THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS
Harrington, Michael
The failures of the welfare state in the sixties have served as stimulus for, and rationale of, the rise of neoconservative thought in the seventies. The neoconservative ideologues base...
...The failures of the welfare state in the sixties have served as stimulus for, and rationale of, the rise of neoconservative thought in the seventies...
...in the demand for "open admissions" to universities...
...If the Nixon administration, in which Moynihan served, had not systematically increased unemployment as part of a strategy for price stability in 1969 and 1970, the problem would have been much less difficult...
...The government—under Kennedy and Johnson as well as Nixon—used its power to favor corporate investment in machines even at times of high unemployment...
...it also plans production according to the same antisocial calculus...
...They are written from the viewpoint of decent and humane Kennedy-Johnson liberals, which means that they are infinitely superior to the proposals from the Nixon administration—but also inadequate...
...It had not reached the point of picking every man a wife, but it was getting close enough to other such imponderables to find itself increasingly held to account for failures in areas where no government could reasonably promise success...
...The program's objectives are clear and simple, and thus it is easy to evaluate...
...They take this to mean that the organic complexities of this reality are such as to frustrate any government impious enough to intrude upon them...
...IN ALL of this I do not claim access to some secret solution to all of our ills...
...If FAP were accompanied by a tough tax-reform proposal, that might have been the case...
...by stressing the cause of the breakdown, a revolutionary process that has been going on for some centuries, one knows that the revival of the old Gemeinschaft is impossible...
...I am convinced that the revolution is going to take place, willy-nilly, and that the only hope we have is to take control of it...
...It is true that in the sixties the burden of paying for social services—and for the war in Vietnam—fell discriminatorily upon working people...
...it does not establish a single medical system in America, collectively paid for, with access determined soley by medical need and a maximum of individual choice for doctor THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 453 and patient...
...This tendency, one can be assured, will assert itself in the current search for a solution to the energy crisis...
...For MICHAEL HARRINGTON it not only expresses a demand for equality in political rights and in political power...
...The New Deal, the Labour government in England after 1945, the Swedish accomplishment achieved from the thirties to the present, the legislative acts of the Popular Front in France, all represent a significant advance for working men and women and their middle-class allies...
...II Why then, if the funds for innovating programs were so scant, is there such a resonance to Moynihan's charge...
...IN A WAY, the second count is a refinement of the first...
...and in the attack on "credentials," and even schooling itself as the determinant of a man's position in society...
...David Lewis of the New Democratic party has documented the existence of "corporate welfare bums" in Canada who fatten themselves on the privileges that the government provides for them...
...some important part of the solution to our social problems lies in the traditional practices and restraints...
...We also know that the Joint Economic Committee has computed that the 1971 subsidies to private home ownership, disproportionately allocated to the wealthy and their mansions rather than the workers and their bungalows, were on the order of $12 billion...
...But even though the ruling class can thus be driven and cajoled into a modicum of decency, it refuses to allow the welfare state to change the relative shares of wealth...
...As a result, the revolution was marketed, vulgarized, co-opted...
...it has been to abolish the rat race altogether...
...They therefore think that the revolution of these times will moderate itself if only we aspire less...
...In some ways, this celebration of the organic as against the rational is the most unfortunate aspect of neoconservatism...
...The reason is simple enough: they have better-organized medical care than we do...
...our lack of knowledge creates new problems rather than solutions...
...There are, for example, the scandalous absence of national health insurance, the routine toleration of levels of unemployment which would topple a government in most European countries, the failure to do anything serious about the housing of the poor over the past generation...
...it might be a bridge toward a society in which people will actually control the state that directs the economy...
...Between 1955 and 1965, the Brookings Institution study of the 1973 Budget shows, there was practically no change in federal civilian expenditures as a percentage of GNP...
...But in 1966 and 1968 when, as I have already noted, presidential commissions recommended a ranging federal program of funding public-service employment, Lyndon Johnson turned down that liberal proposal and took the conservative ("trickle-down") line of encouraging private hiring by subsidizing it...
...The American welfare state is the most conservative variant...
...The service strategy," Moynihan wrote in his retrospect on the battle for FAP, "has been quintessentially that of political liberalism in the middle third of the twentieth century...
...Coleman's findings, that family 444 background measured in social-class terms is a more important determinant of educational achievement than school buildings or chemistry labs, confirms a traditional socialist analysis...
...Now there is a massive group in the high schools such as never existed before and one of the reasons that "Johnny" is not doing better is that this is the first time he has been asked to go beyond that basic literacy...
...And, he added in a somewhat radical mood, "The concept of an `income strategy' entailed many risks—it could only in the end mean income redistribution...
...The latter would not get any increases at all—they might even lose in the shuffle...
...The best placed blacks made significant gains, i.e., the young educated Negroes with stable marriages were able to take advantage of the new opportunities...
...Yet both of these efforts, laudable as their intent was, tended to provide induce ments to poverty...
...In part, an inflationary tendency must be recognized as an inherent, but manageable, problem in any full-employment economy (Joan Robinson says that Keynes himself understood this point a generation ago...
...And in the United States, the unions have a similar suspicion of—but not such an implacable hostility toward—an incomes MICHAEL HARRINGTON policy...
...The Kennedy-Johnson manpower policies did reduce joblessness from the Eisenhower levels down to less than 4 percent, and that was probably the most effective single accomplishment in the "war" on poverty...
...In their reading of the sixties, one crucial error the neoconservatives make is that they ignore the hidden agenda which follows from these interrelationships of power...
...There are the inherent limitations of this social forma tion itself, which are to be found in all of the advanced capitalist powers...
...Southern racists regarded that as intolerable interference with the states' right to be Jim Crow...
...The extent to which there has been a relative change in income shares over the past 200 years in the West is difficult to document and certainly open to debate...
...Moynihan, as will be seen shortly, turns out to be a most persuasive witness against his own case...
...It could serve as the first step toward a society of authoritarian and corporate collectivism in which the Richard Nixons of this world would use the techniques that the Left initiated for the purposes of the Right...
...For one thing, Kristol was simply, and shockingly, wrong on the facts: the distribution of rewards in America is not bell-shaped at all but skewed outrageously in favor of the rich...
...I take it to mean that the reality of society is expressed neither in its formal declarations, even when they are liberal, nor in some organic providence, but in a system of power that is man-made...
...Insofar as the abstract and unhistorical view of the welfare state propounded by the neoconservatives persuades us to timidity and acquiescence, it is not preparing the way for the miraculous resurrection of Gemein schaft...
...And this was the rationale of the various federal education programs of the sixties: they were to close the academic gap by channeling new resources to those who had suffered discrimination and neglect...
...The formula, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," insists upon, and even glories in, human differences—inequalities, if you will—once they no longer rationalize a system of invidious competition...
...Yet the theme of "too much government intervention," which he states here so straightforwardly, is crucial to the 436 neoconservative approach...
...For one thing, this cultural revolution has occurred, not within the context of a political and social revolution, but under the domination of conservative social structures...
...I o begin with, there is the neoconservative version of what actually happened in the sixties...
...However the same table indicates that "capital consumption allowances" went from 5.7 percent to 10.7 percent...
...In 1972, those capital consumption allowances were worth $67.7 billion--compared with after-tax profits of $52.6 billion...
...Their churches, family structure, etc...
...I regard it as a transitional social phenomenon, perched midway between the laissez faire past and the collectivist future...
...But the first category is a refutation of the Oakeshott analysis, and the second by no means confirms it...
...Also, had there been a serious housing program in the sixties, with new cities and towns and new towns in towns, it could have furnished the basis for neighborhood and city-wide integration...
