But that all changed during the Great Depression with the enactment of Roosevelt's New Deal programs for the elderly, needy families, and the unemployed. While those programs enjoyed a broad support born of an emergency, conservatives today say it is time to re-evaluate government's role. The private sector, they point out, does not have sufficient resources to care for all the poor, all the time. However, conservatives counter, some government entitlements financially reward bad behavior and thus trap individuals in a self-destructive cycle of dependence. Gore's suggestion that the road is long between the rhetoric and the results of compassion is not always so.
Compassionate action improves with practice.
And while the road to some of our goals may be long, the practice of compassion can begin immediately. This renewed politics of compassion is a hopeful sign in a society that has seemed to surrender any political vision of the common good in favor of the pandering of interest-group politics. At the end of the 1990s, Americans have a much-diminished understanding of their obligation to the common good. But that requires a sense of national community and a willingness to sacrifice. With the country in that kind of mood, the new politics of compassion is just what we need to turn us away from individualism and toward right relations between people in community.