Essays |
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Moynihan, Welfare Reform, and the Myth of “Benign Neglect”by Larry DeWitt |
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New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the most accomplished public intellectuals to grace the Congress in the last century. Political scientist Michael Barone said Moynihan was “the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.” Senator Moynihan had such a restless and nimble mind that it could never be confined to a single party ideology--which is how he could come to prominence both as a member of the Nixon Administration and as a leading liberal of the Democratic Party. It was said of him that he wrote more books than most of his fellow Senators had read, which was not much of an exaggeration. Senator Moynihan was in the practice of spending most summers researching and writing a new book. His interests ranged nearly as widely as Jefferson’s and he was a Renaissance polymath like Jefferson. Among his more than 20 books are an account of the Nixon Administration's welfare reform proposals; mediations on international law; reflections on the operation of the United Nations; theories of governance, and many other subjects. Moynihan himself often said of the uniquely American brand of public policymaking that Americans were Jeffersonian in their rhetoric but Hamiltonian in their practice. By which he meant that we are constantly going on and on about our beliefs in the virtues of limited government while simultaneously insisting that government do more and more for us. This long bifurcation in political philosophy–between the conservative view represented by Jefferson of that government which governs least being best, and the progressive view of Hamilton that only a large and active federal government can ensure the blessings of the American promise–has endured from their day to ours. It is one of those ironies of American history that Jefferson, who was philosophically the godfather of conservatism, is touted by the Democrats as the founder of their party, whereas Lincoln, who was philosophically a progressive liberal, is revered as the founder of the Republican Party. The irony of course was produced by one of those shifts in the magnetic poles of American politics when, pivoting on the election of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt took the progressives out of the Republican Party and Woodrow Wilson simultaneously invited them into the Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt then cemented this role-switch with the New Deal and ever since Democrats have been thought to be liberals and Republicans conservatives, even though their respective founding fathers would have been horrified to find themselves leading these two parades. Moynihan was an ardent Hamiltonian to his core, who moved rather freely between the liberal and conservative camps, depending on the merits of the case as viewed through his expansive mastery of political theory and history. He understood something that all party ideologues must miss in order to maintain their ideological purity. He understood that given the persistence of this division between liberals and conservatives, it is improbable to suppose one side has a monopoly on wisdom and the other is utterly bankrupt. So Moynihan scandalized the Democratic Party when he served as a liberal insider in the Nixon White House, propelling Nixon to become–in the arena of domestic policy–arguably the last liberal President of the twentieth century. Moynihan’s first big splash in the pool of politics came in 1965 when he authored a famous report on the status of the African-American family (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action). Moynihan was concerned that two historic trendlines had suddenly changed course and had crossed, unexpectedly and thus ominously. Traditionally, as unemployment rose so did welfare dependency, and as unemployment declined so too followed the size of the welfare rolls. But in 1963 these two lines were moving in opposite directions for African-Americans. Moynihan discovered that the number of black families on welfare was rising at a time when unemployment was declining. His report was a brief for vigorous government action to intervene to address this emerging social problem. But since his report documented serious social maladies within the black family–most especially, rising out-of-wedlock birthrates and a concomitant rise in the number of female-headed households–his report was hooted at by liberals and Moynihan was pilloried as a racist and his report trashed and buried. Those who know nothing about Moynihan’s report think they know something because they are familiar with a single expression from Moynihan’s later work for Richard Nixon. At one point in 1970 Moynihan suggested to Nixon that the issue of race in American had become so polarized that a period of “benign neglect” might be in order at the rhetorical level. Many confuse this idea with his 1965 report, and almost everyone who has heard the expression has no clue what it meant, but they are sure it was an expression of Moynihan’s callous indifference to the plight of people of color. Here is the entire passage on “benign neglect” from Moynihan’s internal memo to Nixon: Hardly a brief for the government turning its back on the plight of minorities. Although someone was certainly being mocked in the memo, which may well explain the intensity of the resulting liberal campaign to demonize Moynihan as a racist apologist for the Nixon Administration. Moynihan’s 1965 report itself contained a single recommendation for a change in government policy: “The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.” This too hardly qualifies as “benign neglect,” but liberals complained that Moynihan’s critique of the state of the black family was the imposition of “white middle class values” on blacks and displayed a failure of respect for black culture. Moynihan was accused of “blaming the victim,” an expression popularized by black scholar William Ryan in a 1970 book. Actually, Moynihan’s proposal was an expression of the sensible belief that healthy intact families are the bedrock of healthy societies, and the liberal reaction to this simple idea revealed the lengths to which liberals would go to defend self-destructive behaviors in the name of political correctness. Indeed, not only did liberals of all colors brand Moynihan a racist, but black scholars in many disciplines announced renewed efforts to undertake research to prove that there were in fact no social problems in black families–the answer of course, in true postmodern fashion, being determined at the outset of the “research.” The passage of time has proved Moynihan prescient, and liberal resistance to his insights contributed to the long slow decline of the welfare state and of the black family. Despite his undeniable brilliance, Senator Moynihan could also