We want to be, as Kaus notes and as conservatives regularly emphasize a society of free and equal citizens, not one of benefactors and dependents. We love and sacrifice for our families without regard to anyone s deserving. We owe them that because they are family. It is political madness to suggest that we owe everyone in society in the same measure. Love may motivate our participation in the public square, but it cannot provide the substance of our politics.
Love gives without counting the costs.
A politics that doesn t count costs is feckless and irresponsible. But Mr. Walzer and others like him might reflect more deeply than they seem to have done on the implications of the collapse of socialism. The world has not overnight turned hardhearted. If there is today a near universal suspicion of the politics of the left, that reflects not a failure of moral imagination but a commonsense recognition that collectivist ethics, like collectivist economics, simply runs contrary to the way the world works.