no longer. The same thing has happened to cutting edge TV comedies going to back to Sanford and Son, All in the Family, The Lucy Show, and The Honeymooners.

A number of books have been written on the psychological study of humor, and how it progresses, and they have attempted to capture this phenomenon. The question is, is this progression the greater curiosity, or should the greater story of the study of humor, as it pertains to television, focus on the the fact that even though we’ve moved past The Simpsons, it has left a mark on our sense of humor we may never be able to escape.

Poking a Dead Frog

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind … [Humor] won’t stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect,” –E.B. White writing in The New Yorker.

As a play on this E.B. White quote, author Mike Sacks titled his book Poking a Dead Frog to provide a thesis for a book that attempts to investigate the art of comedy by interviewing a group of TV and movie writers that may have influenced the core of what modern-day Americans define as funny more than any others.

In Sacks’ first interview, we meet a writer from the television shows Saturday Night Live (SNL) and Late Night with David Letterman named James Downey.

Working for SNL for as many years as he has, Downey has written numerous sketches with other writers, and SNL’s performers. He offers an assessment of the difference between the two approaches to comedic presentations that he qualifies may be a broad generalization, but one he believes to be true:

Writers tend to write ordinary people in weird situations. Performers tend to write weird people in ordinary situations.

“The primary critique that most writers have with performer-written sketches is that writers are obsessed with writing original and cutting edge material. Performers don’t mind writing material that may resemble material that the audience may have seen a million times before, and it bothers the writer that the audience doesn’t seem to mind.

“Writers treat comedy as a science where advances are made, and we must always move forward, never backward. Once something is done, no matter how groundbreaking it is, it perhaps should be built upon, but never repeated. For performers, the fact that something has been done before is neither here nor there. Writers get themselves all tied up in knots worrying if their current material is too similar to other things.

“As for me, I wish originality were prized by audiences, but it doesn’t seem to be that important to them. Figuring out the right balance is everything.”

In the Downey scenario, the performer can be excused for writing a less-than-groundbreaking sketch, because they’re the ones on stage. They’re the ones that get the laugh for being funny, or the arrows for the material that isn’t. Few audience members would excuse a performer for attempting a complicated sketch that didn’t play well on stage, on the basis that it was written by a writer that tried too hard to be groundbreaking. Likewise, they don’t give the writer plaudits for a groundbreaking sketch that hits the mark. Most audience members, and critics, give all of the credit and blame for a performance to the performer. Thus, the performer can be excused for preferring the laugh over the groundbreaking provocation that may not go over as well as it appears to on paper, or in theory. It’s their career that’s on the line here, their reputation on the national stage. While the insiders may know the responsible party for the sketch, it’s the performer left with his performance hanging out for all to see that will define him from that point forward.

Once something is done, no matter how groundbreaking it is, it perhaps should be built upon, but never repeated.”

A performer could also be excused for wanting to repeat, or build upon, a sketch that works on the basis that it’s so hard to find one. A writer, on the other hand, doesn’t think that their groundbreaking sketch can be built upon. They look at what they’ve done as a concise, “one off” work of brilliance, and any attempts to repeat it would be perceived as forced by the audience. The performer says nonsense, and applies a far too subtle tweak for the repeat performance. Assigning their creative brains to the audience, the writer thinks that the audience will see through this far too subtle tweak and recognize the repeat performance for what it is. They don’t, complains Downey, they enjoy it in a manner they did the first time through, and this confounds writers.

Writers tend to make certain demands of themselves, and the material they release. The audience, however, is far less demanding. They just want to laugh, or in all other ways, be entertained. The easiest way to entertain is to seek the patterns of entertainment that we’ve all seen a million times. This answer does not count on the people (be they writers or performers) that do it better than us, but on the idea that most humans are more comfortable with the comfort of “getting it” than they are being challenged on some epistemological level. This was thoroughly covered in the Exit Strategy of Sitcoms blog, and in the What’s So Funny? blog.

Many writers fume over the mundane forms of entertainment that others enjoy. In my own struggles to find provocative material, I’ve surfed though other blogs to read their “Ruminations on a day in my life”. Most of these blogs are ten times as popular as the one you’re reading right now, and it’s obvious that most people find the 101 reasons a cat moves across a room at the sound of a can opener more entertaining than a blog on why we fear, or a researched, and original, dissertation on the electromagnetic path between our brain and God.

