Editorials
WHY THE VOTERS WERE FREEZING IT was the BIGGEST referendum on a single issue in the nation's history. Nine states and the District of Columbia voted on the nuclear freeze resolution on November...
...Such a predisposition, however, does not mean approval of every form of intervention...
...The paper demonizes the Russian bear as hovering hungrily over Western Europe, its paws foraging for violent revolution in every third world country about the globe...
...Our answer is "no...
...With MIRVs on both sides ten minutes away from their targets, it shouldn't...
...Liberals don't need to be convinced that these government programs exacerbate poverty in some respects, even as they relieve poverty in other respects.Liberals do need more convincing evidence that conservative and free-market alternatives wouldn't be worse...
...and the Soviets face each other on a war-footing-one that resembles the pre-World War I situation all too closely for comfort...
...Not solely," concedes our correspondent, perhaps in recognition of just how complex the data on teenage pregnancies and births, both here, abroad, and over time, actually are...
...Sample: among the position papers the State Department regularly passes out to visiting journalists these days is one titled "Preserving Nuclear Peace in the 1980s," a speech delivered to the Naval War College last June 22 by Paul Wolwitz, Director of State's Policy Planning Staff...
...That question, raised by a letter in this isue's "Correspondence" section, is a fair one...
...Indeed, one of the more impressive, achievements of the freeze campaign has been to take the nuclear issue out of the think tanks and into the public forum...
...As our correspondent herself states, "Most of those on welfare . . . remain for relatively brief periods...
...Or, for that matter, "democratic capitalism...
...Cavalierly, Wolwitz dismisses spheres of influence, containment, and detente as failed models for East-West relations...
...Take the question of welfare-dependency - the creation of a "welfare mentality" that erodes initiative and personal responsibility...
...The church's social teaching are not inscribed in the Nicene Creed nor infallibly pronounced...
...Other than the normal "substructure of friction" deriving from our political, ideological, and cultural differences, says Kennan in that Atlantic article, the Russians have done nothing in the last eight years of progressively more belligerent East-West relations to warrant Washington's hostile turn...
...Our correspondent rightly offers a healthy reminder that lofty intentions are no compensation for unhappy consequences...
...Catholics are free, after conscientious reflection, to dissent from them and even, as in the case of the new crop of Catholic "democratic capitalists," to argue for revising these teachings in the direction of a stricter reliance on the marketplace...
...Impressive...
...These are some of the good questions raised by the freeze movement-and well directed to an administration that matches the Russians in putting military calculation ahead of political and diplomatic wit...
...Yet in the next paragraph, out of all the factors that have contributed to the growth of an "underclass" - internal migration, changes in the labor market, racial barriers, educational failure, cultural disarray - it is AFDC and other aid programs picked out as the forces that "spawn" new generations of unproductive youth...
...Does the minimum wage increase unemployment among low-income groups and minority youth...
...Is not Russian security, no less than our own, a special American concern, in fact a precondition for our own and world stability...
...Data from overseas show that even higher transfer programs are compatible with gains in productivity...
...Being a "church of the poor" does not automatically mean endorsing greater government economic intervention, or the welfare state, or socialism...
...Others argue that without the minimum wage the working poor would lose more in wages than the unemployed poor would gain in jobs...
...At any rate, the votes for a freeze indicate a widespread conviction that our nuclear strategy has less and less to do with anything one might consider rational self-defense, and that the men in Washington-unprodded-are not going to do anything about it...
...The only alternative is a social teaching so purely formal as to provide virtually no guide to concrete action...
...Most economists think it does, including some liberals, who have proposed alternatives...
...Nine states and the District of Columbia voted on the nuclear freeze resolution on November 2-with 275 city governments, twelve state legislatures, and 446 New England town meetings already on the record for it...
...If you consult your anthropology books, it's the war-game of Levi-Strauss's binary opposition, a game flayed by aspiring heroes who fear being reduced, second-best, shadowed, impotent, and vulnerable to the great evil: death...
...Nonetheless, we can agree with his conclusion, "The record of American policy toward the Soviet Union over the six and a half decades of the existence of that body politic gives the impression that it was not really the nature of any external problem that concerned us but rather something we were anxious to prove to ourselves, about ourselves...
...CHURCH OF THE POOR Does being a "church of the poor" necessarily entail supporting the New Deal, the social programs of the sixties and seventies, the welfare state in any of its forms, and/or socialism...
...There is scarcely an observer of our welfare system, radical, liberal, or conservative - or indeed a user of the system - who does not acknowledge and deplore this reality...
...Indeed it may be the clerics who are the realists, politically if not economically, while their critics are the blindly naive...
