Do conservatives really care about the poor?

Conservatives claim to care about the poor, and one of their criticisms of Democrats is that progressive policy undermines the “social safety net.” This is, to say the least, very strange. I have no doubt that conservatives think they care about the poor; few if any actually wish the poor to just go away and die. But they do not care enough to endorse meaningful action.

Consider, first, that many of them refer to progressives as “bleeding heart liberals.” They intend this as a criticism, even though the term refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus. They scorn the kind of concern that Jesus felt. I have written about how Studs Terkel pointed this out.

Second, who can forget what Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign, about how the 47 percent of Americans who receive some public assistance (even if it is not their entire income but just supplementary help) see themselves as dependents and victims. He simply dismissed them as being lazy. Of course, the memory of this statement is already fading.

But there is one way in which conservatives really do care about the poor. The poor are, for them, political capital. Republicans believe they can gain political capital by talking about the poor. In this sense, they resemble the antebellum Southerners who used slaves as political capital.

The Southerners before the Civil War did not want their slaves to be free, or to have rights and receive fair wages. But neither did they want to harm their slaves. Slaves were the most expensive part of running a plantation. Prices for slaves ran from about $50 for old men up to almost $1000 for a nubile young female, according to a museum display I saw a couple of years ago. This was big money at the time. The slave-owners would have to be crazy to beat their slaves. Of course, some of them were crazy.

During the Constitutional convention, the delegates from Southern states refused to consider an end to slavery. They did, however, consider two limitations upon it. First, they agreed that the importation of slaves would end in the future. They did not, however, foresee any eventual goal of ending slavery. Second, they insisted that slaves be counted in the population census.

This second point makes it look like the slave-owners considered their slaves to be people rather than property. But this is not true. The only reason the Southerners wanted slaves to be counted in the census was so that their states would have more representatives in Congress. The compromise they reached with Northern delegates was that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. Slaves were political capital, nothing more.

Southerners also used slavery in their propaganda against the North. They loved to point out that Northerners, and the British as well, condemned slavery while profiting from trade in the goods that slaves produced, especially cotton. Sometimes Southern propaganda went to extreme lengths. A tract written by George Fitzhugh, Slavery Justified, claimed, “We love our slaves!” I think he sincerely meant in the fraternal, not carnal, sense. He pointed out that Northerners could just dismiss their servants, and allow these servants to sink into poverty and disease and death, at any time. In contrast, Southerners were obligated to keep, feed, clothe, and house their slaves. Southern black slaves were treated better than Northern Irish servants: this was Fitzhugh’s message.

Of course, Republicans care more about the poor even than the Southern plantation owners did about the slaves in which/whom they invested so heavily. But the process is the same: Republicans use the poor, as slave-owners did their slaves, mainly for political capital. Their message is that making rich people richer will help the poor, a claim that has been repeatedly disproven.