...Similarly with Medicaid...
...In his Politics of a Guaranteed Income, Moynihan cites Oakeshott in the course of analyzing the dispute over the Family Assistance Plan, saying that he "has defined the conservative temperament in terms which showed with great distinctiveness, and not a little advantage, in the debate...
...The very structure of the American economy, then, is becoming more and more the work of the hidden agenda that determines the priorities of federal policy and orients them toward the interests of big business...
...But let me simply note that Moynihan, the assistant secretary oflabor for policy research under Kennedy andJohnson, knew that the "service strategy" waspathetically funded, while Moynihan, the counselor to President Nixon, felt that he could win over the President to the Family Assistance Plan (which was a real accomplishment) by attacking the "service strategy" in more traditional, Nixonian terms...
...but the unions, even though seats were allocated to them in the planning bodies, did not have the resources to take advantage of the same information...
...In the 1973 Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, for instance, one reads of how the profit percentages of nonfinancial corporate monies dropped from 22.1 percent in 1950 to a mere 10.6 percent in 1971...
...Yet in some areas it did prove that Washington can act effectively to fund useful jobs...
...As Moynihan tells it, everyone assumed prior to the Report that an increase in educational inputs— money for schools, teachers, books, equipment, etc.—would result in better outputs: academic achievement...
...The conservative argument had heft...
...They universalize about social policy, equality, the professionalization of reform, and so on, when actually they are talking about what was done, and not done, in a specific political and social context...
...Second, there are areas—education, and drug addiction, MICHAEL HARRINGTON for instance—in which our ignorance plays a role and our good intentions may sometimes be counterproductive...
...For another, it involved, as difficult cases almost always do, a conflict of rights rather than a right versus a wrong, as in the case of discriminatory voting and accommodation 438 statutes...
...In the effort to deal with the breakdown of these traditional structures, however, social policy tends to encourage their further weakening...
...So the notion that our troubles are caused 442 by the egalitarianism of the welfare state in the sixties, as suggested by both Glazer and Bell, is not true...
...Even those increases in Social Security which formed the bulk of new government expenditures in the sixties contributed somewhat to this antiegalitarian trend...
...In The Politics of the Guaranteed Annual Income, Moynihan offers a statement of this theme: A further argument which in retrospect may be adduced on behalf of the new conservatism is that diffusing social responsibility for social outcomes tends to retard the rise of social distrust when the promised or presumed outcome does not occur...
...I suspect that Glazer's emphasis derives in part from a very real and understandable concern about the breakdown of "traditional practices and traditional restraints" in his own neighborhood: the university...
...This is a crucial point to grasp, for it provides the opening for positive political action and keeps the foregoing analysis from leading to a weary fatalism...
...they favored these laws...
...In a good many cases, the flaws which are said to be inherent in such programs turn out, on closer examina tion, to be the result of the limitations— usually the cheapness—of the welfare state itself...
...AGAIN, the sixties sometimes talked as if moved by egalitarian passions...
...These cases do meet Oakeshott's criteria for unintended consequences, since they are the result of good, reformist intentions...
...For him, the system worked...
...By taking official declarations at face value, they conjure up an egalitarian, innovating, semiradical decade—which never existed...
...The antisegregation laws—and court opinions—attacked deeply entrenched customs and were viewed as unwarranted interference by many Southern racists...
...First of all, the frantic style of the Johnson administration convinced people that the government was intervening in every area of life...
...faith...
...They called it "state socialism": the use of techniques such as nationalization, planning, and social services...
...So it is not the result of the immemorial frailties of the human condition, but of our own conscious, perverse, and reversible political decisions...
...But this upheaval has been going on for perhaps a century, and it is hardly the result of recent—Populist or New Left—trends in American life...
...and that the academic outputs which could be won by money were lower than most had thought...
...Yet whatever their personal predilections, their ideas have a consistency and import which in the recent period have been conservative...
...There are urgent needs for the human talents now being squandered in unemployment and underemployment, particularly in the nonprofit sector...
...in Richard Nixon's reactionary charge that the sixties liberals (among whom some would count Moynihan himself) "threw money" at problems...
...In agriculture, federal subsidies have favored the big, corporate operation and helped to drive small farmers out of existence...
...Why has Nixon made such political mileage out of just such allegations...
...Oakeshott concludes that "as the conservative understands it, modifications of the rules should always reflect, and never impose, a change in the activities and beliefs of those who are subject to them...
...What the family, church, ethnic group, Landsmanschaft, etc...
...And even that figure overstates the federal largesse in this area, since by 1969 a significant portion of OEO funds were going, directly or indirectly, to private business paid to hire hard-core unemployed—whom they probably would often have hired anyway...
...The government's own figures corroborate Moynihan's judgment that the reforms of the sixties were "oversold and underfinanced...
...So, Glazer concluded, one of the things to recommend the Nixon Family Assistance Plan (FAP) is that it is not a service strategy...
...A. Philip Randolph's Freedom Budget, which was endorsed by John Kenneth Galbraith as well as by a good number of international union presidents, put this issue at the very heart of government policy...
...and from the same communities...
...There is, consequently, a positive incentive to stay under the "notch," i.e, to remain, or at least appear to remain, poor...
...It is a means of imposing nonmarket considerations upon a capitalist economy, of making the society somewhat more humane...
...Still, I would distinguish between two areas of unintended consequences in the re cent history of the welfare state...
...In the Budget of the United States gov ernment for 1974, these patterns of expendi tures are projected up to 1975...
...So the evidence does not back up the first count of the neoconservative indictment of the welfare state in the sixties: that it did too much...
...If the executive and legislative branches, with their attendant planners and technocrats, had intervened vigorously on this count, the courts would not have acted...
...So, paradoxically, it is our more and more egalitarian reality, in Bell's view, which is the cause of "excessive" egalitarianism...
...and it is only charged against the first $12,500 of income, which makes it a bargain for those with over $12,500 a year and regressive compared even to the federal income tax...
...In the same essay in which he deprecated the middle-class beneficiaries who allegedly profiteer from poverty programs, he also wrote, "Increasingly the most relevant findings concerning the state of society are the work of elites and must simply be taken—or respected—by the public at large, at times even by the professional public involved, on...
...He writes: "Ultimately, we are not kept healthy, I believe, by new scientific knowledge or more effective cures or even better-organized medical care services...
...Connally then joined the Nixon staff, with special responsibilities for energy policy (the fact that he could not fit into the paranoid atmosphere of the post-Watergate White House does not alter the essential point...
...The question of school segregation and busing, however, went beyond the issues of public accommodations and voting rights...
...Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made...
...Had there been genuine full employment— through the mechanism of a federal guaranteed right to work—AFDC(U) would have been unnecessary...
...There has indeed been a decline of ethical standards accompanying the effective collapse of organized religion...
...And they did so with all the grace exhibited by the English industrialists who, as Marx said, accepted restrictions upon the working hours of factory labor for the same reason that they spread guano on their fields: because they did not want to exhaust a productive resource...
...There has, of course, been an absolute increase in the standard of living of the masses, but that is something else again and not relevant to Bell's assertion's about "disparities...
...So it deserves rather careful attention...
...Of course...
...The answer is, I suspect, biographical and thereforebeyond the bounds of this essay...
...They also channeled private money into new investment at a time when there was still relatively high unemployment...
...The emancipation of the psyche from the restraints imposed upon it by the hierarchical authority of the past has not, as Marx and the socialist tradition hoped, led to the emergence of a new, humanist and rational code...
...These things do not happen because liberals in America, or social democrats in Europe, are insincere, sell-outs, or anything of the sort...
