Canter Bridge

The time has passed when liberal can be equated with caring and conservative with cold.

Arthur Brooks, the author of Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservativism (Basic, 2006) abbreviates that book’s argument in a January 24 letter published in the Wall Street Journal.

Income inequality is his topic. How the two political poles comprehend that fact on the ground is his lens.

According to Mr. Brook’s research, liberals do not lament income equality more than conservatives. They simply consider it less malleable.

Conservatives, it turns out, are slow to ask ‘government’ to dissolve the obstacle of income inequality that lies in the path of many of them because they are optimistic-some prefer to say ‘hopeful’-about ordinary people’s ability to surmount the roadblock themselves by hard work and creativity. For Brooks, conservatives are marked by a high view of the capacity of ordinary people rather than a heartless regard for their predicament.

During sixteen years in Latin America, I was often astonished by the gap that loomed between two points of departure. On the one hand, the rhetoric of the region’s theologians of liberation loudly decried the structural injustices that kept the poor in their benighted place. Doubtless, a prophetic critique of many of the region’s injustices was and is required. Yet so often, the most eloquent and searing prose was pronounced from the easy chairs of the intellectual salons.

Meanwhile, the poor Christians with whom I shared life simply worked away in hopes that regenerated, focused, hardworking, and altruistic lives would improve the lot of the households and communities of which they were members.

Time after time, this is exactly what happened.

So who cares more?

As Brooks observes, reasonable people can disagree on the state’s role in combating economic and social justice. But reasonable people need to dispense with the assumption that conservatives care less than their liberal counterparts.

That view is the stuff of mythology. Reasonable people use myth to entertain themselves. For serious matters of culture and state, they rely on sterner stuff.