The
National Review continues its long tradition of being the most ambitiously cruel of the ostensibly "intellectual" conservative outlets. In this edition, a fellow named David French (I am not sure when conservatives started trusting the French, mind you, but there you go)
knows who to blame for America's difficulties:
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
He goes on to cite "disturbing research" that (white) poor people tend to be more "disconnected from church and religion" than the rich, saying, "In other words, the deeper a person slides into poverty, the more they’re disconnected from the very values that can save them and their families."
This is an ongoing trope, though it probably would be more at home in the Victorian age than the modern age: the poor are poor because they lack virtue. If they were virtuous, after all, they would not be poor: QED.
According to this philosophy, any help to the poor will only coddle them. They should attend church, and feed their souls; if they are virtuous, God will feed them himself. Poor people get divorced, but rich people do not. Poor people are ignorant: if God truly loved them, he would pay for their education (because of course the rest of us should not.) Poor people are not hard workers, unlike the better off: any layabout can pick crops for ten hours a day. Poor people tend to be born out of wedlock, which makes them bastards, which makes them impure.
Above all, poor people are depraved, and should certainly not have their lives made more comfortable and sustainable at our expense. If they cannot feed themselves, they should die. If their children need medical care but the poor have not saved enough money for it, those children should die. If they cannot pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, if they cannot stay in school instead of giving it up in order to earn enough money to eat, if they cannot go to Harvard like the rest of us and educate themselves, damn them, then they are not worth saving. We should tell them to work harder, we should tell them to go to church, and we should tell them to stop getting divorces: after that, our hands are tied.
I wonder at the sort of church that teaches such things. Not once in decades of sermons did I myself ever hear the preacher talk about Jesus condemning the depravity of the poor, though I remember talk about the depravity of the rich. I never heard the part that condemned poverty as the moral failure of the poor. I slept through my share of sermons, as a child, but I paid enough attention in Sunday School, and sang the songs, and recited the psalms and the beatitudes, and I have to think I would have noticed.
It must be very comforting to think that the poor are only poor because they are sinful little pricks, and not simply because of bad luck or accidents of birth, of economy, or anything else. It provides assurance to any churchgoer that they will simply never be poor, because they work hard and love God. They will never lose their job, or lose their house, or have to sleep in their car, or lose their car as well, because they have "values." (And if they do, the joke is on the statistics, because poor people tend to lose their faith, and not go to church any more, and that proves right there that they were not really virtuous after all.) If you presume virtue is synonymous with good fortune, and depravity with poverty, the world is a much less fickle place.
Oh, and as mere coincidence, you no longer need to care about the poor, because Jesus was wrong. They are just sinners and freeloaders, and you should not encourage people like that by giving them sustenance or comfort.
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