...Even so, the contradictions of the welfare state offer a point of departure for change—above all, for structural change...
...If the "working poor" were abolished as a category by the operation of a full-employment policy, then one could provide a decent minimum for the dependent poor who are not in the labor market...
...There were probably some social workers who believed in such an approach, but they were relatively few in number and certainly not the arbiters of liberalism...
...In this formulation, Moynihan seems to be giving sophisticated utterance to a popular myth: that welfare programs are a cheat designed by social workers...
...once did, the government now attempts to do...
...There is consequently a built-in tendency to erode the progress made by the mass movements in times of militancy...
...The 300,000 black women and children added to the poverty figures in 1972, and the hundreds of thousands who had arrived there before them, are going to constitute a tragic, difficult challenge for some time to come...
...In this conflict, there is a disagreement over the welfare state...
...The "notch" in this case was therefore the result of an inadequate response to a problem that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place...
...and the special limitations of the most conservative and pinchpenny welfare state in the world, the United States of America...
...But it would also seek to transform structures, particularly the maldistribution of wealth and the use of governmental power to shape the national product according to private priorities...
...We are kept healthy by certain patterns of life...
...President Nixon did not, however, bother to make such discriminations...
...Second, there is Moynihan's assertion that the service strategy reallocates resources "up the social scale...
...Moynihan lists three areas in his indictment of liberal ultrareformism: ending racial and ethnic discrimination, abolishing poverty, and promoting equal achievement by means of enriched social services...
...Socialists want to move toward equality, in order then to transcend it...
...The neoconservatives tend to exaggerate the amount of social innovation attempted in the sixties, mistaking promises for operational plans and ignoring the hidden agenda established by the priorities of power...
...Heller, as the chief architect of what was then called the "New Economics," could have hardly thought that services were "quintessential...
...That, however, means a much greater invasion of "management prerogatives" than has as yet been undertaken...
...This reality, it must be emphasized, is not merely a concoction of conservatives when they take their turn at running the welfare state...
...There are obvious ambiguities in my choice of examples...
...Here, however, I am concerned with its sophisticated variant...
...Second, there were two specific areas in which important constituencies felt that the federal government was indeed moving in on them...
...Social reality, Moynihan argues in this mood, is often "counter-intuitive" and therefore the society must accept the data from the experts...
...The UAW's bitter battle with GM in 1970, for instance, was in considerable measure necessary because the union had to catch up with inflation, running furiously just to stay in place...
...The neoconservative ideologues base themselves on what they regard as the data of the sixties, but they do not take into theoretical account how the limitations of the period permeate their evidence and skew their conclusions...
...But they should be aware of how their philosophy disposes itself to such a fate...
...As a result, they lack a sense of what might be done under other circumstances—and of the degree to which "circumstances" themselves are aspects of a structure of power created by struggle, not destiny...
...it also represents a demand for equality in economic power, in social status, in authority in every sphere...
...There is no factual basis whatever for the assertion that there was a massive trend toward equality in the sixties, particularly in income and status...
...Richard Nixon, who is straightforwardly reactionary in such matters, proposed to expand that contradiction with his "job development credit...
...That it has a "quasi-monopoly over the fate of individuals...
...Those Brookings analyses of the Budget are certainly invaluable, but not, as some liberals and editorialists seem to think, holy writ...
...And, Any institution which gains a quasi-monopoly over the fate of individuals is likely, in a free society, to be subject to quick attack...
...These tendencies, it must be remembered, were reinforced, not reversed, by the KennedyJohnson administrations of the sixties (and, of course, by the Nixon administration...
...It was extremely limited in its application, required the states to act—and spend money—and therefore only operated in a significant fashion in a few areas...
...This is a fundamental conservative theme, the nostalgia for the vanished Gemeinschaft, the suspicion of the contemporary Gesellschaft...
...But of that total, more than 70 percent, or over $93 billion, is accounted for by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, veterans' benefits, and aid to the blind, aged, and handicapped...
...First, it is not true that the service strategy has been "quintessentially that of political liberalism in the middle third of the twentieth century"—nor even in the decade of the sixties...
...The persistence of maldistribution results from the concentration of "creative" wealth in the hands of a tiny minority...
...But before turning to that question, a few notes on its American model...
...That depends, not on the nature of the service strategy, but on the tax system...
...In the United States, as we have seen, the Kennedy-Johnson policies did not simply favor rich individuals...
...Housing is somewhat more problematic...
...Many of these—few at the beginning, more later—came from minority groups...
...it is not individual satisfaction which is the measure of social good, but redress for the disadvantaged as a prior claim on the social conscience and social policies...
...Equality of opportunity, Bell THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 439 writes (and there is more than a hint of nostalgia in his tone), derives from a fundamental principle of classical liberalism that the individual—and not the family, the community or the state —is the basic unit of society, and that the purpose of social arrangements is to allow the individual the freedom to fulifill his own purposes—by his labor to gain property, by exchange to satisfy wants, by upward mobility to achieve a place commensurate with his talents...
...In England, for instance, it was first proposed by the left wing of the Labour party as a means of redistributing wealth...
...These figures hardly confirm the thesis that we are on the verge of Michael Young's meritocracy where IQ is the decisive determinant of class position...
...Moreover, it is typical of a strand of thought that is to be found in almost all of neoconservative writing...
...Being American, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunity for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups...
...Lewis Mandell of the University of Michigan Survey Research Center has computed that the top 5 percent of the wealth holders in America own 40 percent of the wealth, and that the top 20 percent possess three times as much as the 80 percent below them...
...The same amount of money is sent out from a central point to everyone in the same status...
...The "notch" defines that point at which working, or increasing income, or even escaping from poverty becomes irrational because government policy turns a marginal increment into a substantial loss...
...It now needs to be generalized, or rather turned into a fundamental principle of the society: that federally financed work will be provided, sometimes as a first resort and sometimes as a last resort, but always and automatically in the case of need, so that every employable worker has a job...
...A generation ago, grade schools functioned to provide minimal literacy, and high schools were the preserve of the more fortunate and motivated students...
...The "traditional way of handling disasters" broke down, in good measure, because of unprecedented new problems and disasters...
...In my analysis, and in the conclusions based upon it, there is a common assumption I share with the neoconservatives: that social reality is counterintuitive...
...2. The welfare state does not simply tend to distribute rewards according to the priorities of private wealth and power...
...This latter assertion, it should be noted, inverts Bell's cause and effect, making educational achievement a function of class position rather than the other way round...
...This presumed trend is then made the basis of what Bell calls the "Tocqueville effect," an explanation of the ingratitude of the new Populists who recently benefited from the progress toward equality...
...Real full employment, for example, betters the bargaining position of all workers, but it aids the relative position of the most vulnerable more than that of any other group...
...This proposition is central to the new conservatism and it will be examined in some detail...
...It is true that in the original infighting over the Economic Opportunity Act, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (through Wilbur Cohen) and the Council of Economic Advisers (through Walter Heller) battled the Secretary of Labor (Willard Wirtz) and his associate (Moynihan) on this question...
...the most reactionary areas advertise their callousness as an inducement for investment...
...There can be no doubt that this "notch" effect took place...
...But this constant harping on the complexity of social policy has itself become a new oversimplification...
...a statesrights Medicaid provision that was practically smuggled into the law...
...The strategy I propose would take advantage of every contradiction within the welfare state to win whatever gains are possible here and now...
...And finally, there is the federal nature of American politics...
...He writes, The social reforms of mid-decade had been oversold, and, with the coming of the war, underfinanced to the degree that seeming failure could be ascribed almost to intent...
...So it is that the climactic charge in Glazer's indictment of the "revolution of equality" is that it seeks to create "equality in authority...