As a writer of a number of the political sketches done on SNL, James Downey made some assessments of comedian Bill Maher’s brand of political humor:

Bill is a funny guy, but he seems to prefer what (Downey’s former SNL alum Seth Meyers calls) clapter (that is some laughter combined with clapping) instead of actual laughs. A lot of his (Maher’s) material runs to the “White people are lame and stupid and racist” trope. It congratulates itself on its edginess, but it’s just the ass-kissiest kind of comedy going, reassuring his status-anxious audience that there are some people they’re smarter than.”

Whether it’s the “ass-kissiest kind of comedy going” from performers giving their audience what they want, or the thought-provoking, groundbreaking comedy that writers try to produce, we all make determinations on comedy. We all judge what is funny, and what is not, without making conscious decisions about it, and we’re all affected by it in one form or another.

The “Once something is done, no matter how groundbreaking it is, it perhaps should be built upon, but never repeated,” line Downey uses to explain the difference between writers, performers, and what the audience demands defines the difference between writers and their audience on another level. All writers have received the compliment from an audience member that suggests that you should do a sequel of the story they’ve written, or that they should expound on the theme in one way or another. This compliment is a double-edged sword in many ways, for while the writer has to love the compliment, the idea of repeating it feels like the idea of repeating it. The first question a writer has is “How? How would you have me repeat it?” which of course is not the audience member’s responsibility, but the writer’s. The point the writer would then make is that they poured their heart out in the story, and while they love you for saying that you thought it was so good that I should just do it again, they also hate you for suggesting that it looked so easy that you should be able to just enter that world again, and do it again, but … different. Just flip that “on” switch is what they’re saying. It’s a very writer-esk, artistic thing to say that they can’t just do it again, but as most writers know there is no such “on” switch, unless you’re writing a “ruminations on life” blog that involves cats running to can openers. Those sequels seem to write themselves, because no one cares, yet everyone cares, and they love them, so writers just pound them out.

Weaponized Compassion

November 3, 2014August 22, 2021 Rilaly1 Comment

Ask a modern-day liberal how they arrive at the notion that the progressive method of problem solving is more effective than conservative one, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the word “kindness” dropped at one point in their explanation. If they do not use that word, they will undoubtedly drop the words “compassionate” or “nice” in some form. If we point out that most of the kind and compassionate big government fixes for ending poverty have resulted in numerous unintended consequences, and that it could be argued that many of those programs have ended up doing more harm than good, we should be prepared to hear their “best intentions” argument. Those who vote Democrat want these programs to succeed of course, but they are not so concerned with the programs’ success that they would vote to “fix” them, or change them if some cold, numbers-oriented accounting spreadsheet proved them ineffective. Their greater concern is that their favored politician puts forth an effort to solve the problem.

Political philosophy professor Leo Strauss says that it’s a mistake “to presume to understand important political philosophers better than they understood themselves, unless one had already put in the hard work necessary to understand them as they understood themselves.”

In an attempt to avoid undue partisan characterization, when it comes to trying to understand why common, ordinary citizens profess an allegiance to the progressive method to problem solving, we provide a characterization of the progressive ideology from someone who could be said to be a forefather of modern day liberalism, former President Franklin Roosevelt:

“Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

If the manner in which most progressives characterize their philosophical pursuit of problem solving is this stark, then it stands to reason that a politically astute observer who opposes it must be cruel, greedy, and callous. If that’s not the case, then the next logical conclusion would have to be that the observer who rejects the problem solving approach of the modern liberal is either not very astute, or woefully uninformed.

On those occasions when I’ve been able to discuss these matters with a concerned liberal citizen, I’ve found that they make an exception for me, because I’ve established the idea that I’m a nice person who means well. They might question my sources of information, my overall knowledge of the situation, and my status in life, such that it places me above those in need. Yet, most of them find it difficult to view me as inherently evil, because they know me, but they choose to view me as anecdotal evidence of those who share the evil mindset. Their extreme characterizations of opposing viewpoints, William Voegeli writes in his Imprimis piece, are a natural result of the repeated messaging from liberal politicians and activists that he calls “weaponized compassion”.

Using compassion as a weapon against the opponents of modern liberalism can be viewed in the following quotes:

“I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.”

Last year (2013) President Obama said, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough—I want your kids to do well also. Empathetic kindness is “what binds us together, and . . . how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”

Conservatives might view this type of “Mean People Suck” messaging as so condescending and simplistic that it could not possibly be effective, but it is. In election after election, exit polls reveal that such themes have worked for liberals, for generations. The reason for this, writes Voegeli, is that Republicans have never mounted an effective defense against it.