be brilliantly wrong, as he was on the issue of the 1996 “welfare reform” legislation. In 1996 the U.S. Congress (primarily the Republican majority) and President Bill Clinton joined together to enact what was informally known as “welfare reform legislation,” more properly, “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.” What this “reform” actually was, was the repeal of Title IV of the Social Security Act of 1935–the only New Deal program under the Social Security Act ever to be repealed. It replaced the categorical entitlement to Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a time-limited welfare benefit hedged-in and lashed together with a stringent work-requirement for receipt of even these time-limited benefits. Instead of the New Deal philosophy which held that society has an affirmative duty to support vulnerable needy children, this new law placed the burden of poverty squarely on the welfare families, insisting that the adult members of the household “move from welfare to work.” Benefits under the new program were to be time-limited, as a harsh “incentive” to become self-supporting, and job-training or actual employment was to be a national requirement for the receipt of even these time-limited benefits. This new program–Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)–was thus, in many senses of the word, an historic legislative change. It instantly became an important milestone in the history of the American welfare state. At the time, most liberal Democrats (including this historian) were deeply skeptical, if not downright opposed, to this change in the law. We believed that TANF was little more than code for conservatives’ indifference to the well-being of the poor. We were certain that this harsh new law would not make for a more independent, prosperous and self-supporting underclass. We were certain employers would not hire these workers. We were afraid, most starkly, that the new law would instead result in horror stories without end as families who had reached the end of their time-limit would be tossed into the streets, homeless, without means, and with the scolding finger of conservatives wagging their dour disapproval. Senator Moynihan spoke for many of us when he bitterly opposed the legislation, rising to his full height on the Senate floor and warning: The essential problem with this legislation is that it imposes time limits without any real provision for the heroic efforts that are required to take people who have been on welfare for a long while, get them off and keep them off. I have no problem with that proposition, that work is what we should seek. Independence is what we should seek. . . . But to put a time limit on, when you do not have provision for seeing that people have work, is to invite an urban crisis unlike anything we have known since the 1960's. It may be it will bring us to our senses. But it will be a crisis. . . I said in the Finance Committee in March of this year, that to drop these children from our Federal life-support system would be the most "regressive and brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction." . . . I said on the floor last September that we will have children sleeping on grates if this becomes law. I repeat that today. I hope I shall have been proved wrong. . . . After we allowed a system to develop in which children are supported in this manner, to suddenly stop that support based on some very vague notion of human behavior–that if you are going to suffer awful consequences, you will change your behavior. We will be making cruelty to children an instrument of social policy. . . . No child in America asked to be here. Why, then, are we determined to punish them? Well, contrary to both Senator Moynihan’s and my expectations, welfare reform appears to have been at least moderately successful. Nearly a decade on now and masses of children are not “sleeping on grates” because their families have been tossed off welfare under this law. No social crisis has occurred. In fact, approximately one-half of the previous welfare-dependent population has become self-supporting, gainfully-employed citizens. Each new study and report on the law brings fresh evidence that it has been a success. By March 2004 there were only two million families on the federal welfare program, less than half the number when President Clinton signed the law in August 1996.[1] Overall, the child poverty rate declined from 20.5% in 1996 to 16.7% in 2002.[2] In fact, poverty among African-American children has gone down by 8% and among Hispanic children the rate is down 12%. And most surprising of all to policy historians such as myself, is the fact that in the recent recession we did not see the usual phenomenon of marginally-employed former welfare recipients being among the first to lose their jobs. In other words, the policy-history narrative here turns out to be that about half the welfare population has been successfully moved from dependency to self-support, their employment has proven stable, childhood poverty has declined, and no social crisis has attended this shift. Senator Moynihan and I were simply wrong about this law. The historical evidence has trumped our political and ideological suppositions. Now to avoid a fruitless detour in thought: yes of course there are ideological components to my analysis here. Senator Moynihan and I both believed that it is desirable for people to be self-supporting rather than dependent on welfare, to be workers rather than welfare clients. But, given this premise, it becomes an empirical question whether a law like TANF can achieve this goal without doing more harm than good. Senator Moynihan and I both believed in 1996 that it could not. We have both been proven wrong. Public policies are sometimes like this. Not pure disputes over ideology, but empirical questions as to–given a common set of goals and values–which public policies are most effective in getting the job done. Policy history then also can often be about this same type of analysis. Despite his fervent belief that welfare reform would fail, Senator Moynihan was at his core an empiricist politician, whose most frequent saying was “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.” So I like to think that were he still gracing the floor of the U.S. Senate with his presence, he too would cheerfully admit that the facts about the 1996 policy shift trump his and my political expectations. This is how policy history ought always to be written–with the empirical evidence reigning supreme over all our political and ideological wishes and expectations. [1] Robert Pear, "Despite Sluggish Economy, Welfare Rolls Actually Fell," New York Times, March 22, 2004: A21. [2] Dept. of Health and Human Services annual Indicators of Welfare Dependence report, 2004. The latest report is online at: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/indicators05/index.htm
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