Eidelberg on the "politics of compassion"

A Discourse on Statesmanship is in large part a contrast between the politics of the American founders, especially Madison and Hamilton, and those of Woodrow Wilson, whom Eidelberg sees as the intellectual founder of a new American republic, greatly inferior to the original. Wilsonianism succeeded in transforming American politics so that it no longer aimed at justice or equality of opportunity, but rather equality of personal condition. The first Eidelberg sees as a felicitous synthesis of aristocratic and democratic principles, tending to protect the exercise of individual faculties by securing the economic differences to which they give rise; the second, as an unfettered democratic principle which ultimately leads to moral relativism, the destruction of genuine individuality, and the enthronement of mediocrity everywhere, including the "élite" colleges which heavily influence a nation's core beliefs.

One of the ways which Wilson used to bring about this change, Eidelberg observes, was the replacement in political rhetoric of a (masculine) sense of justice with a (feminine) one of compassion. The Founders were free of expressions of compassion; so were Lincoln (even on the matter of slavery) and most recently Teddy Roosevelt. But for Woodrow Wilson compassion is the "ruling emotion of his political thought", and since Wilson the "superabundance of sentimentalism and moral purism" in American politics has been "symptomatic of an effeminate age wavering between adolescence and senility."

Why should compassion be so deadly when it enters the political sphere? It is a familiar argument that political compassion will encourage the state to become involved in protecting people from the consequences of their more ill-advised actions. Thus it tends to produce a bloated, suffocating state as well as a people who are never required to grow into full adults. But Eidelberg also sees compassion, or a simulacrum thereof, as a direct tool for psychological control:

. . . as any student of human nature knows, there is hardly a more effective way of emasculating an individual and gaining power over his will than by evoking self-pity. This may be done by blaming others or bad luck for his plight and by indulging him with sympathy. [p. 342.]

Political compassion, Eidelberg says, brings the ruler down to the level of the average person; it makes no demands on that person, placing no responsibility on him for his own condition; it obliterates distinctions among men, so that even felons and traitors may become its objects; and it is vastly condescending, refusing even to credit the common man with the capacity to do evil—by no means a contemptible power, in Eidelberg's view.

Eidelberg's claims about Wilson would be likely to strike many as extreme (though not everyone: there are also democratic ideologues like Walter Karp, for example, who hated Wilson for subjecting the United States to a de facto dictatorship during World War I, after dragging the country unnecessarily into that conflict; many also view postwar Wilsonian diplomacy as disastrous). Eidelberg's point, though, is not so much that Wilson was a mad revolutionary hiding in a thin disguise of respectability, as that his basic ideas had malignant long-term implications, at which he would doubtless have been appalled if he had been aware of them.