If nothing else, the appalling “leadership” of the “caring” Obamacrats should have revealed to anyone who is paying attention that “I feel your pain” is a stupid way to run a country. According to Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, liberalism is a co-dependent alliance of experts and victims; yet this kind of unhealthy faux compassion has fueled American politics in recent years. Meanwhile, research has proven that the people most likely to actually care are the people least likely to approve of kind of top-down government programs that Democrats favor.
Sources:
http://nypost.com/2014/11/09/why-liberal-compassion-is-an-inane-basis-for-political-action/
polination.blog 
Comment on my Facebook post: This is the false righteousness predicted of the last days, “having a form of godliness, but denying the Power thereof”, 2 Timothy 3:5. This is such a perfect fit.
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William Voegeli, the author of The Pity Party (pictured above), gave an address at Hillsdale College last month on this subject, the text of which is available here:
The Case Against Liberal Compassion
It’s definitely worth a read. I’m sure the book is excellent as well.
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Excerpt:
“Mitch Daniels, the former Republican governor of Indiana, contended that disciplining government according to ‘measured provable performance and effective spending’ ought to be a ‘completely philosophically neutral objective.’ Skinflint conservatives want government to be thrifty for obvious reasons, but Daniels maintained that liberals’ motivations should be even stronger. ‘I argue to my most liberal friends: You ought to be the most offended of anybody if a dollar that could help a poor person is being squandered in some way. And,’ the governor added slyly, ‘some of them actually agree.’
“The clear implication—that many liberals are not especially troubled if government dollars that could help poor people are squandered—strikes me as true, interesting, and important. Given that liberals are people who: 1) have built a welfare state that is now the biggest thing government does in America; and 2) want to regard themselves and be regarded by others as compassionate empathizers determined to alleviate suffering, it should follow that nothing would preoccupy them more than making sure the welfare state machine is functioning at maximum efficiency. When it isn’t, after all, the sacred mission of alleviating preventable suffering is inevitably degraded.
“In fact, however, liberals do not seem all that concerned about whether the machine they’ve built, and want to keep expanding, is running well. For inflation-adjusted, per capita federal welfare state spending to increase by 254 percent from 1977 to 2013, without a correspondingly dramatic reduction in poverty, and for liberals to react to this phenomenon by taking the position that our welfare state’s only real defect is that it is insufficiently generous, rather than insufficiently effective, suggests a basic problem.
“To take a recent, vivid example, the Obama Administration had three-and-a-half years from the signing of the Affordable Care Act to the launch of the healthcare.gov website. It’s hard to reconcile the latter debacle with the image of liberals lying awake at night tormented by the thought the government should be doing more to reduce suffering. …
“I conclude that the machinery created by the politics of kindness doesn’t work very well—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. …
“If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, the failure of government programs to alleviate suffering is not only an acceptable outcome but in many ways the preferred one. Sometimes empathizers, such as those in the ‘helping professions,’ acquire a vested interest in the study, management, and perpetuation—as opposed to the solution and resulting disappearance—of sufferers’ problems. This is why so many government programs initiated to conquer a problem end up, instead, colonizing it by building sprawling settlements where the helpers and the helped are endlessly, increasingly co-dependent. Even where there are no material benefits to addressing, without ever reducing, other people’s suffering, there are vital psychic benefits for those who regard their own compassion as the central virtue that makes them good, decent, and admirable people—people whose sensitivity readily distinguishes them from mean-spirited conservatives. ‘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.'”
(read the whole thing here)
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Wow.
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