Wes Deviers

One reason the Right’s cultural victories are often short-lived is that our moral vision and vocabulary are stunted, trapped in the slogans of the 1980s. Yes, we once grappled with serious welfare dependency in this country. But major reforms and subsequent fine-tuning largely addressed that problem. We should be proud of those policy successes. Contrary to what some on the left claim, today, material poverty in America is low by any historical measure. Instead of updating our talking points, too many on the Right speak as though the crisis of welfare dependence were frozen in amber. That might generate clicks, but Americans are not fools and see this as deeply hypocritical. It is glaringly obvious that the poor are hardly the only ones on the take, and anyone with a conscience ought to question the morality of singling them out. It is especially grotesque when this rhetoric comes from people who work in politics and its adjacent industries. For those who have not figured it out, once in office, politicians make sure their supporters are taken care of. It happens through rent-seeking, regulatory protections, tax credits, and countless other channels. I am not saying all of it is evil. Some of it is even necessary. But for that reason, I refuse to get worked up, or try to whip people into a frenzy, over a mother buying her kids some grapes. In my view, anyone who indulges in that spectacle, especially when they know about the much more egregious graft, will have to answer for it someday, either in this life or the next. So, where does that leave us? The American Right urgently needs a far more sophisticated and ambitious moral vision and political vocabulary. Of course, you are responsible for your own family. But that is elementary; it is not the summit of conservative social thought. A richer, better conservatism, as Roger Scruton argued, sees society as a web of loyalties and mutual obligations, not merely a marketplace of transactions. Free markets are obviously essential, but stopping there betrays an impoverished view of the human experience. In any free society made up of people with diverse talents and opportunities, disparate outcomes are inevitable. From this understanding flows the belief in a modest safety net to help those who fall on hard times, especially those who cannot help themselves. This is fundamentally different from the socialist model, both in vision and in practice. Socialists seek to dissolve private obligations into state control and redistribute wealth as a matter of ideological equality. Conservatism, on the other hand, insists that the duty to help others arises from personal loyalty, community ties, and the love of home rather than from abstract schemes. We offer help to enable people to get back on their feet, not to equalize outcomes. This view is entirely consistent with our country's Judeo-Christian heritage. To be clear, acts of compassion through the state should never be abused or allowed to foster permanent dependency or unravel social cohesion. But neither should it be branded as a scarlet letter of shame. It is not only moral to help those who cannot help themselves; it is also an act of prudence. If we neglect our fellow citizens in their times of hardship, especially when the well-connected continue to receive help in countless ways, we risk tearing apart the very trust and solidarity that hold a country together. Without such safeguards, we invite the kind of extreme poverty that breeds precisely the social upheaval conservatism exists to prevent—and we will deserve it.