Mitt Romney managed to infuriate the left and demoralize the right when he told CNN‘s Soledad O’Brien that he didn’t care about the very poor and that the federal programs that serve them are working just fine. It’s kind of obvious why people on the left took offense, but what about people on the right? Daniel Horowitz does a good job of explaining how Romney’s comments were a concern:
The media, Democrats, and many Republicans are painting him as out-of-touch, while expressing their concern that he is apathetic to the plight of the poor. However, they are missing the point. The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are taken care of with the welfare state. Worse, he believes that the welfare state is, more or less, functioning properly. Fear not, any minor glitches would be repaired by Mr. Fix It.
There are a number of zombie lies the right likes to tell itself to maintain the fiction that they care about the poor. In truth, if you’ve ever worked with the poor, you’ve seen that there really is a major concern for the poor among conservative Christians. They do a lot of work with the homeless, with getting people into drug treatment, and with trying to save troubled people’s souls by offering them unconditional forgiveness and a second chance through the grace of their Savior, Jesus Christ. They do a lot of good work and they are successful in helping countless people back on their feet again. But they’re also working to win converts, and many of them see the government as competitors.
The way this gets translated into electoral politics is through a critique of federal programs aimed at helping the poor. Here, Mr. Horowitz offers up the standard fare:
As conservatives, we care deeply about the poor. Then again, we care for everyone equally. We don’t recognize a class system – one that Romney has propagated incessantly throughout the campaign. It is that conviction that burns in the heart of every conservative who desires to fundamentally overhaul the welfare state and the cycle of dependency and poverty.
We care immensely about the millions of poor who are condemned to a life of failure because they are trapped in the public education system perpetuated by teachers’ unions and the Democrats. We cry out for those who cannot afford healthcare because the liberals have destroyed the free market. We empathize with those who can no longer afford food, gas, and utilities because liberals have artificially inflated the prices with government interventions. We sympathize with those who can’t find jobs that fit their skill set because liberal environmentalists have eliminated their jobs.
As conservatives, we are not happy to merely be efficient stewards of Medicaid, LIHEAP, Food Stamps, Unemployment, and TANF to deal with the aforementioned problems. We seek to solve those problems by offering an equal opportunity for everyone to earn a living with dignity; not by offering capricious politicians the opportunity to grow dependency, and by extension, their own power.
As you can see, in this critique, the liberals are to blame for everything. Nothing we try to do is successful, and most of it is counterproductive. But underneath it all is the unstated premise that the poor can be better served by religious groups. These groups can run soup kitchens in lieu of the government providing food stamps. They can educate kids better than the state-run federally-subsidized schools. They can provide health care in their private hospitals, or through small clinics.
You can go all the way back to the 4th-Century and see that Christians have always been successful in winning converts because they offered social services (food, counseling, medical care, education, job centers) that the state (or the pagan cults) either did not provide or provided inadequately and inefficiently.
For conservative Christian groups that work with the poor, federal anti-poverty efforts are seen as a way of secularizing the poor, just as federal education standards are seen as taking God out of education. This battle has been at the heart of the conservative movement since it started to take shape in the 1950’s. It’s why you see such a growth in home-schoolers today. And it’s part of why secular anti-poverty groups like ACORN come under such withering attack.
Mitt Romney seems to have little interest in this battle, which shouldn’t be all that surprising since he comes from a competing missionary faith. And Mormons go about their missionary efforts in a completely different way from the conservative Christians.
The GOP is an uneasy alliance between people who are tax-averse because of their high incomes and people who are government-averse because of the competition government provides to their faith-traditions. But the result of this alliance is that poor people overwhelmingly support the Democrats. And that makes Republicans care even less about using the government to help the poor than would otherwise be the case. They don’t want to do it anyway, but they won’t get any credit for it even if they do.
So, the idea becomes to disavow government efforts to help the poor, even to the point of denying people the unemployment insurance they paid for. All government assistance is suspect and likely counterproductive. And Mitt Romney stepped all over that by suggesting that the country’s social welfare programs are just fine the way they are. He missed the point. It’s okay to not want to offer any government assistance to the poor, but it’s not okay to say that you don’t give a shit about the poor because they’re doing just fine. It’s okay to say that you want to focus on the middle class, but not okay to say that federal welfare programs are working great.
The truth is that religious groups do a lot of great work in this country but they are not capable of providing education, health care, counseling, and financial assistance to everyone who needs those things. And we live in an officially secular country where no one should be put in a situation where they have to engage in religious activities in order to receive aid.
Romney just proved, simultaneously, that he doesn’t give a shit about the poor and that he doesn’t give a shit about Movement Conservatism’s war against the federal government. No one is happy. Especially since he’s proven (once again) to be such a shitty politician.
