Neither Alms nor a Friend: The Tragedy of Compassionate Conservatism

MARVIN OLASKY HOLDS A MORAL COPYRIGHT ON THE TERM "COMPASSIONATE Conservatism," and franchised President George W. Bush to market it. Olasky has produced a stream of books and articles on the subject; the latest is called, simply, Compassionate Conservatism (2000). The book has a foreword as well as an appendix written by Bush the Younger, not to mention a prescient endorsement by then Senator, and now Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose own compassion has recently been a cause for some concern. A previous Olasky book, Renewing American Compassion (1996a), is introduced by another franchisee, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was in the midst of dismantling the welfare state at the time of publication. In the preface, Gingrich wrote, "Marvin Olasky unlocked for me the key of how to replace the welfare state. His earlier Tragedy of American Compassion was one of the most extraordinary books written in our generation." Scrambled metaphor aside, it was heady praise from Gingrich, the one-time history professor, who went on to say about Olasky' s earlier book, The Tragedy (1992): In it he went back and looked at 350 years in which Americans dealt with poverty, tragedy, and addiction with much greater success than the current welfare system has done. It was primarily a history book that showed...the consistent way Americans thought about poverty and helped the poor. It concluded that what traditional reporters warned against is precisely what the welfare state did (Olasky, 1996a: xiii). The Tragedy provides a sweeping historical analysis of welfare in America, and it is the key to understanding how Bush and other leaders think about their heritage and how they intend to restructure charitable institutions to reclaim this tradition. A careful examination of The Tragedy can be helpful for those who wish to understand the Bush agenda. Before we turn to the text, it will be useful to describe the author, who is not well known outside conservative circles, even though he has been the subject of many feature stories in the mass media (Grann, 1999; Miller, 2000; JPS; 1996). For those who are concerned about the conservative agenda, Olasky' s personal history is as important as the welfare history he explains. His scholarly research is intertwined with his personal history in such a way that you cannot understand one without information on the other. It is not difficult to find Out about him; his website displays his picture and provides a detailed biography, as well as many articles and essays written about his work, even ones that have taken him to task. Olasky is in his early fifties, a scrawny, jug-eared, bearded, bespectacled professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Austin. One critic compared him to the 19th-century Ichabod Crane; it may be an accurate description in more ways than simply his appearance. He has written innumerable articles and a steady stream of books (18 in the last 13 years). In addition, he is the editor of World, "a weekly Christian news magazine," and has contributed a regular column to the Austin-American Statesman. He has also edited 16 books for the Turning Point Christian Worldview Series. His path to Christianity and conservatism was not direct or simple. His parents were second-generation American Jews whose families had escaped from Czarist Russia. Like many of their generation, his parents were not very strict about their religious practices, but Marvin did attend Hebrew school for seven years and was bar mitzvahed at 13. He took the first steps on the path toward Christianity by going the opposite way. He became an atheist at 14 and a member of the Communist Party in 1972, when he was 22. In the interim, he attended Yale as a scholarship student, where he was an activist during the Vietnam War. Even though there have been enormous swings in his ideological commitments, there is a certain consistency in his approach. The New York Times (Grann, 1999) interviewed some of his classmates, who said that his activism was oddly "puritanical" and "monkish. …