There’s room for the right to make a connection with well-meaning progressives when it comes to love.
At the risk of arriving late to the news cycle of a couple weeks ago on the hierarchies of love, I wanted to offer an adjustment to Matt Walsh’s perspective, with which I mostly agree:
The point is well taken that it’s easier to love “people” in the abstract than to love particular people (particularly when doing so leads one to advocate for things that one wants anyway). Nonetheless, if the term, “love,” means willing the good of the other, it is certainly available to both distant and aggregated people — the broader humanity. However, the closer a person is to environments that we can actually influence, this willing the good increasingly requires action.
Progressive policy is characterized by three qualities that bring the reality of their “love” into question:
- It is only marginally more specific (if at all) than the love that most well-meaning people will have for people they don’t know.
- It tends to impose obligations on people other than the progressives who claim to care so much.
- It implicitly imposes progressives’ beliefs about what is “good” on everybody else, including the constituencies they patronize.
Of course, for many progressives, we could add in the fourth characterization that the policies conspicuously benefit them in some way.