...Not only is the price of economic recovery being disproportionately paid by the nation's poor, but they are being told in addition, "It's all for your own good...
...it understands only one thing, and that's the "fact" of crude power-primarily, we are to understand, "nuclear blackmail...
...Have income-transfer programs caused the decline in productivity...
...Is it too much to suspect that these developments have more to do with the inequalities of political power than the certitudes of economic theory...
...We welcome the questions, said Randall Forsberg, one of the freeze movement's most articulate proponents...
...It would be disingenuous to deny that these moral principles, although usually articulated in very general terms, embody political and economic judgments...
...As many more Americans now realize, a new generation of more accurate weapons, launched on fifteen- or twenty-minute computer warning, not only increases the menace of accidents, but the new technology has shifted the strategies of both superpowers away from deterrence to first-strike thinking-and plans for surviving a protracted nuclear exchange...
...Just what have we been trying to prove to ourselves, about ourselves...
...When one adds to mis flammable brew the deterioration of East-West relations over the last eight years, it becomes apparent that in all but name the U.S...
...Moscow does not respond to political accords...
...Is AFDC responsible for the explosion in pregnancies among unwed teenagers...
...One catches an adversary with claims to the same heroic status, scapegoats him with all one's hatreds, and barters his life sacrificially for one's own...
...We wonder...
...Arizona alone turned it down...
...Hardly any analyses of America's productivity decline single out income-transfer programs as a significant factor...
...That said, we must add that the weight of Catholic social teaching, developed over a long period of time and based on a distinctive attitude toward the social nature of humankind, favors an active governmental responsibility for economic justice...
...We have a much graver view than Mr...
...She may be right about that, too...
...A recent Ford Foundation newsletter reported on the long-term study of American family income conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan: From 20 to 25 percent of American families turned to welfare in at least one of the ten years between 1969 and 1978, but only about two percent were permanently and totally dependent on welfare...
...Human weakness makes all of us reluctant to have our pet notions subjected to rigorous examination...
...The "worst case" scenarios of the war-planners thus all but displace diplomatic strategy-and as Leonid I. Brezhnev's October 26 speech to his military chiefs makes plain, the Russians are willing to react in kind...
...Must our safety be built on the anxiety of the Russians...
...In short, we do not find any strong grounds here for the notion that critics of government economic intervention represent hard-nosed economic knowledge while clerical advocates of the poor represent ignorance and naivete...
...All the more so in that the administration mounted a strong counterattack against it...
...But the specific examples she mentions do not add up to quite the strong case she thinks she has - either against liberals or against government intervention...
...And she adds: "Evidence that government intervention may exacerbate poverty is usually ignored by liberals, including Catholics...
...The portrait bears out George F. Kennan's thesis that the Reagan administration mistakes Moscow's concern for military security, its obsession with secrecy, and the quest for prestige and influence abroad, with something else entirely-a passion for formal control and world dominance, a program Kennan argues the Soviets pretty well gave up at the end of the 1940s...
...Kennan of the possible significance of Moscow's departure from past policy in invading Afghanistan...
...But this means, again as Kennan argues in the November issue of Atlantic, that the East-West relationship has been militarized-and negotiations take on the aspect of delaying tactics...
...Yet exactly what is the scope of this problem, and how does it compare to the positive assistance that AFDC otherwise provides...
...and one that more and more Catholics must be asking themselves as they read reports, not infrequently exaggerated, of statements by liberation theologians, church agencies, and even bishops, demanding reforms that would aggressively counteract poverty...
...Does this make you feel safe...
...At root, the thing is an expiatory rite...
...Does a highly volatile arms race represent, as the Reagan administration claims, a firm ground for negotiating with Moscow, or, as the freeze proponents claim, does it not provide quicksand...
...Do an increasing number of American Christians and Jews, the foul incense of sacrificial victimage still in their memories, smell this in the latest upsurge of nuclear demonry...
...To claim otherwise is a form of fundamentalism, whether of the left or of the right...
...But as long as the church remains unpersuaded by their viewpoint, these Catholics cannot complain if its corporate statements exhibit a principled predisposition toward government intervention...
...Nonetheless, the political and economic content of the church's social tradition is a source of discomfort to convinced followers of Milton Friedman and George Gilder...
...Kennan does not answer his own question...
...To voice concern about this likelihood is entirely justified for a "church of the poor...
...Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger's new "Defense Guidance," which calls for the "decapitation" of the Soviet state, suggests that there's something very primitive going on here-like a ritual act of sacrificial head-hunting...
...the issues deserve public airing...
...The popular notion of a 'culture of poverty' perpetuated through second and third generations is not evident in panel data, which show a low incidence of intergenerational welfare dependency...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
