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PERSON PROFILEMarvin OlaskyMarvin Olasky has variously been described as "...a leading thinker and propagandist of the Christian right1," "...the godfather of 'compassionate conservatism2,'" and as a man whose "...historical judgements are so crude and pinched that one suspects his main effect will be to butress the stereotypes of those who are prejudiced against religious conservatives3." In short, Olasky is a complicated yet important figure in the new conservative movement, a peripatetic evangelist serving up a radical vision in which the government's social welfare programs and budgets would be turned over to private, Christian organizations, which will practice tough-love on unlucky recipients, a theory that totally overlooks the fact that the social welfare state sprang up precisely because private philanthropy had failed miserably at providing a basic social safety net. Olasky sports the life story of true believer. Born Jewish, by 14 he was an athiest, in college he became a Marxist/Communist (interestingly, after Communism had pretty much been discredited -- 1971), and now he is a right-wing Christian. Like his colleague Dinesh D'Souza, without the conservative movement and money, Olasky would be but a minor blip on the nation's public consciousness. Olasky first came to prominence with the publication in 1992 of his book The Tragedy of American Compassion, a book funded (like the Bell Curve) by the Bradley Foundation and the Heritage Foundation, where he had applied for a fellowship in 1989. The reaction to his book took place in 1992, with help from Bill Bennett. The right used his critique of the welfare state to gut the nation's welfare laws, but didn't enact any of his program, as reported in the New York Times Magazine in 1999: Initially the book went almost unnoticed, and those few who reviewed it decried it as "romantic," "shallow" and "bizarre" — the work of a "utopian" crank. But although most academics dismissed the book, a small coterie of Beltway conservatives began to circulate it privately. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett hailed it as the "most important book on welfare and social policy in a decade" and handed a copy to the new Republican Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich read it from cover to cover and liked it so much, he had it distributed to all the incoming freshmen. In his first address to the nation, Gingrich declared: "Our models are Alexis de Tocqueville and Marvin Olasky. We are going to redefine compassion and take it back." Overnight, Olasky, the perennial convert, had seemingly converted an entire party. A small band of policy wonks and legislators — many of whom would go on to work for Bush — began calling themselves "compassionate conservatives." This little-known professor was suddenly a fixture on the television talk shows and in the back corridors of Congress. While slashing the welfare state, Olasky's disciples sought to unleash an outpouring of charitable works through Federal grants, tax credits and partnerships between church and state. These measures represented only the first step in what Olasky regarded as a revolution — turning the Government's responsibility to the poor over to private charities. Yet despite all the lip service paid to compassionate conservative ideas, even these modest initiatives never materialized. Almost all of the proposals, which were sponsored by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana and had names like the Character Development Act, were killed before they even reached the floor — largely at the hands of the same Republicans who had wrapped themselves only months earlier in Olasky's language of compassion. Far from helping the poor, his critics charged, Olasky had provided a smokescreen for guiltlessly cutting back the welfare state. Even Olasky compares what some Republicans did to the poor to pulling the knife out of the back of a person who had been mugged and then leaving him on the street to bleed. "You can't just say, You're fine — get up," he says. "You have to spend a lot of time patching the guy up." But to his critics, Olasky's outrage only seemed like evidence of his naivete. --NY Times Magazine, September 12, 1999 Here is a wonderful extended excerpt from the Bush Files' profile on Olasky:The [Olasky] family also spent two years in Washington, D.C. (1989-91), while Olasky worked at the Heritage Foundation. During that time Susan and Marvin also adopted their youngest son, a bi-racial child, partly as an expression of their anti-abortion convictions. Without the support and endorsement of conservative foundations and prominent Republicans, it is likely Olasky would have remained an obscure professor of public relations and journalism history. But when The Tragedy of American Compassion was first issued by conservative publisher Regnery in 1992, with the promotion of the Heritage Foundation it caught the wave of conservative reaction which peaked with the 1994 Republican Congress, and won the personal endorsement of Newt Gingrich. Olasky became a media star and a much-quoted congressional witness on welfare reform, and Regnery re-issued the book in 1995, with an introduction by Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. (Olasky’s other major books sport introductions respectively by Gingrich and Watergate felon turned born-again prison minister Charles Colson.) In earlier books (e.g., Prodigal Press, 1988; The Press and Abortion, 1838–1988, 1988; Central Ideas in the Development of American Journalism, 1991) Olasky developed his scholarly method: tendentious, heavily anecdotal histories purporting to demonstrate the political and spiritual decline of the U.S. press (and the culture at large) since the time of the Puritans, and especially since the early twentieth century. Central Ideas argues that mainstream journalism has abandoned its crusading roots in Christian individualism in favor of sinister liberal federalism. The polemical thrust of Prodigal Press is accurately reflected in its subtitle, The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media. The Press and Abortion laments that newspapers, which once sensationally excoriated abortionists and condemned any woman who might consider abortion, are now “lapdogs for the abortion lobby.” The Tragedy