In Defense of Good Intentions

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"For many years we tried many different programs. All of them -- let's understand this -- had noble intentions."

-- President Bush in Los Angeles, May 9

THESE DAYS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN BE ACcused of is good intentions. George Bush imputes good intentions to the antipoverty efforts of the 1960s and '70s as a preface to saying they've backfired. Bush's Republican rival, Patrick Buchanan, then trumps him by pre-emptively tarring any new antipoverty efforts with the same brush. "In the wake of Los Angeles," Buchanan declares, "everyone has a 'solution' to the 'problem.' And these solutions come from earnest and well-intentioned men and women." Officer, stop that man! He's armed with good intentions.

A check through Nexis, the computerized news-media database, confirms that virtually every time someone is described as having "good" or "noble" or "best of" intentions, that person is about to be accused of doing something wrong. It may just be improperly removing a hook from a fish ("Good intentions notwithstanding, the result of such handling can be a severely injured fish . . ."). But most often since the Los Angeles riot, the subject has been the cities and the underclass.

Good intentions do sometimes go awry, in helping the poor as in any other human endeavor. Go see the current movie of E.M. Forster's Howards End -- or read the novel -- for an exploration of that theme. But the reflexive crediting of "good intentions" has become a standard throat-clearing exercise by those who wish to attack government antipoverty programs. This serves their rhetorical purposes in two ways.

First, while good intentions might seem like an admirable thing to have, the phrase also conjures up an image of woolly-minded naivete. Those dear old liberals, sitting in their ivory-tower rocking chairs, knitting vast social- welfare blankets from skeins of good intentions and taxpayer money -- What do they know about the real world? The implication is that good intentions are not merely insufficient but even detrimental to the hard business of facing up to the hard truths about poverty and race. Good intentions are for sissies.

At the same time, crediting others with good intentions is a subtle way of claiming them for yourself. After all, it is hardly necessary to vouch for the good intentions of Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to spend billions fighting poverty. The one who needs credit for good intentions is Bush, who says such efforts are unnecessary or even destructive and -- by a remarkable coincidence -- the true solutions to the problems of the ghetto are those that ask virtually nothing of the white middle class. Naturally Bush would like to stipulate good intentions all around.

It is shocking to read President Johnson's words from the 1960s. He spoke bluntly about "white guilt" and "equality ((of)) result." These phrases violate the taboos of 1992's conservative political correctness. And of course anything as grandiose as a "war on poverty" is unthinkable today. Why is that? People say we have lost the economic optimism and national self- confidence of the 1960s. But the 1980s were also a period of national economic optimism, yet that is when the War on Poverty was officially declared unwinnable. And even the sad-sack 1990s are objectively richer than the 1960s. The difference must be a matter of good intentions.