The alliance of public-sector workers and compassionate liberal elites is driving America into the ditch.

It’s the Unions

by Fred Siegel

William Voegeli has a profound talent for anticipating the pratfalls of the liberal welfare state. In his new book, The Pity Party: A Mean Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion, Voegeli looks beyond the stunning incompetence of the Obama administration to its underlying liberal assumptions. 

In his previous book, 2010’s Never Enough: The Limitless Welfare State, Voegeli not only foresaw the Tea Party movement before it emerged; he also explained that its underlying fears of an out-of-control government were well justified. He looked to a renewed constitutionalism as a means of restraining the American Leviathan. It’s a theme to which Voegeli, a senior editor at The Claremont Review of Books, returns to here. And just as the previous book anticipated the rise of the Tea Party, the new one seems to have been written in anticipation of this year’s big political stories—the sudden influx of illegal, underage Central American immigrants and the transatlantic Ebola crisis.

Both episodes forced liberals to deal with their beau ideal of compassion, the virtue which, more than any other, Voegeli argues, shapes the modern liberal world view. “Compassion encompasses modern liberalism . . . not the other way around,” he writes.

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