...In the process, the joint decisions of the state and the business community determine the shape, as well as the distribution, of the national product...
...It is, for all the decency and intelli gence of its proponents, unwittingly doing the work of the reactionaries who will have unchallenged dominance over the collectiv ism of the 21st century, if once the people are persuaded that they are impotent...
...So much for our stockholder democracy...
...AFDC(U) recognized that the government's full-employment policy was unable to provide work for a significant number of able and willing family heads...
...Therefore, a government that seeks to maximize growth —and with it full employment, tax revenues to fund new social services, etc.—must keep corporations happy...
...Thus, Nathan Glazer writes of "the revolution of equality": "Perhaps only a Tocqueville saw its awesome potency...
...And James D. Smith of Penn State has concluded that the rich get richer because they start from a higher base...
...For now, however, let me simply discuss a few important measures which are transitional in character, i.e., rooted in immediate and politically possible demands, yet capable of effecting some increments of change in the structure of power itself...
...On the other hand, the welfare state exists within a capitalist economy and, particularly in "normal" periods, it is permeated by the values of that society...
...Some of these propositions were indeed shared by almost all liberals and radicals...
...Second, there is no question that some movements in the sixties stood for the kind of radical, egalitarian redistribution of wealth and power that Glazer distrusts...
...Significantly, the opposition came not from the blue-collar working class, which was willing to make concessions to better the lot of the worst-off in the society, but from the educated salariat...
...The AFDC(U) legislation was a victory for those liberals who were aghast because the requirement that no man could be in the house literally drove fathers to leave their families (or to pretend that they had done so...
...Here, as in so many recent events, it was the lack of a radical program, the absence of innovation, that was crucial, not, as the neoconservatives have it, our prodigality...
...The KennedyJohnson tax cuts in the sixties gave enormous subsidies to the richest people and corporations in America...
...This means, as John Kenneth Galbraith recognizes, that the United States tends to regard government undertakings as part of the area of unfreedom and inefficiency, a conviction that often operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...In the early pages of Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, Moynihan indulges in some romantic medievalism which leans heavily upon Robert Nisbet...
...Therefore this essay will conclude on what by now may seem a subtle and obscure truth: that there are some solutions to some of our problems...
...But Moynihan and company exaggerate the degree to which the assumptions sub verted by Coleman had been shared by the Left...
...If minority demands for quality education through integration were, and should have been, the dominant consideration, still, ethnic and class concerns for the integrity of neighborhoods were not simply a mask for racism, they derived from an authentic emotion...
...It has been a major obstacle to the passage of national health insurance, and it will surely be used by the oil companies as an excuse for profiteering on the energy crisis...
...It relates to establishing the broader context of all the welfare state debates of the sixties...
...This is particularly true of their largest, and most conservative, abstraction: • The preference for the unplanned, and even the irrational, as opposed to conscious government policy...
...Of course it isn't...
...This has meant that so many of our programs—welfare, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, to name a few— have been subjected to states' rights vetoes...
...England and Sweden are beset by the same cultural convulsions as the United States...
...If the liberal proposals for full employment had been adopted in the sixties, it would not have existed at all...
...There is no alternative to an incomes policy if there is to be full employment with inflation under control...
...These enormous increases in capital consumption allowances reflect the various credits and depreciation gimmicks of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations...
...Yet their health is...
...Colleges dramatically increased the number of minority students...
...10.4 billion respectively...
...Sophisticated businessmen, the decisive though not always dominant class of welfarestate society, have learned that a Keynesian government following corporate priorities is their friend, not their enemy...
...One result, as the AFL– CIO has stressed repeatedly, was a one-sided capital-goods boom initiated by government policy, which made significant contributions —along with the government's war in Vietnam— to the raging inflation at the decade's end...
...So it is that Richard Titmuss has documented the sharp limits of redistribution even under a Labour government in England and that the figures for the United States show that there has been no shift in the portions allotted to the different social classes in at least a generation...
...Between 1960 and 1970, there was a $44.3 billion rise in the funds for Social Security and Medicare ($33.9 billion and 2 Why does Moynihan contradict himself...
...First of all, it must be emphasized that both AFDC(U) and Medicaid were palliatives, not radical departures...
...But at least we can put a federally established floor under misery...
...This is not going to happen...
...The government did too much...
...In the process, he overstates the class bias of the service strategy...
...In this context, the fight for socialist legitimacy in this country is crucial to the process of liberal reform...
...It was precisely the default of federal action, not its ubiquity, which turned the judiciary into an agency for the redress of long-overdue grievances...
...If, therefore, the minimum were set at $6,500, as urged by Senator Eugene McCarthy and the National Welfare Rights Organization, that would have required supplementing the income of everyone with less than $13,000, i.e., of the majority of the people So, Moynihan con 446 cludes, it was essential to peg the minimum low if there was any hope of passing the plan...
...In particular, and here I simply restate an excellent principle introduced into the 1972 campaign by George McGovern, there should be a positive and systematic bias against all forms of unearned income: capital gains, dividends, interest, etc...
...But does this prove, as Oakeshott, Moynihan, and the neoconservatives assume, that such mishaps are inherent in the very process of reform and therefore are an argument for caution with regard to innovation...
...They came screaming to this wisdom because they were educated in it by militant labor, socialist, and liberal movements...
...Admitting that is one thing...
...Counterposed to this approach is the current idea of equality of result: "Today we have come to the end of classic liberalism...
...They take it as a given and largely ignore its influence upon the failures they decry...
...They have persuaded the Nixon policy-makers on this count, providing them with a rationale for dismantling a number of Great Society programs—though they failed to win Nixon to a serious fight for the alternative of an income strategy...
...Quotas on imports, tax write-offs to domestic producers, and other federal actions led to a rapid consumption of continental reserves...
...First, there are the cases where our deficiencies are the result of timid, pinch-penny programs, which create unnecessary "notches...
...studies do not find adult social achievement well predicted by academic achievement" and "family background, measured in social class terms—primarily education of parents, but including many other considerations such as the presence of an encyclopedia in the house—is apparently a major determinant of educational achievement...
...The crisis itself is, of course, the result of government policies that were in the service of the 23 major petroleum producers...
...Price and investment and profit and dividend decisions must become a matter of public debate and determination...
...In explaining why the Nixon proposals set the minimum so low (in the neighborhood of $2,500 for a family), Moynihan says that this was necessary because the working poor were being included in the program...
...An income strategy, Moynihan said, did not involve the intrusions and confrontations of a service strategy...
...I honor them when they contradict their own premises, but unfortunately they do not accompany their essays to explain to the reader their velleities to the contrary...
...And David K. Cohen reported in the April 1972 Commentary that high school seniors in the bottom fifth both economically and in terms of IQ had a 10 percent chance of going to college—while seniors who were in the top income fifth and the bottom IQ fifth had a 40 percent chance...
...On the one hand, the welfare state represents the interests, and the achievements, of the Left...
...This provides an enormous incentive for someone to keep his income below the Medicaid cut-off line...
...For according to Tocqueville, Bell says, democratic institutions and equality "develop sentiments of envy in the human heart...
...My ultimate aim is, pace, Nathan Glazer, the democratization of economic power and the socialization of the private sector...
...Even in Sweden, where a social democratic government has created one of the most imaginative and progressive welfare states in the world, there was tre mendous resistance when Olaf Palme fought for a very modest redistribution several years ago...
...But it is a gigantic step forward, with the great merit of substituting group and preventive medicine for fee-for-service medicine...
...There has, of course, been a counterpro gram implicit, and sometimes explicit, in my analysis of the neoconservatives...
