Truth And Consequences

In the LA Times, Michael Kinsley takes on the values debate:

I'm a terrible person — barely a person at all, really, and certainly not a real American — because I voted for the losing candidate on Tuesday. If you insist — and you do — I will rethink my fundamental beliefs from scratch because they are shared by only 47% of the electorate.

And please let me, or any other liberal, know if there is anything else we can do to abase ourselves. Abandon our core values? Pander to yours? Not a problem. Happy to do it. Anything, anything at all, to stop this shower of helpful advice.

There's just one little request I have. If it's not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

First of all, Kinsley misses the point (intentionally, I suspect). The "arrogant and elitist" jabs have nothing to do with the values debate.  They are a result of the whiny name-calling from the sore-loser contingent. Stop calling us stupid and ignorant and I imagine we'll stop calling you arrogant and elitist.

But why don't we call a truce? Pundits on the left, stop calling red state voters inbred cross-burning homophobic misogynists and admit that there are probably as many reasons for supporting the President as there are red state voters.  If you're feeling really brave, open your eyes to the very real presence of blacks, atheists and agnostics, pro-choicers, and homosexuals in the GOP.

Pundits on the right, stop with the holier-than-thou chest thumping.  Admit that Democrats aren't all HIV-positive thong-wearing Satan-worshipping crack addicts with 11 illegitimate children by 15 different fathers, most of whom are currently doing 3-to-5 in the state pen.  If you're feeling really brave, open your eyes to the very real presence of thinking, rational human beings in the Democratic party.  There is intelligent life in the DNC: the first manned probes returned from Boston with video.

But admit something else, Mr. Kinsley: choices have consequences, and life is never quite as simple as we'd like it to be.  These are home truths the Democrats don't want to own up to:

It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I'm sure they are — don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

Liberals love to frame the values debate in terms of choice.  It's not a potential human life: it's a choice.  If you disagree, I can dismiss your opinion because you're obviously a religious whack job.

Choice is such an attractive word: who could possibly oppose having more choices?

In the political arena, liberals do a better job of framing the debate: of packaging the pill for easy swallowing.  In all fairness, they have an easier task.  Liberal ideology is intrinsically positive in nature: Everyone should be allowed to choose.  It's not fair that some people have more than others - let's help the downtrodden. No one should go hungry/uneducated/jobless/unfulfilled.

A few days ago, I posted a conservative credo.  Read it carefully: conservatives aren't against choice. 

We simply believe that choices have consequences.

We have no desire to bear the consequences of other people's personal choices.  We're perfectly willing to bear the consequences of our own choices.  Which leads me to the clever wording of the excerpt quoted above:

But at least my values — as deplorable as I'm sure they are — don't involve any direct imposition on you.

I beg to differ.  If a young girl chooses to have six illegitimate children before the age of thirty, I don't have to raise them, nor do I have to enter the delivery room.  But money is taken from my paycheck to subsidize her welfare check, her state-sponsored health care, her two failed attempts to get a GED, the police who patrol her crime-ridden street where gangs of fatherless boys gather to terrorize the local residents, the juvenile hall her oldest boy ends up in 14 years later. 

I didn't make those choices, but I get stuck with the tab. And I live in a world in which some people work hard and pay their own way, while other people do as they please and have their expenses paid by others.  For a party that claims fairness as its mantra, this hardly seems appropriate.

The prevailing view of the Left is that people ought to be allowed to make choices without facing the natural consequences of those choices. That, in and of itself, might not be objectionable to the Right, if they did not also maintain that it was the duty of all right-thinking people to protect the chooser from facing those consequences.

The Michael Kinsleys of this world portray the Right as harshly judgemental and anti-choice. I don't hate that unwed mother. I don't condemn her. But I'm not sure it helped to subsidize her refusal to face reality.  I wouldn't support that behavior in my own daughter because I understand it's not good for her or her children.

And unlike the left, I'm not interested in telling her what's good for her.  Let her decide that.  And then live with the consequences of her decisions.  I don't think I'm more qualified than she is to make major decisions about her life.  I think she should be in the driver's seat.

The truth is, values are not a cost-free proposition.  The 'values-neutral' approach of the left has real social and economic costs: higher divorce rates, STDs, illegitimacy, single parent families, juvenile delinquency, declining academic achievement.  Look at the destruction of the black nuclear family over the past 40 years for a salutory lesson in social engineering run amok.

The values of the right have costs too: taken too far, they result in intolerance, bigotry, stifling of dissent and creativity, and hypocrisy. 

The problem is not a lack of values on the left, but that, as always, we have competing visions of what America should strive for.  Dale Franks notes:

...both sides are trying to force their moral values on the country. That is, in great part, what politics is all about. Politics is nothing more than the struggle to reinforce culture through the law. And culture, for the most part, is defined by the standards of morality, fairness, and ethics it promotes throughout society.

The problem with moral values is not that one side is trying to impose them, and the other side is not. It is that both sides are promoting a competing--and in many ways, mutually exclusive--moral vision on society.

- Cassandra