Administrative Liberalism and the War on Poverty
Rosenberg, Bernard & Bensman, Joseph
As lonely sectarian politics goes into eclipse and "coalitionism" comes to the fore, it behooves radicals to watch their step. The terrain is tricky and full of traps. One danger is a...
...Yet they often play the game anyhow—as totally powerless men and women do when they have nothing to lose and maybe a little to gain...
...Norman Eddy's saintliness, of which there is little doubt, does not preclude his use of the Marine Corps as a model for adolescents hooked on heroin...
...For ten or fifteen years his gentle ministrations got him nowhere with teenage addicts...
...With time, there was a divergence in the evolution of these two altruists...
...It made all the difference...
...No problem is as vexatious as the Negro problem, nor more likely to produce liberal exasperation...
...The ideology, variously disguised and sugar-coated, sanctioned manipulation of the masses, always in their "own best interest...
...When denied this psychological support, he feels personally offended and he strikes back...
...They become the target...
...We are reminded that they were once swept off their feet from the opposite side by a sanguinary brute in the Kremlin who seemed to some of them aimiably avuncular, even after he was more than half-mad with power...
...In East Harlem resides a humane and intelligent clergyman whose early career parallels that of Norman Thomas: Ivy League background, Union Theological Seminary, identification with the poor, social work in the slums...
...Just so, the administrative liberal, repeatedly rejected by those he means to serve, loses all patience with them...
...Those ingrates...
...There is no reason to assume any initial cynicism in the liberal who has been academically indoctrinated with, and probably motivated by, high ideals of service and selflessness...
...It represents the dark side of a virtuous tradition...
...Synanon is small potatoes—so far...
...The impulse to organize and represent the poor comes mainly from two types of men: left ideologues who have been to college and middle-class professionals...
...Chuck Diederich, the dictatorial leader who excommunicates heretics from his movement, blames John Dewey, Progressive Education and permissive family life for all our woes...
...It is all too utterly revolting...
...In effect, the administrative liberal says to those he only meant to help: "How dare you do me dirt after all I have done for you...
...To say this is by no means to claim that all liberals are finks, which is a delusion among some on the socalled New Left...
...Yes and no...
...It involves hiding a certain percentage of unemployed Negro youth in isolated camps where military or prison discipline may be said to prevail...
...To help deplete the modest but relatively colossal budgets which have come into being, we see a newly arisen class of field workers, re searchers, officials, counselors, psychologists, and other professionals...
...These are the ideals handed down by an older generation of upper-class social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, who did not demand any return for their sacrifices...
...We suspect that work camps prepare youth best for jobs in work camps...
...today some of them strut about in uniform, study the Marine Corps Manual—and stay "clean" for awhile...
...The Kennedy-Johnson war on delinquency and poverty, however piddling and ineffectual, has meant an appreciable increase in programs designed to combat unemployment, to provide job training and improve education...
...Convinced that most problems are remediable, they are animated by a passionate desire to do something about them...
...Administrative liberalism, with roots in the recent past, is now more widely, practiced and more firmly entrenched than ever...
...The poor, who tend to be alienated and apathetic, do not cry for autonomy...
...To observe him and his organization is to feel as if the Senator had returned, and now with a program—which is all that was missing last time...
...Program planners, fearful of strikes and mass drop-outs, spend time orienting their staffs and trainees on the methodology of group dynamics, to keep their operation sufficiently intact to gain further financial support...
...In the clinic, an inadequate psychotherapist who fails to dispel his patient's neurosis will rarely fix the blame where it belongs—on himself...
...They stubbornly refuse to be manipulated for peanuts—and in programs that reflect only the administrative liberals' conception of adequacy...
...But now the newly professionalized middle-class social worker wants also to be loved, respected, and reassured...
...Accordingly, he espouses a superpatriarchal order, with Daddy Diederich on top of the heap...
...The system depends on brainwashing...
...At Synanon every man must be an informer (inverting the underworld code, says Diederich, as if refusal to betray a friend were exclusive to the underworld) . There a failure to inform is an offense as serious for the abstainer as for the malefactor...
...As lonely sectarian politics goes into eclipse and "coalitionism" comes to the fore, it behooves radicals to watch their step...
...Why do they drop out of agencies set up to rescue them...
...How soon will she start slapping her little charges...
...How can a liberal look to the military for anything...
...This serious susceptibility would appear to be chronic...
...Our partnership with liberal elements must be cemented with a substance that prevents liberal conversion hysteria from making a mockery of this whole precarious alliance...
...The highminded social investigator, trained perhaps to be Lady Bountiful, is tricked only so many times until she turns on the needy whose way of life in any case disgusts her...
...How much simpler to blame the patient for having failed him than to wonder about his own competence...
...For jobs that do not exist...
...Liberals have usually been compassionate, warm, civilized, concerned, and understanding...
...We can only agree with Friedenberg that drug addiction is preferable to the destruction of the self and the elimination of that conditional and marginal freedom left to us—no matter how many vile habits we may have...
...Despite such efforts, the administrative liberal is in crisis whenever his client turns out to be unmanageable...
...While liberals applaud Synanon, it takes a powerful social critic like Edgar Z. Friedenberg, governed by an irrepressible anarchist-libertarian bias, to recoil in horror...