...On a more prosaic level, Glazer deduces some very faulty policy from his attempt to revive Gemeinschaft past...
...So Bell's basic assertion of a trend is, to put it mildly, quite debatable...
...By focusing on the breakdown as the author of our woes, one holds out the hope that all can be well again if only it can be repaired...
...Just before World War II, about a third of American youth went to high school...
...Moynihan and Wirtz were for a job emphasis...
...He reduced taxes by about $20 billion a year...
...They therefore look for the causes of the recent failures of the welfare state in the fundamental limitations of the human condition...
...Third, part of our inability to deal with education relates to unprecedented changes that have taken place...
...Because John Kennedy had such a narrow presidential margin and a shaky position in Congress, he moved to stimulate the THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 441 economy through investment credits, accelerated depreciation and tax cuts, all of which notoriously benefited the rich more than anyone else...
...In the introduction he wrote (along with Frederick Mosteller) to the essays on the Coleman Re port, which were produced by a Harvard seminar, he said, One of the patterns of the 1960s was that of middle-class persons, in large measure professionals, conceiving a great range of social programs, supported by tax monies, which undertook to assist the poor through a process of employing middle-class persons...
...Since the most famous discussion of the equality issue in the history of socialist thought— Marx's brief but profound comments on the Gotha Program of the German Social Democracy—is an attack on the notion that equality of result is a socialist ideal, this is a surprising assertion from one as well-versed as Bell in the literature...
...3. The welfare state is, by its very nature, a contradictory phenomenon...
...In order to do that, I will first summarize the critique of the welfare state that is the point of departure for my strategy...
...In the 1955-75 period, that Budget tells us, the "human resources" percentage of the Budget will have increased from 21.1 percent to 64.8 percent, or from $14.5 billion to $134.9 billion...
...The modern welfare state was getting into activities no one understood very well...
...Second, to the degree that some relative prog ress may have been achieved, it was the re sult not only of technology but also of a furi ous social conflict—a class war—over the distribution of the fruits of technology...
...When Nixon talked of Washington doing "too much," the Dixiecrats, to whom the Southern strategy was designed to appeal, did not have to consult the Budget or the Brookings Institution to know what he meant...
...I will challenge this approach on three different levels...
...we were providing the jobs through these programs for the barely college trained that other programs were producing...
...The now-famous "notch" is invoked by the American neoconservatives as an instance of Oakeshott's wisdom...
...The sixties satisfied no one...
...Ironically, Moynihan himself might plausibly claim some credit—or, would he now himself bear some blame?—for introducing the idea of 440 equality of result into the mainstream of political debate...
...are no more secure than ours...
...For another, as some of the data already cited indicate, the influence of class subverts, or at least vitiates, much of the effect of genetic endowment...
...In the writings of Chesterton, Belloc, Gill, and others, the Middle Ages were held up as a model...
...In Moynihan's report on the Negro family in 1965 he wrote of a new period beginning after the victories over juridical segregation...
...And in a later article Glazer praised another program based on an "income strategy": "Thus we know enough generally about Social Security to act (although there are plenty of complexities in that program, too...
...In 1972 (the 1974 Federal Budget tells us) Model Cities spent all of $500 million, and it is quite clear that one of the reasons this program did not live up to its expectations was, and is, "lack of money...
...And after a brief infatuation with Family Assistance, he abandoned the income strategy, too...
...Is it true that the university "has now become the quasi-arbiter of class position...
...The Kennedy-Griffith bill is not, alas, socialized medicine...
...Medical care is another area in which it is not the limitations of our social intelligence but the perversity of our politics that stops us from action...
...But if one is not to be mesmerized by rhetoric it must be quickly added that the egalitarians lost...
...In Oakeshott's view, innovation involves "certain loss and possible gain" and is best when it resembles the process of growth...
...and even in the agitation of some advocates of "community control" on the Left...
...Also, the American welfare state is antisocialist, while all other welfare states have been profoundly influenced by socialist thought and action...
...In stock ownership, as Letitia Upton and Nancy Lyons have documented, the disparities are severe: the top 1 percent of the wealth holders own 62 percent of all publicly held corporate stock...
...Lyndon Johnson refused to fund the publicservice jobs advocated by the Automation Commission of 1966 and the Civil Disorders Commission of 1968...
...The reason for this persistence of the maldistribution of wealth are not to be found, as Irving Kristol argued in his essay "About Equality," in a bell-shaped distribution of human talents which determines a bellshaped distribution of rewards...
...The Internal Revenue Code must be transformed from an instrument of negative redistribution, placing greater burdens on the working people than on the rich, to a means of positive redistribution...
...Second, thinking in terms of input and output assumes that education can, and should be, described as a production function appropriate in a factory: X dollars invested yields Y increases in reading scores...
...This was three times the increased expenditure of public as sistance (welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, student aid...
...Instead of talking of a "Tocqueville effect," perhaps it is necessary to speak of the "Sisyphus effect": the anger felt by people when they intuit that, despite the fact that they have more money to spend, they have not advanced their relative position in a society which regards that as the supreme good...
...Whatever one might think of the philosophic questions, 3 the welfare state in the last decade s Bell refers to "equality of result" as a socialistethic...
...By contrast, the Office of Economic Opportunity, a quintessential Great Society agency, received less than $10 billion in the nine years between its creation under Johnson and its dismemberment under Nixon, with a peak appropriation for a single year of $1.9 billion in 1969...
...That, I submit, is not true...
...To the extent that the Coleman Report disproved them—and the Report itself, it must be understood, is still the subject of debate— it did indeed expose an area of well-meaning ignorance...
...This theory of equality of opportunity is, Bell says, a socialist ethic...
...III The neoconservative error in this regard constitutes the faulty basis for yet another proposition: since the Kennedy-Johnson years were excessively idealistic and egalitarian but still promoted discontent, this shows that • The consequences of government intervention are, more often than not, unintended and usually negative...
...If it helped liberate men from feudal relationships of personal dependence, the "individual" of whom it spoke was mostly the bourgeois, the affluent, the privileged individual...
...Second, their interpretations of the data, even when the latter are accurate, abstract from the unique historical setting—the late capitalist welfare state—which largely determines how the data function...
...Two of them, Glazer and Moynihan, have sometimes spoken favorably of conservatism, but Bell, as far as I know, has not...
...Big business already spends millions in order to conceal billions and, with an effective incomes policy, it would be motivated to become even more wily and evasive...
...Under the provisions of Aid for the Families of Dependent Children (Unemployed) —AFDC (U) —states were given the right to provide AFDC benefits even though there was an able-bodied, though unemployed, man in the house...
...Moynihan and the rest of the neoconservatives did not, happily, share that assessment...
...In vulgarized version it also appears in George Wallace's racist Populism with its attack on the "pointy headed bureaucrats" in Washington...
...448 MICHAEL HARRINGTON VI This critique of neoconservatism can now be generalized: the failures of the welfare state in recent years are the result of its conservatism, not its excessive liberalism or, more preposterously, of its radicalism...
...In legislation that was long overdue, the Congress provided some minimal guarantees of basic rights in public accommodations and voting...
...It is not individual satisfaction which is the measure of social good, but redress for the disadvantaged as a prior claim on the social conscience and on social policies...
...The difficulty with this interpretation of the sixties is that the central event it describes— a pervasive government intrusion into the private sphere—never took place...
...During the sixties, as the AFL– CIO has documented on many occasions, unit labor costs were stable for the first half of the decade while profits soared (and also the much more significant figure of corporate cash flow, profit, plus depreciation allowances and internal financing...
