Welfare and the Transformation of Electoral Politics

...There is a good deal of capital mobility in the United States, which may lend an air of credibility to arguments about globalization...

...First in the Progressive era, then again during the New Deal, social movements combined with electoral instability to force the forging of new government initiatives that tempered business excesses and reduced the extremes of inequality...

...Another is that politicians are merely responding to the fact that Americans detest welfare...

...Of course, there were economic promises to smooth the way: once international markets were unfettered, a golden era of economic growth would ensue...

...IfAmerican politicians, especially Democratic politicians, are less inclined to campaign with economic appeals, it is not because they are held in check by international markets but because they are held in check by politicized business interests...

...The well-off want more big tax cuts...

...The expectation was that the growing deficit would generate powerful pressures for social program cuts...

...Even now, the polls show that the pocketbook issues, which receded in the din of propaganda about welfare, crime, and immigration, are surging to the fore again...

...Wages are falling for most people, despite the fact that work time is lengthening...

...Indeed, the relentless charges leveled by politicians and conservative think-tank experts are as much an argument about what is wrong with America as an argument about welfare policy...

...And it certainly won't create jobs at wages that can support a family...

...And AFDC was singled out for the biggest cut, some 57 percent of its federal funding over the seven-year projected budget...

...And the polls show popular support, both for the attack on government in general, and for the attack on programs for the poor...

...Fewer than five million adults are on the rolls, a number that has not changed much since the early 1970s...

...or think of the nineteenthcentury poor-law system, with its elaborate arrangements for consigning the poor to hellholes called "houses of industry...

...The assault on the means-tested programs can be explained as simply an expression of the greed of mobilized business interests and the politicians they fund...

...The solution is not hard to see: eliminate the perverse incentives...

...But fundamentalist appeals are not restricted to the Christian Right...

...Pat Buchanan's attacks on a government that gives hard-earned tax dollars to welfare moms is part of this history...

...There may be some hardship along the way, but this is the only way to make poor women moral and self-reliant...

...At the same time, political leaders are pointing to minorities and the poor, and especially poor women, as the miscreants, the polluters, whose transgressions of core values are responsible for contemporary troubles...

...Although the talk is about AFDC, the new legislation includes cuts in a range of other means-tested programs, particularly food stamps and Supplemental Security Income (SSI...

...As usual, George Bush bashed welfare in his January 1992 State of the Union message...

...The very familiarity of the argument gives it the ring of truth...

...In fact, the percentage of single mothers who receive welfare has declined over time, which would not be the case if women were having babies to get welfare...

...For more than half a century, political scientists have said that voters are moved by "pocketbook" issues...

...They infuse the electioneering of both Democrats and Republicans, as suggested by the "family values" themes to which Clinton and Dole repeatedly return...

...In sum, a mobilized business class, acting through a resurgent Republican party and a wavering Democratic president, is both invoking the threat of capital mobility that appears to weaken state power and taking large steps to make that threat real...

...In the 1980s, however, the Democratic Congress resisted sharp reductions...

...Whether this agenda will be realized remains to be seen...

...After the election of 1994, the new Republican majority in Congress proposed another round of huge tax cuts, again benefiting the most affluent...

...This group becomes the Other, embodying a kind of moral pollution that is to blame for the problems people experience in daily life...

...Child beggars will join men on the streets, women and babies will huddle over grates, and urban slums will continue their slide into medieval wastelands...

...If child nutrition and food stamps are included, the programs account for 3 percent of the federal budget...

...These cultural insecurities clearly helped to fuel FAIL • 1996 65 Welfare the rise of the Christian Right...

...Last winter, Clinton vetoed a particularly mean-spirited combination of these reforms, but indicated he would welcome a slightly less punitive combination...

...Meanwhile, state politicians have pioneered their own battery of welfare changes...

...Naturally, there is discontent...

...The preoccupation with welfare contradicts this model of electoral economism...

...Benefits in these programs are less likely to be a matter of right and more likely to be discretionary, subject to the successful hurdling of bureaucratic inquisitions and continuing bureaucratic surveillance...

...Opinions are too excited and inflamed...

...But other aspects of our history argue that hate politics will not work for long...

...An obvious answer is that Americans, bred to a market culture that celebrates individual self-reliance and material success, just don't like welfare or the poor who rely on it, and this public antipathy is fueling punitive welfare reform...

...But this suggests that welfare is not significantly related to single-parent family formation, since most other rich countries provide more generous assistance to single mothers...

...Something else is going on...

...Other bills would impede the federal government's ability to regulate business by requiring obstructive review procedures or extravagant compensation to private owners for losses due to regulation...

...The penetration of goods, labor, and capital from abroad is a real factor, but the argument is deployed too sweepingly...

...But the 1992 presidential campaign brought welfare to center stage...

...The slogan echoes with the convictions of the late-eighteenthcentury antifederalists who opposed the original Constitution because they feared a remote central government would become the instrument of elites...

...At first the Clinton administration talked of new programs in job training and job creation, health care, and day care, all of which would presumably make it possible for mothers to work...

