Where the Right is not wrong, part 3: The value of personal responsibility

Below: Part 1: Experts don't know everything
              Part 2: regulations are often burdensome

One of the weird things that result from polarization is that perfectly sensible ideas become distorted  by association with one side. The Right has taken ownership of the idea of “personal responsibility”. For the Left, that now smells of a cover for not wanting to help those in need. Reds seek to cut programs like welfare because, from their perspective, they want to encourage personal responsibility; from our Blue point of view, that just leaves the poor in the lurch and robs  them of opportunity. We believe government has a responsibility to help, and we do not believe that voluntary charity from communities or individuals is adequate. This disagreement quickly spirals into mutual recriminations, with the Right accusing the Left of coddling the poor just to win votes and power, and the Left accusing the Right of covering avarice and heartlessness under a false value of responsibility.

But let's step back for a moment. Personal responsibility is something we all value. Blues hope as much as Reds that our kids will learn this value. None of us believes that a good society is one in which people laze around waiting for government handouts. We all want a society in which people are engaged in meaningful work and can support their families and communities.

And we should recognize that none of us really knows how to get there. Even if government programs are critical for helping the disadvantaged - which we Blues do believe - we haven't solved the problem of what happens after that. There have of course been many theories and experiments in transitioning people from welfare, but I think it's fair to say that none has been a ringing success. But neither has relying on local community and personal responsibility.
The sociological view is that we need both. Government cannot operate effectively without support from communities, and communities are not sufficient to deal with the problems of complex societies without government. Is it so hard to keep both things in mind at once?

We do know that the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 1970s have not succeeded in improving the lives of many poor and minority people. Some Blues blame it on racism, which is a rather vague category; but even if it's true, that's exactly the point. Regulations cannot by themselves overcome racism or other forms of social resistance. Regulations work only when they operate together with growing social consensus.

We if the Left don't have much to say about how to build such a consensus. Faced with crises in government-based welfare programs, we generally stick to a one-note reply: do more of the same - increase the force and scope of the regulations. But much evidence indicated that this only increases the force and scope of the resistances and evasions. We have paid far too little attention to complementary strategies of community mobilization, especially among whites and the more affluent. And we have consistently underestimated the difficulty of building self reliant communities among the disadvantaged.

It certainly seems clear that personal responsibility is not enough: benevolence from the dominant community, and preaching the value of self reliance to the poor, are inadequate responses to the severe issues of inequality and poverty. But community and self reliance are good and necessary and should be part of the conversation.