...If there were a guaranteed right to work and an effective incomes policy, then there could be a realistic Guaranteed Annual Income...
...Welfare state governments constantly intervene on behalf of those whom the Wall Street Journal calls the "most productive" citizens, THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 449 i.e., the possessors of wealth who often engage in no activity more strenuous than the clipping of coupons...
...The schools do not simply develop cognitive skills...
...A few general words about Bell's "sticky fact" are needed before turning to specifics in the sixties...
...In fact, as Nathan Glazer has remarked, in the "most original area" THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 437 of Great Society innovation—such neighborhoodcontrolled programs as Model Cities and Community Action—there was "not very much" money...
...Glazer believes that Humpty Dumpty is going to be put together again...
...The traditional New Deal liberals of the laborliberal coalition always made full employment their demand, as Moynihan must remember from his days at the Department of Labor...
...That "schooling itself" has ever been the "determinant of a man's position in society...
...The pre-World War I German socialists noted this trend under Bismarck...
...For one thing, this problem was posed in the de facto segregated districts of the North as well as in the de jure systems of the South...
...Social policy"—Glazer wrote in "The Limits of Social Policy"—"is an effort to deal with the breakdown of traditional ways of handling disasters...
...The Social Security tax does not vary according to family size, responsibilities, etc...
...First, I differ as to at least some of the facts...
...Nevertheless, the neoconservatives build upon this faulty base and argue against a "service strategy" that is seen as an unwarranted intervention in the domain of social complexity...
...Since they were to be given the right to keep a portion of the earnings (in contrast to the 100 percent tax on such income in most welfare systems), a $2,500 base for the dependent (nonworking) poor thus meant some support to the working poor up to $5,000 of income...
...Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to argue the contrary is to be found in Daniel Bell's Public Interest article, "Meritocracy and Equality" (Fall 1972) ; I will make a fairly close reading of some of its assertions since they are a perfect illustration of the way the sixties are read by neoconservatism...
...The reason for that unfortunate—but to my mind, necessary—reality runs counter to neoconservative theory...
...Moreover, if there is any possibility that this cultural revolution can become a vehicle for social emancipation, what is required is a radical response, a reshaping of the social structures, and not, as in the neoconservative proposal, a retreat...
...Right now, how ever, the question is relatively simple: did the government in fact innovate extensively to end racism, poverty, and inequality in the sixties...
...In saying these things, I do not want to suggest for a moment that reform is a seamTHE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 443 less, utterly predictable affair...
...I will take three men as representative of this neoconservative trend: Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell...
...On this calculus, much cited by the Dixiecrats MICHAEL HARRINGTON at the time, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were clearly unwise...
...For our antisocialism is really directed against improvement in the welfare state, not, alas, against a serious socialist threat within America...
...IV The critique of the service strategy was basic to Nathan Glazer's enormously influential article, "The Limits of Social Policy" (Commentary, September 1971) . Glazer wrote: "In its efforts to deal with the breakdown of these traditional structures [family, ethnic group, church, neighborhood], however, social policy tends to encourage their further weakening...
...Third, Moynihan is somewhat ambiguous —and somewhat wrong—in another aspect of his critique of the service strategy...
...However, once one reduces the focus from two centuries to two decades—that is, to the period in which Bell perceives his "Tocque ville effect"—we can be somewhat more pre cise about the figures (but only somewhat...
...It should be said in passing that classical liberalism was, in some part, a swindle...
...Much more profoundly, private wealth dominates the economy of the welfare state...
...Moynihan, for instance, notes that the New Towns in Towns Program, which was to use surplus federal land to build homes for the poor, was given a major White House send-off in 1967—and by 1971 had only 300 units of housing under construction...
...Indeed, it does not even represent the best of liberalism...
...If there is a strike of capital, as happened to Leon Blum in the France of the thirties and to Harold Wilson in the England of the sixties, the system will not work...
...q MICHAEL HARRINGTON...
...John Connally toured the Middle East as the MICHAEL HARRINGTON unofficial representative of the President of the United States and the official lawyer for Texas (worldwide) oil interests...
...In doing this, one is not going to solve all the human problems which collect under the title of "welfare...
...The states which adopt policies based upon a modicum of humanity are penalized...
...However, the powers-that-be do not trust simply in trends...
...In part, Bell is here talking about theories, like John Rawls's writings on equality...
...During the second half of the decade, workers were forced to strike simply to keep pace with the cost of living and some of them suffered a decline in real purchasing power...
...It takes that fledgling ideology back toward conservatism pure and simple, to the notion that the hope of the future lies in the past...
...This progress was not negligible...
...Incomes policy is an area in which the pessimistic analysis of this essay has been, alas, confirmed every time...
...And yet the actual effect of service programs such as education is probably to reallocate resources up the social scale, taxing, as it were, factory workers to pay schoolteachers...
...Precisely to the degree that state management of the economy is successful, Harold Wilson noted in 1960, there is "a law of increasing returns to the rich...
...It has been criticized by the keepers of liberal moderation, the Brookings Institution, as being too radical, which I regard as a substantial point in its favor...
...We have most certainly failed to respond adequately to this challenge but our difficulties stem from a new and worthy problem...
...Moynihan carried the attack against the service strategy into the White House itself in 1969 and 1970, persuading—if only briefly—Richard Nixon to advocate a guaranteed annual income (which the President constantly asserted was not a guaranteed an nual income...
...Then, between 1965 and 1970, that percentage almost doubled...
...As Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller summarize the Coleman Report (the Equal Educational Opportunity Report...
...Indeed, the staff studies and hearings of the Joint Economic Committee in 1972 showed that the Internal Revenue Code alone contains a welfare system, primarily for the rich, worth $77 billion a year (it takes the form of deductions for capital gains, mansions, etc...
...But when the economic and social conditions for those practices and restraints have been destroyed, how can they rise from the dead to solve our problems...
...Similarly, Moynihan's assertion that FAP had to mean "income redistribution"—and it is interesting that, as a neoconservative, he counts this as a point in its favor—is, in and of itself, not true in the least...
...The belief that schools could—apart from changes in class position, the labor market, housing, etc.—transform life at the bottom of the society is not a radical thesis...
...Take the common corporate practice of concealing profit income...
...But I do think that the evidence demonstrates that there are areas—most particularly, full employment, income tax reform, incomes policy, guaranteed income, medicine, and more 454 problematically housing—where this country can act...
...Yet neither does it justify Bell's sweeping generalization: "A sticky fact of Western society over the past 200 years has been the steady decrease in income disparity among persons —not by distribution policies and judgments about fairness, but by technology, which has cheapened the cost of products and made more things available to more people...
...Social Se curity is neither innovative nor intrusive for —as Nathan Glazer pointed out in the May 1973 Commentary—"the program's objec tives are clear and simple, and thus it is easy to evaluate...
...Leaving for later the issue of the democratization of authority, what Glazer is doing is calling into question the traditional socialist demand for economic and social democracy...
...If such a formulation strikes one as sentimental, a nonquantifiable claim, then it can be translated into economic projections...
...overgeneralizing from it, as the neoconservatives have done, is another thing...
...All the evidence shows that there has been no change in basic income distribution since at least 1947 (there are those who argue that there were some changes between 1929 and 1947 because of the Depression and the War— two rather unfortunate instruments of social policy—but even that proposition has been criticized by serious analysts...
...If, for example, one were to finance community action programs in the next period out of those $20 billion in loophole savings that would be realized if the reforms advocated by George McGovern and George Meany were adopted, Moynihan's regressive effect would not take place...
...It is the most narrow and pinchpenny, since this country spends a smaller percentage of its GNP on social programs than any advanced nation, capitalist or Communist...
