Liberals, Conservatives, and the Poor

Who are “the poor” being written about in previous posts about Conservatives and the Poor?  A stereotypical liberal lumps “the poor” together into one category and says their poverty is a result of various forms of oppression stemming from structural and institutional defects.  A stereotypical conservative lumps “the poor” together into one category and says their poverty is the result of personal defects of various forms.  These stereotypical liberals and conservatives (to the extent that they exist and are not merely caricatures created by their opponents) suffer from common defects.  They both fail to see the humanity of individual poor people and the complexity in which their lives are lived out.  There are no doubt institutional causes of poverty – racism, xenophobia, poor schools (with my meager brain, I still fail to see the liberal argument against school vouchers to help alleviate this problem), lack of quality medical care, lack of cheap transportation, etc.  And, there are no doubt individual causes of poverty – alcoholism, out of wedlock births, lack of personal discipline (the ability to show up on time and consistently), lack of personal hygiene, etc.  Many people are truly poor through no fault of their own or their family (but in many cases, these folks –through a combination of individual initiative, private help, and public help - can change their status over a couple of generations.) And, there may be a few people who are poor only through the fault of themselves or family.  But, I suspect that many are poor through a combination of institutional factors and personal decisions, which inevitably will be influenced by the broader culture and, in turn, influence the culture.

Do conservatives care about poor people?  Some do and some don’t.  I just came back from a conference attended mostly by conservatives and one of the battle cries of the conference was that your money is not your own, it is a gift from God to be used in the service of others.  Do liberals care about poor people?  Some do and some don’t.  When I suggested to a liberal colleague years ago that one way to solve the Social Security crisis is to means-test benefits, her response was “hell know, I put in, and I will demand that I receive my share of the benefits.”  I grew up biased in favor of the liberal democratic responses to poverty and the poor assuming that they conformed to Catholic Social Teaching.  As I started to study CST, I realized that many of the liberal democratic responses to the poor were actually contrary to CST.  My metaphor (which may be overly simplified) for much of the democratic response is that it treated the poor like dogs who were put in kennels in the form of high rise housing projects.  These measures might have provided minimum material needs but at the cost of poor people’s humanity. 

My hope is that we can get beyond the caricatures of liberals, conservatives, and the poor to address real human needs, including the needs of poor people in the complexities of their situations.  I suspect that we will differ as to the proper mix of individual initiative, private charity, and public welfare to address this and other problems.  But, hey, that makes life interesting…