A Nation of Moochers (6 page)

This sort of rhetoric would not have been out of place in New York circa 1969, and thereby hangs a tale.

If the ideology that spawned such ideas began with a misty dream of egalitarian compassion, it ended with the squalor of Haight Ashbury and the devastated inner cities of dozens of major cities. In his seminal work
The Dream and the Nightmare,
Myron Magnet described the transformation of culture and policy that destroyed families, communities, and cities. Throughout the sixties, wrote Magnet, popular culture “downplayed the personal responsibility, self-control, and deferral of gratification that it takes to succeed.” In place of those bourgeois values the new culture “celebrated an ‘if it feels good’ self-indulgence” that shaped public policy, especially for the poor. Of course, the middle classes paid a steep price for such indulgence, but when those same fashionable ideas “reached the poor, especially the urban, minority poor,” wrote Magnet, “the result was disastrous.”
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Guilt, Fear, and the Rolling Riot

So how did it happen at all?

In his history of the decline and fall of some of America’s great urban centers, Fred Siegel tracks the origins of this disastrous freak show of crackpot leftism to a combination of guilt and fear. The large-scale riots of the midsixties were followed by a chronic fear of the violence Siegel calls a “rolling riot,” including a dramatic spike in violent crime. For many on the left, the message was clear: “Be prepared to pay up or be prepared for trouble. In the decades that followed the 1960s, the riot ideology, a racial version of collective bargaining, became part of the warp and woof of big-city politics.”

Urban leaders used fear of violence to push for more cash from the federal government “on the threat that the Casbah might again erupt.” But, notes Siegel, “the most exquisite form of intimidation came in intellectual life, where cowed intellectuals relinquished their independence of judgment.”
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In his prize-winning book
From Opportunity to Entitlement,
Gareth Davies chronicles the transformation of traditional New Deal liberalism into a doctrine of entitlement welfarism that effectively destroyed the Great Society and turned voters away from the left for years.
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In a shift that alienated much of Middle America, Davies writes, “notions of self-help and personal independence … largely disappeared from liberal discourse during the late 1960s and 1970s. In their place came radical notions of income by right.…” Among activists and the liberal elite, it became common to denigrate anyone “who made demands on the poor.”
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The sixties were not an era of subtlety or euphemism: entry-level jobs were equated with slavery; work requirements were denounced as racist; suggestions that family disintegration contributed to poverty were censured as “blaming the victim.”

Liberals vied with one another to embrace the new ethos, in an orgy of what sociologist James Coleman was to call “conspicuous benevolence,” designed to advertise as ostentatiously as possible their “egalitarian intentions.”
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“Once the language of group rights and racial justice had entered antipoverty discourse,” recounts Davies, “the language of mutual obligation tended to be relegated, if not abandoned altogether.”
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Politically the idea was a disaster. Entitlement liberalism abandoned “the link between work and income at a time when the public devotion to the link was so obvious.”
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The result “left the Democratic Party astonishingly distant from the work ethic of Middle America.”
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But not before it had transformed the face of inner cities across the country and cemented notions of entitlement in at least some parts of the political culture.

Explosion

New York was ground zero for the accompanying explosion in welfare dependency and the attendant social collapse. In the fifteen years after the end of World War II, welfare in the city grew by just 47,000 recipients. From 1960 through 1965, it grew more rapidly, with around 200,000 clients added to the rolls, bringing the total to roughly 538,000. But then came the deluge. Under liberal mayor John Lindsay and his welfare chief, Mitchell Ginsberg (known as “Come-and-Get-It Ginsberg”), the city consciously set out to expand the welfare rolls as quickly as possible, even though the late sixties were a period of economic prosperity, and black unemployment in the city was only around 4 percent. The administration succeeded spectacularly: By 1971, New York had added another 630,000 welfare dependents, ballooning the total to more than 1,165,000. “New York’s welfare population was larger than the population of fifteen states,” notes Siegel. As recently as 1960, there had been 10 workers for every 1 person on the dole; by 1971 that had been cut to a ratio of just 5 to 1.
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As hundreds of thousands of city residents became wards, the repercussions mushroomed. Many black workers disappeared from the employment rolls, families disintegrated “amid an explosion of desertion, divorce and out-of-wedlock births,” and the middle class headed for the exits. Other social changes, including the sexual revolution, contributed to family and social breakdown, but, says Siegel, “welfare was a key ingredient in the toxic brew that devastated vast sections of the city.”
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The welfare explosion was accompanied by a transformation of attitudes as welfarists attacked root and branch the stigma associated with dependency. At the heart of this change of values was the belief that the poor were victims and they were therefore not responsible either for their condition or their behaviors. “The alibi industry had a justification for everything,” writes Siegel. “The biggest and most important alibi was that the poor were so disadvantaged by their environment … that all responsibility for their fate was shifted to government.… The assumption that some individuals might be even partly responsible for their actions was, they insisted, entirely outdated.”
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When Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his paper “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” in 1965, it set off a firestorm of outrage among the new liberal elites. Moynihan warned that the wave of illegitimacy and family breakdowns was posing a daunting barrier to the realization of full equality for minorities. He wrote: “At the heart of the deterioration of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of weakness of the Negro community at the present time.… Unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.”
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Today Moynihan’s warning seems prophetic, but when it was released in 1965, it ran headlong into the rising tide of racial grievance and victimist ideology.