of American Compassion is the result of what Olasky describes as a two-paragraph grant proposal to the Heritage Foundation, on the historical meaning of “compassion.” The book offers an argument from history for public policy based on Olasky’s central principles of “conservative compassion”: all government-run public assistance programs are inevitably counterproductive, because only charity that is directly personal, requires the able-bodied to work, and includes explicit spiritual counseling, has any hope of success. He derives his argument primarily from an anecdotal positive history of church-based services, juxtaposed with a negative narrative of federal programs, uniformly described as failures. The title suggests these failure are ones of good intentions gone bad: since the word “compassion” (as Olasky never tires of repeating) literally derives from the Latin words meaning “suffering with,” any welfare program derived from taxation and government funding short-circuits this personal connection, deprives the giver of spiritually edifying empathy, and turns charitable compassion into false, liberal conscience-salving. Tragedy is the best of Olasky’s books, in that it provides a thumbnail sketch of the historical debates over welfare policy, and describes — always with a strong bias toward punitive religiosity — the explicit political battles that took place over welfare in the various eras. To his credit, Olasky attempts to refute social Darwinist arguments for the abolition of welfare, arguing that the poor should not be abandoned as hapless losers in the modern jungle but instead offered a Christian hand of solidarity and opportunity. (The book is laudingly introduced, however, by the leading social Darwinist of our time, Charles Murray. More unhappily, Olasky’s presumptive poor are, virtually without exception, the conventional right-wing caricatures of the underclass: shiftless drunks and addicts, derelict fathers and irresponsible teenage mothers, able-bodied men who just don’t want to work. The many more millions of working poor — earning minimum wages or less, often with two or more family members trying desperately to make ends meet with little hope of social compassion, conservative or otherwise — are largely invisible in Olasky’s universe. In a 1995 interview, contemporary with his books on poverty and welfare, he concluded bluntly, “Today’s poor in the United States are the victims and perpetrators of illegitimacy and abandonment, of family non-formation and malformation, alienation and loneliness; but they are not suffering from thirst, hunger or nakedness, except by choice, or insanity, or parental abuse.” In Texas, where one fifth of the children live in families with working adults who earn insufficient income for food, such a declaration amounts to willful if not malicious ignorance. When I asked him whether a person working full-time or more has a right to a living wage, he wanted to know who would guarantee such a right — if it’s the government, he’s not interested. Rights or no rights, did he think such a person deserves a living wage? “I would put the emphasis on training and equipping people to find jobs good enough to provide an adequate wage to support a family.” Could he not conceive that wages at the bottom of the scale might have some influence on wages above it? He’s more interested in individual cases, he answered, than macroeconomics. --The Last Puritan: Meet Marvin Olasky, Governor Bush's Compassionate Conservative Guru,by Michael King, The Bush Files. Other information about Olasky:Senior Fellow at Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty (2/2000) Member, board of advisors, Center of the American Experiment Editor of World Magazine, a Christian weekly that recently (2/2000) smeared John McCain in a front page story (distibuted to Congress and the Capitol's press, no less), that conservative New York Times columnist called "religio-political sleaze in action." [In fairness to Olasky, he says he recused himself from the story, since he has been the chief domestic policy advisor to GOP Presidential candidate George W. Bush.] Recently wrote a book (The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision From Washington to Clinton) that tried to show that the best husbands make the best presidents. The book was ripped in the New York Times by no less than David Brooks -- one of the conservative's own -- senior editor of the Weekly Standard. Brooks wrote that “Olasky’s historical judgments are so crude and pinched that one suspects his main effect will be to buttress the stereotypes of those who are prejudiced against religious conservatives.” Senior Fellow at Capital Research Center, a heavily-funded organization dedicated to "...encourage both corporate and private foundations to align their philanthropic interests more closely with the market system that made their wealth possible." Olasky was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation from 1989-90, when he wrote his book The Tragedy of American Compassion. Senior Fellow, Progress & Freedom Foundation, 1995-1996. Member, board of advisors, National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. Awards judge, Media Research Center. 1The Bush Files, by Michael King, The Texas Observer 2Where W. Got Compassion, David Grann, New York Times Magazine, September 1999. 3Sexual Politics, by David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1999. Believe it or not, this quote if from Weekly Standard writer David Brooks' review of Olasky's latest book, The American Leadership Tradition, in the New York Times.
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MORE LINKSFlorida Baptist Witness Bible is standard for objectivity in journalism, Olasky saysAll journalists are shaped by their worldviews, and the only way to bring true objectivity to journalism is to be shaped by the worldview of the Bible, Marvin Olasky said at the Baptist Press Excellence in Journalism Banquet in Nashville, Tenn., Oct. 7.
NewsHour RELIGION AND THE GOPOlasky appeared on the NewsHour on PBS on 2/29/2000
William Safire Political 'God's World'Conservative William Safire rips Olasky in the New York Times for a hatchet job cover story in the magazine he edits (World) written by Bob Jones, of Bob Jones U.
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The Bell Curve
