In Defense of Good Intentions

By Michael Kinsley

"For many years we tried many different programs. All of them -- let's understand this -- had noble intentions."

-- President Bush in Los Angeles, May 9

THESE DAYS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN BE ACcused of is good intentions. George Bush imputes good intentions to the antipoverty efforts of the 1960s and '70s as a preface to saying they've backfired. Bush's Republican rival, Patrick Buchanan, then trumps him by pre-emptively tarring any new antipoverty efforts with the same brush. "In the wake of Los Angeles," Buchanan declares, "everyone has a 'solution' to the 'problem.' And these solutions come from earnest and well-intentioned men and women." Officer, stop that man! He's armed with good intentions.

A check through Nexis, the computerized news-media database, confirms that virtually every time someone is described as having "good" or "noble" or "best of" intentions, that person is about to be accused of doing something wrong. It may just be improperly removing a hook from a fish ("Good intentions notwithstanding, the result of such handling can be a severely injured fish . . ."). But most often since the Los Angeles riot, the subject has been the cities and the underclass.

Good intentions do sometimes go awry, in helping the poor as in any other human endeavor. Go see the current movie of E.M. Forster's Howards End -- or read the novel -- for an exploration of that theme. But the reflexive crediting of "good intentions" has become a standard throat-clearing exercise by those who wish to attack government antipoverty programs. This serves their rhetorical purposes in two ways.

First, while good intentions might seem like an admirable thing to have, the phrase also conjures up an image of woolly-minded naivete. Those dear old liberals, sitting in their ivory-tower rocking chairs, knitting vast social- welfare blankets from skeins of good intentions and taxpayer money -- What do they know about the real world? The implication is that good intentions are not merely insufficient but even detrimental to the hard business of facing up to the hard truths about poverty and race. Good intentions are for sissies.

At the same time, crediting others with good intentions is a subtle way of claiming them for yourself. After all, it is hardly necessary to vouch for the good intentions of Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to spend billions fighting poverty. The one who needs credit for good intentions is Bush, who says such efforts are unnecessary or even destructive and -- by a remarkable coincidence -- the true solutions to the problems of the ghetto are those that ask virtually nothing of the white middle class. Naturally Bush would like to stipulate good intentions all around.

It is shocking to read President Johnson's words from the 1960s. He spoke bluntly about "white guilt" and "equality ((of)) result." These phrases violate the taboos of 1992's conservative political correctness. And of course anything as grandiose as a "war on poverty" is unthinkable today. Why is that? People say we have lost the economic optimism and national self- confidence of the 1960s. But the 1980s were also a period of national economic optimism, yet that is when the War on Poverty was officially declared unwinnable. And even the sad-sack 1990s are objectively richer than the 1960s. The difference must be a matter of good intentions.

To be sure, there is some hard-earned pessimism about government programs at work. But much of the pessimism is mere posturing. Bush and others have said repeatedly in recent weeks that the government has spent "$3 trillion over 25 years" fighting poverty, with the implication that this money has been lavished on the underclass. According to the White House's own figures, most of this mystical $3 trillion went for such non-underclass and politically sacrosanct programs as Medicare (more than a trillion) and veterans' benefits ($287 billion). The good intentions of anyone who talks about $3 trillion spent fighting poverty are suspect from the start.

Like Jimmy Carter after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Bush would like it known that after Los Angeles, the scales fell from his eyes. "The time really has come to try a new way . . . making our commitment to end poverty and despair greater than ever before." However, the distinguishing feature of the conservative antipoverty agenda that Bush has now embraced is not its newness -- or even its rightness or wrongness -- but its cheapness. At the state level, in the name of welfare "reform," benefits are simply being slashed. The cost of "enterprise zones" is hidden in the form of tax cuts (with the usual claim that these cuts will pay for themselves).

Some favorite conservative nostrums would actually cost plenty, such as privatizing public housing or changing current welfare rules that penalize people for taking a job, saving money or keeping their families intact. But conservatives usually pretend the cost doesn't exist. It isn't recalcitrant liberals standing in the way of such reforms. It is a national reluctance to spend the money nurtured by conservatives themselves.

Fine words butter no parsnips, as the Brits like to say. The test of good intentions is a willingness to put yourself out for them. Yet the political message Bush and company are sending is: You have already put yourselves out too much. After Los Angeles, it's a comforting message. What a relief to be told that good intentions are futile.