“If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits. The fact that liberals are, if anything, increasingly disposed to frame the basic political choice before the nation in these terms suggests that conservatives have not presented an adequate response.”

The problem that exists for Republicans, as it has for most of my life, is how does one defeat a negative? How does a political party prove to the population that they are not mean? An individual candidate can try to prove that they are personified evidence to the contrary, but that candidate will usually end up, as John McCain did in the 2008 Presidential Election, expending so much of their time and resources trying to defeat the charge of being mean that not only do they get distracted from other substantive issues, they leave the electorate wondering if they are protesting too much and, in fact, a mean person.

Money

If these two philosophical pursuits of problem solving can be broken down to admittedly simplistic structures, it could be said that when one sifts through all of the rhetoric that both sides of the aisle engage in, the crux of the difference between the two philosophies revolves around money. Those who allocate more tax payers dollars to a problem are deemed more compassionate, and those who don’t are viewed as mean, cruel, and in favor of the rich.

Renown budget cutter, and former Indiana Republican Governor, Mitch Daniels believed he has at least one effective counter to the idea that the austerity measures that conservatives employ for problem solving are hateful.

“You ought to be the most offended of anybody,” he says to liberals, “If a dollar that could help a poor person is being squandered in some way.”

I think that we can say that most honest, and well-meaning liberal citizens believe that when their hard-earned tax dollars are devoted to helping the poor, they don’t mind paying those taxes, and they will vote for any politician who pledges to do so. The question I’ve always had for these citizens of good intentions is what percentage of your tax dollar, ostensibly devoted to fighting poverty, ends up being allocated to the bureaucracy devoted to fighting poverty? What percentage of that dollar goes to administrative costs, various other bureaucratic expenses, and what percentage ends up being fraudulently wasted, abused, and trapped in the bureaucratic red tape of redundancies? What percentage of that hard-earned, tax payer’s dollar actually makes it to the poor people that that bureaucracy is intended to help, and what percentage ends up being squandered in some way?

Another way of framing the same question I would have for those who vote Democrat for the expressed intent of helping the poor, or resolving economic inequality, through the various methods of tax allocations, government regulation, etc., is what are the various programs’ rates of success?

The liberal response to former Governor Daniels’ quote is that he is hateful, racist, against the poor, against women, and mean. If Daniels followed the John McCain model of countering such charges, he would then spend so much of his time defending himself against these charges that his central message would get lost in the shuffle, and people would walk away thinking that he’s mean. It’s called weaponzied compassion.

The aspect of Mitch Daniels’ argument that Mitch Daniels doesn’t discuss, in his rational argument against liberals, is that the solvency issue, or the effectiveness of the welfare program, isn’t of primary concern to liberal citizens. They simply want more for more, and anyone who attempts to cut the amount of money going to entitlement programs, or decreases the increase from the previous year, is deemed mean, hateful, racist, and engaged in a war against the poor.

When these numbers are put into actual and proverbial spreadsheets, it can be proven that while the welfare program has expanded exponentially in the last two generations, the needle of the poverty rate hasn’t moved much at all. This appears to be of less concern to liberal citizens, when as Daniels points out it should be their primary concern.

Why doesn’t the welfare program work very well? Why have there been so many problems with the wealth redistribution aspects of Obamacare? Why has Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) 1964-65 Great Society program failed to move the poverty level over the last fifty years, and why do most of the well-intentioned plans of liberalism fail to achieve on a level that could promote liberalism as the ideal political philosophy for all Americans, as opposed to the twenty some odd percent who maintain unwavering belief?

The cynical conservative would say that these programs have inherent flaws that keep those immersed in these troubled programs voting for the career politicians who promise to fix them in every election cycle. These programs are never fixed, but politicians have vowed to fix them, or the system, for as long as most of us have been alive.

While this might apply to liberal politicians, the liberal citizen would inform you that they have nothing to gain from the stagnancy, or failure, of the program for which they advocate. They don’t understand how a conservative could be rooting on the failure of a program ostensibly designed to help the poor. Most conservatives are not, of course, they just have a different way of approaching the matter, but the conservative methods to fixing the problem are complicated, difficult to understand, numbers oriented, long-term, and very difficult to sell on a campaign trail. When people can’t grasp the totality of such an approach, they feel stupid, and when they feel stupid they need someone to help them understand it, or if that’s not possible, to, at least, make them feel better about not understanding it. What better way is there to relate to these people, and their confusion, than to call those with alternative, and complicated, solutions names? People understand name calling, it’s street, and it reaches us on a base level equivalent to bathroom humor –a tool that some comedians employ when they fear they’re losing an audience. This type of response unites us all in a manner –a Jerry Springer manner– that a complicated explanation with long-term problem solving techniques cannot.

