Good advocates paint glorious pictures. When they intervene for you with the powerful, they add an extra dash to your skills and personality and sketch little hidden talents unknown even to you. They smooth over your obvious flaws and pronounce you more than worthy for the task at hand.
No grander artist can be found who produces such masterpieces in your behalf. They paint a slightly exalted view of you, often forcing you to live up to the splendor of the image. The perception becomes the reality. You become the picture.
But who appoints the advocates? In many cases they, too, have enjoyed advocates who initially painted flattering portraits in their behalf and hung them in the halls of the powerful. In this way, merit is confirmed and awarded selectively over time.
The world is full of advocates, but not all of them with titles or with the ability to make a difference for those they seek to serve. Thurgood Marshall deserves a mention as one who made a powerful difference as an advocate of the powerless. A democracy is an endless string of advocates, for causes good and bad.
But the truly altruistic kind of advocacy that we have witnessed for many years in America is on the decline. There is an outright revolt, even revulsion, against using the levers of government to provide assistance or preference to those who might require it the most.
The nomination of Clarence Thomas, a conservative black judge in Washington, D.C., to the U.S. Supreme Court is but another signal of the declining role of activist advocacy in behalf of the unfortunate.
It`s not that Thomas sees himself as heartless. He, after all, suffered the evils of racism and poverty. It`s just that he sees as self-defeating the spirited kind of advocacy that leads to special consideration for one group over another. For this reason, he has rejected affirmative action and legal tactics to eliminate discrimination.
In the civil-rights arena, the battle is not so much over racism but over remedies. Thomas` nomination is a denial of the advocacy system that has put the government in the fore of attacking discrimination for several decades. Like other conservative black thinkers, he appears to favor self-development and individual enterprise as the answer.
This is true in many other areas. When most of us weren`t paying as much attention as we should, the country shifted back to another place and another time, perhaps even back to its roots. It has gone as far back as the philosophical era of Franklin and Jefferson, when personal development and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps dominated thinking.
Budgets providing aid to the poor are shrinking. Schools are being told by the government that internal reform, not bigger per-pupil expenditure, is the route to better education. Young people are warned almost daily that if they want to participate fully in the economy, they must help themselves by improving their skills and knowledge.
Even Democrats have turned more in the direction of such bootstrap thinking. They have moved away from their old role of prime advocate of the poor and begun to rethink the social welfare system that has not been a total success.
Capitalism`s triumph not only has hardened hearts but also has made
”tough love” the new national policy for improving the lot of the poor and unfortunate. To the question of ”who`s my advocate,” they are told,
”you.”
This might be fine if the practice of advocacy were truly even-handed. It isn`t. Democrats, for example, now are seeking to become the grand advocates of the middle class, with more voters and more money. Republicans, while professing economic fairness in their approach, are listening to some powerful advocates in pushing a capital-gains tax cut that would help mostly the wealthy.
Then there is Mikhail Gorbachev, a supreme advocate for an entire country who has the ear of the president of the United States. For only promised reforms in his economy, Gorbachev seems destined to receive billions of dollars of U.S. and other Western aid.
How is it that Bush will listen with such eagerness to Gorbachev`s plea for Western welfare and be so deaf to similar entreaties at home? He is saying, ”no reform, no aid” to the Soviet leader, but he`s not willing to go even that far for the impoverished in America.
The Soviet people have the activism of Gorbachev speaking in their behalf. Americans in need must content themselves with a passivist, indifferent government with no one to argue their case.
The sad truth about American politics is that good advocates no longer come free or cheap. Money has so corrupted the system that the most articulate, capable and powerful advocates are on special-interest payrolls. The advocacy system has been restricted by wealth itself.
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For the poor and the powerless, only the philosophy of boostrapism remains. The chief fear among politicians here is that this ploy might actually work one day, much in the same way it worked during earlier, more innocent days of American history. It would surprise even those advocating it.