In an earlier book,
A Nation of Victims,
I recounted how the discussion of the “family question” fell under an extraordinary intellectual taboo that was to have appalling consequences for public policy. A white Boston sociologist named William Ryan led the way in claiming that any suggestion that the poor bore any responsibility for their plight was a form of “blaming the victim.” For liberals like Ryan, being a victim of racism meant never having to say you’re sorry or suffering the consequences of your misdeeds. Drop out of school? Refuse to work? Father illegitimate children? For Ryan, there was always someone else to blame, and he slammed any fellow liberal who did not embrace this position.
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The idea of the poor as victim was central to the new entitlement culture. In the new “politics of dependency,” wrote welfare expert Lawrence Mead, indigents “claim a right to support based on the injuries of the past, not on anything that they contribute now. Wounds are an asset today, much as a paycheck was in progressive-era politics. One claims to be a victim, not a worker.”
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Any attempt to change the behavior or conduct of the victim, Ryan insisted, was part of the overall pattern of victimization. Ryan shared some of his sharpest censures for wavering liberals who believed they could “revamp and revise the victim … they want to change his attitudes, alter his values, fill up his cultural deficits, energize his apathetic soul, cure his character defects, train him and polish and woo him from his savage ways.” In other words, trying to get the poor to finish school, be responsible for their families, and get a job was part of “a dreadful war against the poor and oppressed.”
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Waging such a war also consisted of focusing on minorities’ lack of job skills and education or emphasizing “better values” or “habits of thrift and foresight.” When Catherine Chilman in her book
Growing Up Poor
ventured a modest, almost apologetic defense of middle-class lifestyles as “more in harmony” with economic reality, Ryan denounced her ideas as “nefarious.” Poverty, insisted Ryan, had nothing to do with character, skills, or indeed any characteristic of the poor themselves. Poverty was “most simply and clearly understood as a lack of money.”

With that in mind, Ryan excoriated any program that even hinted at changing or “improving” the behavior of the downtrodden, including education programs that aimed to “make up for the deficiencies” in students’ backgrounds that caused them to fail in school. When sociologist James Coleman found that family background was the single most important factor in educational success, Ryan howled with indignation, “Is this or is this not, a clear case of blaming the victim?” It was not. Rather, Coleman’s study was a sober work of social research that has since become the basis for educational reform efforts throughout the country. But it clashed with Ryan’s ideological worldview and indeed the era’s dominant and fashionable ideologies of compassion.
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Welfare advocate Richard Elman declared that concern about the negative effects of dependency was a mere “bogeyman,” and he insisted that no one should be made to feel shame for feeding from the welfare trough.
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Since nonjudgmentalism was the flavor of the day, Elman found a receptive audience among urban intellectuals and activists alike. Mixed with a generous dose of racial guilt, his message was a recipe for a revolution of dependency. Stigmas against dependency, joblessness, and illegitimacy were ridiculed; the very idea of personal responsibility was derided as discriminatory.

Elman argued that Americans needed to “make dependency legitimate” so dependents could “consume with integrity.” Members of the middle class, he insisted, “must dispel our own myth that we are not dependent and do not wish to become dependent. We must try to create even more agencies of dependency, and we must make it possible for all to make use of them equally.”
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Policymakers set out to make it so. Under the leadership of New York’s welfare chief Ginsberg, writes Siegel, “work—particularly entry level work—was, like fatherhood, placed in the trash can of history.” Liberal leaders increasingly sneered at the idea that the poor should be steered toward gainful employment as an alternative to welfare. Activists insisted that it would be wrong to push the poor into what they called “dead end jobs.”
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Arguing for the expansion of welfare, Paul Goodman insisted that “there are fewer jobs that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity.” Elman jibed that the narrow-minded middle class wanted the poor “to go the hard route, to be … taxi drivers, restaurant employees … and factory hands.”
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These were jobs with no future, he insisted, and among the welfarist elite the idea that the poor should work came to be seen as reactionary, “the northern equivalent of the forced labor and debt bondage of the South.” Instead, Elman declared, they should be entitled to dignity and income through welfare.

The cry was taken up by the emerging welfare rights movement. Declared welfare activist Beulah Sanders, “You can’t force me to work! You’d better give me something better than I’m getting on welfare.” Another welfare mother informed legislators that “we only want the kind of jobs that will pay $10,000 or $20,000.… We aren’t going to do anybody’s laundry or babysitting except for ourselves.”
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Perhaps most famous among the would-be architects of the revolution were two Columbia poverty intellectuals, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who quite explicitly and unapologetically “wanted to sever the connection between economic effort and outcome; they wanted, instead, to guarantee a high level of living as a matter of right.”
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The two argued that not nearly enough people were on welfare and they urged a full-out campaign to recruit more of the poor onto the welfare rolls. Their goal was quite explicitly to overload and bankrupt the antipoverty system, thus (they hoped) forcing a fundamental realignment of the nation’s economy by guaranteeing the poor an annual income—regardless of their willingness to work.

This was not always an easy sell. Piven later lamented the reluctance of some civil rights leaders to embrace the culture of entitlement. “We met with [Urban League President] Whitney Young,” Piven recalled, “and he gave us a long speech about how it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get fifty poor families onto welfare.”
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Cloward and Piven and the emerging liberal orthodoxy, of course, thought just the opposite—welfare was far preferable to mere work—and they were willing to harness the “rolling riot” for their cause. They argued that the real power of the poor was “their ability to menace and riot.” They called it the “politics of the poor,” which included “rent strikes, crime, civic disruptions.”
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