...The Coleman Report—the Equal Educational Opportunity Survey and Report—is prime evidence in this regard...
...All of them—and particularly Glazer—advocate various liberal reforms, and Bell may still consider himself a man of the Left...
...But then Moynihan himself is ambiguous in his critique...
...A 1972 Business Week summary of recent research pointed out that the bottom 50 percent of the income recipients received 23 percent of total personal income in 1969 and represented only 3 percent of net worth...
...Thus, the Populist revolt which Michael Young foresaw several decades hence has already begun at the very outset of the post-industrial society...
...But this was true only because of an enormous and intolerable fact which Moynihan ignores: that there were unconscionably high levels of unemployment and underemployment creating that scandalous category of the "working poor...
...they are also a basic socializing institution for a democratic society...
...Even such a program is too cautious, in danger of being subverted by private economic power...
...Moynihan was silent on his vote saying that a Democrat who had been in a Republican administration should stay out of the campaign...
...Specifically, there should be both public and employee members on the board of directors of all major companies, with funds for expert assistance to aid them in representing the consumer and worker interest—and in systematically betraying management "secrets" as a matter of principle...
...The Report did show that the objective disparities between black and white educational inputs were not as great has had been imagined by many...
...I propose to sketch it out in symbolic detail, i.e., not to offer a legislative shopping list, but to illus trate an emphasis, to exemplify an approach to a program rather than the program itself...
...Big business was encouraged, and sometimes paid, to become an "equal opportunity employer...
...From Burke to Dostoevsky to Spengler it has been at the very center of conservative thought...
...In Lyndon Johnson's Howard University speech, inspired and partly composed by Moynihan, the President said, "We seek not just freedom but opportunity, not just legal equality but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and a result...
...In housing, policies determined in Washington—and corresponding to a calculus of private profitability rather than public need—encouraged suburbia with princely assistance while the central cities were allowed to rot...
...He allowed himself to be persuaded, or perhaps it would be more precise to say that he per mitted his prejudices to be reinforced, by the blunderbuss blast against the service strategy...
...In part, these neoconservative fears have substantial content...
...Therefore, it was said, particularly after the 1954 Supreme Court decision against segregation in public education, that the disparity in intellectual performance between the poor and the nonpoor, or the minorities and the majority, was to be explained by the lack of school inputs in poor neighborhoods...
...The failures of most manpower programs in the sixties are not to be explained primarily by the difficulties of providing educational services, the unintended consequences of overly ambitious schemes, etc...
...The housing project is a genuine example of a liberal idea whose unintended consequences were more important than its good intentions...
...There are, then, reasons to be disturbed...
...As a statement of moral obligation toward people who have suffered discrimination for centuries, this argument seems quite compelling...
...There are, as the neoconservatives insist at every turn, unintended consequences which sometimes overwhelm the best-intentioned plans...
...Perhaps the best known contemporary writer in this intellectual tradition is Michael Oakeshott...
...A guaranteed right to work...
...That would be true only if other factors did not contribute to the "notch" effect— which is precisely the case...
...The Council was lending a helpful scholarly hand to the companies who want to plead poor mouth...
...This analysis contains both an interpretation of the recent history of the welfare state and policy conclusions to be derived from it...
...And Medicaid was, of course, a sleeper provision of the Medicare law which permitted the most advanced states—notably New York, Massachusetts, and California— to provide a partial installment of socialized medicine...
...The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 hardly deal with "imponderables...
...The top 5 percent of income recipients who own 86 percent of all publicly held corporate stock receive greater increments of the governmentally planned and induced growth in national product than does any other group...
...That equation, however, utterly fails to take into account some of the most crucial variables...
...I see them as a result of a hidden agenda which follows the priorities of private wealth...
...But because the urban struggle became more and more of a battle between have-nots among the minorities and the poor and have-littles from the white working class, with the prize coming to be scarce resources such as schools and housing, the courts were called in as arbiters...
...and it was debated at a time when Nixon, MICHAEL HARRINGTON as the Joint Economic Committee showed, was increasing the tax relief of the rich sub stantially...
...They have also accepted the establishment of social minimums of income, health care, etc...
...Rather they back up Cohen's statement that "nowhere can we find any empirical support for the idea that brains are becoming increasingly more important to status in America...
...Similarly, in states with decent Medicaid programs, a person who raises his income by five dollars but thereby fails the means test for Medicaid, forfeits much more than five dollars in medical benefits...
...That, however, was a function of the antiegalitarianism of federal wealth and income policy, which has already been documented in the discussion of Daniel Bell's view on equality...
...During the heyday of French "in 450 dicative planning"—that conspiracy for economic growth between the state and the capitalists, as one critic called it—the companies were able to utilize what was, in effect, governmentsubsidized market research for their own ends...
...Some of the principal efforts—Model Cities, for example—had more of it than they could spend...
...But if there were National Health Insurance—had we passed Truman's 1949 proposal or were we to pass the Kennedy-Griffith bill now before the Congress—the "notch" would simply disappear...
...This became even more evident in the course of the 1960s as the Federal government undertook an unprecedented range of social initiatives designed to put an end to racial and ethnic discrimination, to poverty, and even also to unequal levels of achievement among groups variously defined by race, class, religion, national origin, and sex, primarily through the strategy of providing new, or "enriched," social services...
...The "notch" was the creation of timid governmental action, not of sweeping programs...
...Therefore, on this count, as on many others, there must be an incomes policy...
...As the gate-keeper, it has gained a quasi-monopoly in determining the future stratification of society...
...has never been the impossible goal of guaranteeing everyone the right to win in a competitive rat race...
...Now Senator Henry Jackson has proposed a $20 billion research and development program, in which Washington is going to bail out the authors of our crisis...
...for the majority it did not, and one reason classical liberalism has faded is that people came to see its limitations...
...One sees this today in the derogation of the IQ and the denunciation of theories espousing a genetic basis of intelligence...
...Medicare can be criticized— primarily on the grounds that it is an utterly inadequate installment on national health insurance—but its difficulties certainly do not derive from too much federal experi mentation with the "imponderables" of social policy...
...It asserts that • The government was too egalitarian in its policies...
...In this, as in the entire critique of the service strategy, there is the imprecision of overgeneralizations...
...But when one looks at where this quantum leap occured, it does not support the thesis of widespread federal innovation in social policy...
...It is a notorious fact that Medicare and Medicaid have, along with their undeniable accomplishments, bid up the cost of medical care for those under 65 and not poor...
...ers, I do not suggest that there are "easy answers" to the issues of the seventies...
...So the very phenomenon of the welfare state, as well as its American exemplar, is THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 451 based upon a conservative power structure...
...They are, more than anything else, a function of the country's refusal to provide a decent job for every citizen...
...That is to say, it bore all the marks of President Nixon's effort to make it as inadequate as possible...
...And Daniel Bell defends the "authority represented in the superior competence of in dividuals" from the scorn of the New Popu lists...
...A good part of that $67.7 billion in 1972 represents hidden profits (when, for example, actual depreciation is not at all as rapid as the legal rate of accelerated depreciation, a point which Philip Stern, among others, has docu mented) . In short, the institutional prejudices of the tax system, of the legal system, and of the accounting profession lean toward the falsification of unearned income statistics and profit rates...
...Rather, it opposes the "service strategy" in aiding the poor, as a means of obtaining equality of result...
...But then, Moynihan is partly a product of Catholic social thought, which has always idealized THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS 447 the period of the Church's dominance...
...As a Nixon counselor, Moynihan made this a major MICHAEL HARRINGTON argument in persuading the President to adopt the "incomes strategy" of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP...