“I conclude that the machinery created by the politics of kindness does not work very well–” writes Voegeli, “in the sense of being economical, adaptable, and above all effective– because the liberals who build, operate, defend, and seek to expand this machine don’t really care whether it works very well and are, on balance, happier when it fails than when it succeeds.”

To accentuate this particular point, William Voegeli pulls out his Oxford English Dictionary to provide us with the literal definition of compassion.

“Compassion means suffering together with one another. Compassion is the feeling or emotion, that a person is moved by when witnessing the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it.”

This definition of compassion does not include a wish to suffer the identical fate of the sufferer, but that they want to suffer the trials and tribulations of others vicariously, and they do want someone to do something about it, regardless how effective that something is.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile:

“When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow man, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself.”

Those who reject this characterization as simplistic still need to ask the question why liberals would be for programs that have, historically, proven ineffective? Why would their answer to the problems that everyone acknowledges exist in the welfare program be more welfare? With a fifty year track record of failure, why would so many liberals consider LBJ’s Great Society program to be a success?

The co-editor of a book called Pathological Altruism, Barbara Oakley explains her point of view:

“It’s the indifference –blithe, heedless, smug, or solipsistic– that liberals have to actual results that defines them as pathological altruists. It’s the idea that they can appear compassionate by being for these programs,” and thus be perceived as wonderful people by their peers, “That drives them to be for these programs even if they have a poor track record.”

Those who have introduced a results-oriented refutation of these programs to liberals –or people that are generally for such altruistic programs– have either witnessed genuine surprise on their face, or they’ve been greeted with a very frustrated person who reacts in a manner that suggests that a results-oriented presentation is obnoxious. To those who are surprised, some of us have recognized that not only did they not know these facts and figures that we’re presenting to them, but that the very idea of investigating for this kind of information never occurred to them.

“Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” wrote the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”

***

As a former fraud investigator of charitable enterprises, firsthand experience informed me that some people are pathologically altruistic. There’s nothing wrong with giving, of course, and there may be some merits to blind, uninformed giving, but those merits, as Rousseau points out, are generally immersed in how one views themselves, or how they want to be viewed.

There’s an old line that suggests: “Who cares why people give, as long as they give.” The same could be said, I suppose, when it comes to why some people are for government programs ostensibly designed to help poor people: “Who cares how effective they are, as long as they have the best of intentions.”

The calls I made to these charitable givers involved a disturbingly high number of givers who claimed that it was my company’s responsibility to police these charities, because we allowed them to use our payment service for their transactions. It was, in fact, our job to see to it that the charities who used our service were giving a universally accepted rate to intended recipients, but I couldn’t shake the idea that by castigating the company I worked for, these givers were absolving themselves of the responsibility of knowing, or learning, the true percentage of recipients that were actually being helped by their charitable giving and making more informed choices for their charitable giving going forward.

The givers did their part, in other words by caring enough to give money, and their responsibility concluded at that point. The same could be said, I believe, of those who absolve themselves of the effectiveness of federal government poverty programs. “I pay my taxes,” is something one might hear from one that learns that the poverty rate hasn’t moved much in fifty years, “and I vote Democrat. I can’t help it if they can’t get their act together.”

As a fraud investigator of charities, I was not permitted to provide those I called the actual percentage of the charitable givers’ dollar going to support the organization’s stated cause, but I was able to tell them where to find that number. The very idea that I would call these people to ask them questions about their charitable largess did raise some concerns among some about the institution they selected for their charity, but they were in the minority.

The question I would’ve loved to ask those (too few in my humble opinion) who were concerned about the charitable institutions I was calling about, had my company allowed me to do so, is, “Even though, as you say, it’s our responsibility to police this charity, will you continue to give to this charity? Even though you now wonder if the practices they engage in are, at the very least, questionable?” The answers, I believe, would’ve been fascinating for political scientists and psychologists to study, for it would’ve suggested that the most important part of charitable giving, for some, is to prove that they care, and the actual responsibility of seeing to it that people are helped is another entity’s responsibility. One could argue that most people, conservative and liberal, work very hard, and they are too busy to dot the I’s, and cross the T’s involved in the process of giving, and they they have to rely on others to see to it that their generosity is pushed through to its end. My firsthand experience with pathological altruism revealed that most people care more about caring than they do the ultimate reality of other people being helped.