TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/060192/0601640.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5.7 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 90

In Defense of Good Intentions


By Michael Kinsley


    "For many years we tried many different programs. All of
them -- let's understand this -- had noble intentions."

    -- President Bush in Los Angeles, May 9


    These days one of the worst things you can be accused of
is good intentions. George Bush imputes good intentions to the
antipoverty efforts of the 1960s and '70s as a preface to
saying they've backfired. Bush's Republican rival, Patrick
Buchanan, then trumps him by pre-emptively tarring any new
antipoverty efforts with the same brush. "In the wake of Los
Angeles," Buchanan declares, "everyone has a `solution' to the
`problem.' And these solutions come from earnest and
well-intentioned men and women." Officer, stop that man! He's
armed with good intentions.

    A check through Nexis, the computerized news-media
database, confirms that virtually every time someone is
described as having "good" or "noble" or "best of" intentions,
that person is about to be accused of doing something wrong. It
may just be improperly removing a hook from a fish ("Good
intentions notwithstanding, the result of such handling can be
a severely injured fish . . ."). But most often since the Los
Angeles riot, the subject has been the cities and the
underclass.

    Good intentions do sometimes go awry, in helping the poor
as in any other human endeavor. Go see the current movie of
E.M. Forster's Howards End -- or read the novel -- for an
exploration of that theme. But the reflexive crediting of "good
intentions" has become a standard throat-clearing exercise by
those who wish to attack government antipoverty programs. This
serves their rhetorical purposes in two ways.

    First, while good intentions might seem like an admirable
thing to have, the phrase also conjures up an image of
woolly-minded naivete. Those dear old liberals, sitting in their
ivory-tower rocking chairs, knitting vast social-welfare
blankets from skeins of good intentions and taxpayer money --
What do they know about the real world? The implication is that
good intentions are not merely insufficient but even detrimental
to the hard business of facing up to the hard truths about
poverty and race. Good intentions are for sissies.

    At the same time, crediting others with good intentions is
a subtle way of claiming them for yourself. After all, it is
hardly necessary to vouch for the good intentions of Lyndon
Johnson, who wanted to spend billions fighting poverty. The one
who needs credit for good intentions is Bush, who says such
efforts are unnecessary or even destructive and -- by a
remarkable coincidence -- the true solutions to the problems of
the ghetto are those that ask virtually nothing of the white
middle class. Naturally Bush would like to stipulate good
intentions all around.

    It is shocking to read President Johnson's words from the
1960s. He spoke bluntly about "white guilt" and "equality [of]
result." These phrases violate the taboos of 1992's conservative
political correctness. And of course anything as grandiose as
a "war on poverty" is unthinkable today. Why is that? People say
we have lost the economic optimism and national self-confidence
of the 1960s. But the 1980s were also a period of national
economic optimism, yet that is when the War on Poverty was
officially declared unwinnable. And even the sad-sack 1990s are
objectively richer than the 1960s. The difference must be a
matter of good intentions.

    To be sure, there is some hard-earned pessimism about
government programs at work. But much of the pessimism is mere
posturing. Bush and others have said repeatedly in recent weeks
that the government has spent "$3 trillion over 25 years"
fighting poverty, with the implication that this money has been
lavished on the underclass. According to the White House's own
figures, most of this mystical $3 trillion went for such
non-underclass and politically sacrosanct programs as Medicare
(more than a trillion) and veterans' benefits ($287 billion).
The good intentions of anyone who talks about $3 trillion spent
fighting poverty are suspect from the start.

    Like Jimmy Carter after the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, Bush would like it known that after Los Angeles,
the scales fell from his eyes. "The time really has come to try
a new way . . . making our commitment to end poverty and despair
greater than ever before." However, the distinguishing feature
of the conservative antipoverty agenda that Bush has now
embraced is not its newness -- or even its rightness or
wrongness -- but its cheapness. At the state level, in the name
of welfare "reform," benefits are simply being slashed. The cost
of "enterprise zones" is hidden in the form of tax cuts (with
the usual claim that these cuts will pay for themselves).

    Some favorite conservative nostrums would actually cost
plenty, such as privatizing public housing or changing current
welfare rules that penalize people for taking a job, saving
money or keeping their families intact. But conservatives
usually pretend the cost doesn't exist. It isn't recalcitrant
liberals standing in the way of such reforms. It is a national
reluctance to spend the money nurtured by conservatives
themselves.

    Fine words butter no parsnips, as the Brits like to say.
The test of good intentions is a willingness to put yourself
out for them. Yet the political message Bush and company are
sending is: You have already put yourselves out too much. After
Los Angeles, it's a comforting message. What a relief to be
told that good intentions are futile.