...The reaction is common and ugly in all its manifestations...
...It totally subordinates the individual to a group composed of past, present and future brainwashers, all democratically organized under the beneficent auspices of a messianic master...
...Exploitative businessmen do not ask as much of their workers who are merely expected to do a going day's work for less than the going day's pay...
...In most of these areas, nearly as much is being accomplished by private, political and apolitical organizations as by government...
...But it was conceived by a man who talks and acts much like the late Joe McCarthy...
...It is liberalism gone sour on a broader scale, but with all the old moral indignation, and more, that causes FDR to issue his "curse on both your houses" when railroad workers strike, and such injured pride is at work in HST when he seizes the coal mines...
...Out of this situation emerges the showcase member of an impoverished minority group who advances a cause concocted and managed by middle-class activists...
...The answer is: military training which will induce masculinity in "the perpetually emasculated Negro" (a term much favored by both sexes in the social work profession) We pass over the irony of suggesting an all-male society as the solution to latent or manifest homosexuality or the passivity that it implies...
...Poor people in the flesh sometimes resent the stereotypes that liberals foist upon them...
...each man more or less foreswore it—Thomas for democratic socialism, his latter-day prototype for authoritarianism...
...All an outsider can do, to recruit the minimum number of "indigenous leaders" the law requires, is to participate in community action programs...
...There are pretty practices directed by the group and its cadre of professional advisers, psychologists and sociologists, including "the hair-cut" at which verbal assaults, uninhibited personal denunciation and deliberate humiliation take place...
...It leaves a lot of fatherless Negro boys around...
...too easily exasperated by the intractability of a social problem, they tend to adopt illiberal means to solve it, thereby turning themselves inside out...
...But these days they often will not play the game...
...For such ladies (Eleanor Roosevelt was another—and they had their male counterparts) doing a good job was satisfaction enough...
...To that end, experts contrived a whole battery of administrative, linguistic, rhetorical and persuasive techniques which they benevolently applied in every sphere available to them...
...it is the very embodiment of values at the farthest remove from anybody's liberalism...
...The administrative liberal as Mills defined him was basically a social worker, committed to the ideology of welfare and planning, who assumed that he could decide the fate of his "clients" without consulting them...
...Picture the young teacher, surrounded by raucous insubordinates in her lower-class school room...
...One danger is a permanent by-product of the New Deal, the phenomenon C. Wright Mills once labeled "administrative liberalism...
...So what...
...frustration simply activates a bacillus in the liberal spirit that will not die...
...Who would gainsay that...
...Provoke him, that is to say, disenchant him, and he will revenge himself by advocating authoritarian and even totalitarian solutions...
...Few adolescents, let alone their elders, can get serious about work programs that pay $1.35 an hour, surely not when they are able to do as well in menial or manual work without the programs...
...These practices are literally no different from those in Mao's China...
...At present a good many middle and higher echelon liberals are being forced, by the logic of their own position, into direct contact with human beings who could previously be treated as statistical categories...
...And our liberal friends can hardly contain their admiration for this apotheosis of primitive authoritarianism...
...Work with Negroes, offer them uplift—and they go on being miserable underdogs...
...they are disorganized by the absence of powerful male authority figures in their environment...
...Social work in the slums is a frustrating affair...
...The big trouble begins when, given the chance, liberals try—and fail...
...In some cases because they object to training programs training them for jobs which require no training—or for non-existent jobs in inadequately equipped and incompetently staffed institutions where placement facilities are a joke and youth is prepared for apprenticeship in trades whose unions do not accept apprentices...
...It follows from his analysis that the Negro family must be mended...
...Synanon, a more ominous enterprise—originally designed to break drug addicts of their habit, since used on hapless convicts in a state penitentiary and now proclaimed by fanatic devotees as a cure-all for the ills of modern civilization—enlists many a disenchanted administra tive liberal...
...But we know of no one who would care to argue that an army is a liberal, democratic institution which teaches young men to be free, individually responsible, and independent...
...How long will she cling to John Dewey and the principles of Progressive Education...
...Haven't we always had something like this...
...But the liberal infatuation with it demonstrates a dreadful weakness in the middle which we commonly associate only with the extremes...
...Well, their family structure is a mess...
...Once organized and represented, the poor are confronted by trained group workers or political manipulators who coach them in the arts of "indigenousness...
...The martial atmosphere is no doubt conducive to training—but for what...
...But how...
...An army is and must be essentially totalitarian...
...Beware of hurting the liberal, for if you do, he turns into a monster...
...For jobs that do not require training...
...The overwhelming majority of these people are administrative liberals, all devotedly fighting for their right to "represent" the poor (including those who argue vociferously that the poor should represent themselves) . Even the rare slum dwellers who are given a measure of selfdetermination find that they must have advisors, consultants, specialists, and operators technically or legally competent to negotiate for and administer complex community projects...
...But the liberal in a position of power wants nothing less than subservience to his good intentions—and at less than a going day's pay...
...Daniel P. Moynihan mixes sound if platitudinous sociology with questionable folk wisdom in serving up his famous report, which pinpoints this difficulty...
...The militarization of work through work camps, in job corps, and other programs is a further symptom of the same disease...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