...There is, however, one area where the complexities do more nearly accord to the neoconservative account of them: education...
...Their similars can be found in every advanced capitalist nation...
...Reform was becoming professionalized...
...Moreover, the sweeping orders sometimes handed down in these cases came from the courts, i.e., from the least representative, most insulated of democratic institutions...
...So it is that the Labour Left and the Trade Union Congress are now bitter opponents of any kind of incomes policy...
...For as the Social Security tax, one of the most regressive in the nation, was increased, so was the burden on working people...
...New cities and new towns are possible...
...Thus, Edward Banfield, a conservative conservative who sometimes fellow-travels with the neoconservatives, is quite wrong when he says that "it was not for lack of money that the Great Society programs failed...
...There was indeed considerable social change going on, and much of it in the direction most desired by those who were discontented, but it was progress clearly linked to the economic boom brought on by the war, which made it difficult to take much satisfaction in it...
...V he neoconservatives cannot, of course, be held responsible for a reactionary misreading of their views...
...Moreover, even if it may sound a little arrogant, it should be remembered that this writer and DISSENT and others on the democratic Left were not taken in, that we predicted the intended consequences of the real American agenda...
...Now, Moynihan said, the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights...
...In this case, the realistic politicians were wrong, the liberal intellectuals right...
...in the pressure for increased numbers of blacks, women and specific minority groups such as Puerto Ricans and Chicanos on the faculties of universities, by quotas if necessary...
...Now that figure is around three quarters of the available population...
...As a political tactic, I have the same criticisms Moynihan eventually formulated: that programs to deal with the special needs of blacks and other minorities must also be designed so as to raise the living standards of others, the white working class in particular...
...Washington, in short, socializes both production and distribution for private profit...
...Putting it that way is to confuse the effect for a cause and to overlook a revolution...
...For there are serious experts who believe that it is not so much what a child learns in school, but the school experience taken as a whole, which is crucial for increasing intellectual productivity...
...But it is Nathan Glazer, sharing Moynihan's outlook yet coming from a com pletely different (socialist) tradition, who provides the most interesting example of this mood...
...Then there is the supposedly excessive federal involvement in the war on poverty and the related attempt to end "unequal levels of achievement among groups . . . through the strategy of providing new, or 'enriched' social services...
...That is most questionable sociology...
...Third, their methodological errors have political signifi cance leading them to counsel a national policy of timidity, which is the cause of, not the solution to, most of the problems they pose...
...It is precisely Moynihan's amnesia on this count which flaws his analysis of the Family Assistance Plan...
...Witness his remark, "the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations had made equality the central theme of social policy...
...The philosophy behind this theory goes back at least to Edmund Burke and his assertion of an organic development of society as an argument against state interference with the providence of the natural order of things...
...Such legislation would entail a certain danger of inflation by tightening up the labor market, a risk that is infinitely more acceptable than the reality of chronic joblessness since the passage of the Employment Act of 1946...
...Some General Propositions • 1. All welfare states are antiegalitarian and resist income redistribution...
...It is sometimes encouraged by liberals as well...
...Nathan Glazer is much closer to the truth when he writes, • we hired great numbers of social workers and consultants, increasing their income...
...Instead, he paid private business a bonus for hiring hard-core unemployed workers...
...VII This analysis is not, however, simply a critique of the neoconservatives...
...Moreover, we know from the experience of George Romney and the federal subsidy of rental and home ownership (the "234" and "235" programs) that the private market is not an answer, since it will, given the least opportunity, fleece both the public and the poor...
...I discuss them, then, as a social-intellectual phenomenon, not as individuals.' In thus criticizing these pessimistic think 1 If I were to get into biography, I would make an analogy between the neoconservatives, who are disappointed liberals, and the mystics and religionists who fled in disenchantment from the New Left...
...Cohen, Heller, and their allies wanted to make the war on poverty into a THE WELFARE STATE AND ITS NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITICS community action program...
...This last point does not attack "affirmative action" programs or inveigh against quotas (a neoconservative criticism which will be taken up in due course...
...Services become professionalized...
...These have been built in Scandinavia, England, and, to cite the depressing American example, in Florida where Disney World utilizes some of the most innovating ideas in urban design for its profits...
...In other words, the undeniable needs of the working poor, who would gain from FAP, were counterposed to the undeniable needs of the dependent poor in states with relatively high benefits...
...The socialist aim, at least in its serious formulations, MICHAEL HARRINGTON was anything but egalitarian...
...But is it indeed true that "today...
...That is, of course, his civil liberty, but it puts him on the side of the status quo...
...Moreover, the 1964 and 1965 measures must certainly be regarded as successful examples of government action: the "promised or presumed outcome" did occur...
...But even then, the community action proponents never isolated that idea from the whole range of macroeconomic measures in which the government was engaging...
...The reason the "notch" arises in this area is that National Health Insurance, first vigorously advocated by Harry Truman in 1949, was rejected and the nation decided, after wasting more than a decade in indecision, on a second best: some medical care for the elderly...
...But if the sixties sometimes spoke—and rightly so—of national obligations to the victims of discrimination who are not dreamed of in the philosophy of classical liberalism, it did not act radically on that premise...
...Almost all of the difficulties attendant upon Nixon's Family Assistance Plan would disappear if the context were thus dramatically altered...
...Two of them, Bell and Glazer, were public supporters of McGovern in 1972...
...but in part, he is making assertions about current practice...
...So Moynihan is,—as is Bell, who is at least as anxious to defend the perquisites of ex pertise—of two minds about the profes sionals in charge of the service strategy...
...It also obviously points the way to action...
...The Emergency Employ452 ment Act of 1971 was much too narrow, underfinanced, temporary, etc...
...However, if the man worked more than 30 or 35 hours, he and his family would lose all assistance...
...In the same book in which he charges overreaching federal involvement, Moynihan answers this question brilliantly...
...they help them along...
...However, the imperatives of the capitalist economy—above all the argument that profit income is a source of further growth and therefore performs more important services than wage income, which is merely consumed—overwhelmed that excellent intention...
...Christopher Jencks's study of inequality (which Bell cites in his essay) came to an even more pointed conclusion as to the lack of relationship between scholarly and economic success...
...I do not cite this history merely to demonstrate that Moynihan's memory is faulty...
...So, in addition to changes in the tax code, there must be major transformations in the status of the corporation, all of them toward making it a more "transparent" and publicly accountable institution...
...Therefore the great mass movements for reform in all of the advanced capitalist countries seek to control the welfare state and to impose their, the people's, priorities upon it...
...Why not do the same thing for social purposes throughout the United States...
...If, however, one examines the record, his case simply does not hold up...
...In the case of teachers, whom Moynihan has attacked on this count, my own guess is that a very large number of them are the children of working-class families...
...Is that true...
...In part, the inflationary effect will be offset by increased productivity—by the fact that unused human resources will be put to work producing valuable goods and services that people want, in housing, health, education, and the like...
...Such explanations of social behavior almost always miss the mark...
...Bell writes, " . . . the university, which once merely reflected the status system of the society, has now become the arbiter of class position...
...So what they offer as Realpolitik is actually rooted in a certain naivete...
...the dirty little secret of the rich in a democ racy is the extent of their wealth...
...If there are going to be billions spent on solar, geothermal, and tidal energy research, as now seems to be the case, and if the structure of our welfare state remains much as it is, then one can predict with certainty that the chief beneficiaries of the new, publicly developed technology will be the villains from the old, publicly subsidized technology...
...the top 5 percent have 86 percent, the top 20 percent have 97 percent...
...Moreover, in periods of crisis and change, real gains have been, and can be, made...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
