It's kind of hard to believe, given the incredibly misleading column George Will offers today. Will argues that an "independent" scholar has proven conservatives are more charitable than liberals:
Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism." The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.
If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data.
Brooks may very well be a registered independent. But he's also quite clearly a conservative, since he is a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, where he has authored a number of pieces in the genre of "Did You Know that Conservatives Are Better Than Liberals Because...".
The "Independent" Mr. Brooks is also a columnist for another newspaper, the conservative New York Sun, and has written articles for the National Review so there's something deeply dishonest about Will presenting Brooks as a politically impartial social scientist "mugged" by his findings.
Among Brooks' "independent" work:
Democrats and "Diversity" in which Mr. Brooks tries to argue that liberals don't actually care about diversity.
The Political Gender Gap, in which Mr. Brooks says that despite the fact that women make less money than men they "feel the most freedom," so it's okay.
Liberal Hate-mongers, in which Mr. Brooks argues that it's actually liberals who are the real racists.
But Mr. Brooks has also authored a number of columns that simply take a conservative viewpoint, like this Op-Ed in The Sun praising Bush's AIDS policy.
The truth is that Arthur Brooks is a social scientist whose job it is to make the numbers look good for conservatives. Which is fine, but George Will identifying him as a "registered independent" in an effort to make him look impartial is deeply dishonest, and it never should have gotten past an editor.
It's Will's job to espouse a conservative viewpoint, and I have no idea whether his column is correct.
But if Will has to deliberately obscure that his information is coming from a partisan source to make it seem more credible, than that information probably isn't very reliable at all.
3 comments:
is religiously based charity taken into account here?
also, what counts as charity? is donating to your church equal to donating to world hunger?
Dude, Kos just stated that you are officially his new favorite blogger.
Don't let the fame get to you, bro. Take it gradually. Score the hot chicks first, leave the coke habit and the career-rejuvinating rehab stint and reality show to wait another few months.
Congrats -- I guess -- I've rarely ever read the site.
wrt Will's OpEd, it's frustrating because he's spouting things when he should have links to something more solid than a book by a guy associated with AEI.
The clear point of Will's OpEd is to push the idea that liberals will sit back and not help anyone, waiting for the government to do it. And it is clearly meant to coincide with the release of Obama's tax returns.
One thing Will and Brooks, the author of the book ignore is that looking at tax returns is not the be all of charitible work. Also, those identified as conservative may have just been maxing out something on their tax returns.
There's a lot of charity that is not monetary, and measuring by blood donation is especially craven of Brooks and Will pointing it out. There's a portion of the liberal community who is actually forbidden from donating blood. Did Brooks or Will take that into consideration? I doubt it.
As for the state analysis of giving, I live in a state that is bright red, so my charitible donations and work is lumped in with the other people in this state in Brooks' analysis.
It's crappy work done by a researcher with an axe to grind. It got a lot of play again today, though.
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