As a result, there are many occasions today when one must argue sternly for individual rights and against the so-called common good. This is especially true when the eyes of many are blinded by the mere sound of the words. When people hear the “common good,” many think of something noble and shiny and good, something motherly. But they do not think carefully enough about who is determining what the common good is, whether they are speaking truly, empirically, and whether they have a good track record of success. We should ask ourselves: Who decides what the common good is, and who enforces this common good? And what does it do to those who receive it, to their skills and their sense of accomplishment and personal happiness?
The Progressive Agenda. In America, many of our elites describe themselves as progressives. But what do they mean? Watch what they do, what they advocate for, and you will most often see that these are activists on behalf of larger government and more spending for their favorite causes: the poor, Planned Parenthood, solar and wind power, restrictions on the use of fossil fuels, and two of their most passionately held causes, abortion and gay marriage. Such progressives are not necessarily anticapitalist. Many of those funding progressive causes are, in fact, very wealthy capitalists themselves, or their heirs and foundations. George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates are household names. But many other lesser known people with very deep pockets have much social and political influence, people like software entrepreneur Tim Gill, retired hedge-fund executive Tom Steyer, and green-technology investor David Gelbaum.4
Many progressives talk and act as though the trouble with the American people is that they do not know what is good for them. They have to be told, herded, regulated, fined, and forced into the right course of action. Nanny, nanny, everywhere the nanny state. Progressives now play the role that Puritans used to play in saying no. No smoking, no ozone, no gun-ownership, no this, that, and the other thing. Some of these may be admirable ideas; it is the relentless nagging in the progressive character that is new and troubling.
More than progressives recognize in themselves, they suffer from an inner passion for bossing other people around. They desire to do this for the good of the ones bossed. One of the more humble, but often annoying, of these impositions was the automatic safety belt that used to be in many cars, which closed around you whether you wanted it to or not. One of the more outrageous is the automatic cancellation of the health-insurance policy you have long experience with, chose for yourself, and like, in order to be fitted into a government plan you don’t like or want.
Almost always, the rationale offered for coercing you into something you don’t want is that it’s for your own good. It is surprising how often the terms “social justice” and “common good” are pounded into our heads to make us do something we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. And that is probably why progressives turn to big government. Otherwise, they could not coerce us into seeing things their way.
New “Civil Rights”: Gender, Sex, Reproduction. When I first went to the United Nations Human Rights Commission meetings in Geneva in 1981, two different delegates from opposite sides of the world (Norway and India) told me that the most hopeful signs they had seen in their lifetimes was the much delayed shift in the United States in favor of institutional support for the rights of black Americans. To change habits of mind so inveterate and so entrenched gives hope to the rest of humanity, they said. The calling of the Second Vatican Council by the old Pope John XXIII and the election of the handsome young President John F. Kennedy and his “New Frontiersmen” gave hope that the old thick ice was breaking up.
It is no wonder that nearly every new impulse and new social movement in the United States (and elsewhere) since that time has styled itself in the image of that first great civil-rights movement of American blacks and their allies.
In recent decades, for instance, a brand new element of the progressive agenda has taken shape under the rubric of social justice: “reproductive rights.” As one writer puts it:
The privileged in this world, for the most part, have unfettered access to the reproductive health and education services to decide for themselves when and whether to bear or raise a child. The poor and disadvantaged do not. Thus, the struggle for reproductive justice is inextricably bound up with the effort to secure a more just society.
Accordingly, those who would labor to achieve economic and social justice are called upon to join in the effort to achieve reproductive justice and, thereby, help realize the sacred vision of a truly just society for all.5
This is how the thinking goes: The privileged of this world have a chance to control the number of children they have, but the poor don’t have this chance, and that’s not fair. So, in the name of the poor, progressives introduced a concept of reproductive rights, by which they primarily mean the right to abortion. It’s not so hard to get birth control anywhere in the world; that transformation has by and large already happened. What the issue really comes down to is abortion: How can you be for social justice and against reproductive rights?
The situation is the same in the case of gay rights, another element of the progressive agenda promoted as a matter of social justice. Consider the following statement from an administrator of the Anglican Church in New Zealand: “How can the Church be taken seriously or receive any respect for its views on the far more important issues of poverty, violence and social justice, when the public keep being reminded of this blot on its integrity, the continued discrimination against gays?”6
Compassion. All these newly invented demands increasingly fly under the flag of “social justice.” And there is one more new word (or honorable old word, used in a new way) by which to understand many today who talk about social justice. There used to be a Tammany Hall saying: “Th’ fella’ what said that patriotism is th’ last refuge of scoundrels, underestimated th’ possibilities of compassion.” In addition to equality and the common good, another term that came to be used in association with social justice is “compassion.”
That Tammany Hall saying wittily reminds us of the contemporary sins committed in the name of compassion. We must never again allow that beautiful term “compassion” to become a blinding light, in whose name totalitarians seize power for “the people,” and then practice the utmost cruelty. Abortion, for instance, the daily use of scissors to slice spinal cords and other medical tools to crush little skulls—this is compassion for women? It is a ruse to cover this with the name “choice.” The question is: What is the choice, and how much do you want to look at it with your own eyes, in order to take full responsibility for it?
Compassion comes in true forms and in false forms. The American War on Poverty unintentionally ushered in a period of rapidly rising numbers of births out of wedlock and the relative decline in the number of married couples among the poor. This dramatic change in family composition was accompanied by a sharp increase in poverty among never-married women with children. By 1986, the fastest growing segment of the poor was found in this cohort of never-married women with children.7
To be fair, the War on Poverty did work very well for the elderly in the United States, whose condition in 1985 was far better than it had been in 1965. It was still better in 2005.
But here too we are up against the law of unintended consequences. The original premise of Social Security arrangements was that there would be seven workers for every receiver of benefits. Today, however, we are no longer having the numbers of children required to support such a program. We’re getting to the point where by 2030 there will be only two workers for every retiree. It is therefore already clear that we are not going to be able to meet the obligations that we have assumed. That sword of Damocles hangs by an even more frayed thread over social-democratic Europe.