...Why is all this happening...

...This sort of politics is not, after all, alien to an American history that is studded with episodes of murderous hate politics animated by economic grievances...

...So why the uproar, and the draconian solution...

...The banner hoisted to explain these changes is that state governments are "closer to the people...

...Rules of this sort have now been adopted by two-thirds of the states...

...A series of economic developments associated with postindustrialism has paved the way for a much more aggressive capitalist class politics...

...To the contrary, the 66 • DISSENT Welfare visible and deepening degradation of poor women and children could well fuel fundamentalist calls for individual moral rejuvenation and the purging of the Other...

...So are the paranoid militias with their doctrines of national and racial purity, and the Christian Right with its obsession with sexual morality...

...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...They evoke preoccupations deeply etched in American culture, including our ageold dislike of the poor, especially the supplicant poor, our racial antipathies, and our strange American obsession with sexual transgression...

...And just as regularly, defensive Democrats have tried to ward off the challenge by reciting their belief in "work-not-welfare" and proposing schemes to put recipients to work...

...Measured as a proportion of the poor or as a proportion of single-parent households, the numbers have in fact shrunk...

...As the dollar estimates mounted, the services and job promotion side of the plan shrank...

...Even without legislation, President Clinton could indeed claim, Besharov said, that "he has ended welfare as we know it...

...More important, he did not deliver on his economic promises...

...They proposed to eliminate federal responsibility for cash assistance to poor mothers and children in favor of block grants, which would give the states less federal money over time but broader latitude in deciding how that money should be spent, or whether it should be spent at all...

...In effect, the Republican program would strip the national government of the capacity to do what contemporary governments do to reduce the extremes of inequality, regulate economic instabilities, and curb business excesses...

...The campaign against welfare plays a central part in this electioneering...

...Why the trumFALL • 1996 • 61 Welfare peting of welfare as a major and growing problem of American society when AFDC is in fact a relatively small program...

...But in the twentieth century, it is the state governments that are more sensitive to business political pressures, simply because states (and localities) are far more vulnerable to the threat of disinvestment, and even a single corporate relocation can devastate a community...

...The heart of the argument is the idea that big American problems— deepening poverty, the breakdown of family and community, a kind of demoralization overtaking our society—are centered on poor and minority women...

...As a consequence, children raised on welfare turn into school dropouts and delinquents, and then into welfare users themselves...

...These sorts of Durkheimian rituals for defining the poor as the marginal Other are also embedded in contemporary American relief practices...

...After the 1994 congressional election, the victorious Republicans tried to go the president one better...

...Beginning in the 1970s, large employers became much more belligerent toward unions, stridently resisting new organizing efforts and working to roll back earlier union gains...

...The Decline of Electoral Economism Conditions would seem to be ripe for economic appeals to the electorate...

...In effect, instead of campaigning with promises of economic improvement, politicians are campaigning with proposals to worsen economic conditions for a wide swath of the voting public...

...And their immorality is perversely encouraged by government welfare programs...

...In principle, the national government retains the capacity to regulate the economy...

...This means not only benefit cuts for the very poor, but massive public-sector job losses and downward pressure on the wages of less skilled workers in the private sector, who will find themselves competing with the increasingly desperate people who lose their public jobs or benefits...

...This "tough love" will deter young women from having babies in the first place, and those who already have will be forced to go to work to support their children...

...At a meeting of the American Enterprise Institute last spring, Douglas Besharov called this flood of state initiatives "welfare reform on the cheap...

...Still, the development of American democracy depended on the perennial emergence of popular revolt in the past, and it does once again...

...Since the New Deal, American presidents, especially Democratic presidents, talked to voters about broad economic and social conditions, promised public action, and in that context were even able to talk about the marginalized poor, and to build voter support for public action to ameliorate poverty...

...In fact, he presided over an economic upturn in which productivity and profits moved up briskly but wages stagnated, part-time and temporary work expanded, and earnings for the less educated continued to fall...

...The claim that welfare is causing a tide of "illegitimacy" generates still more heat...

...What will be the reactions as families are actually cut off aid, and visible consequences accumulate...

...True, he campaigned in 1992 on "It's the economy, stupid," but he coupled that with welfare bashing and rhetoric about family values and individual responsibility...

...The explanation that inevitably springs to mind is that globalization has made it impossible for national governments to deliver economic benefits...

...These manipulative appeals draw on real anxieties generated by a culture in flux...

...Moreover, welfare policies and practices have always worked to reinforce this dislike for the poor, first in England, where American-style poor relief was developed, and then in the United States...

...Once on the dole, these women become trapped and dependent, unable to summon the initiative to get a job, unable even to raise their children properly...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...These women are said to contradict all of the old Protestant virtues of industry and self-reliance, of chastity and self-restraint...

...A thoughtful answer will consider the broad developments that have contributed to the feebleness of electoral economism in contemporary American politics...

...If it is, the ideology of neo-laissez-faire will have contributed to the construction of institutional arrangements that do indeed make government, and the democratic publics that can influence governments, nearly helpless before markets...

...Of course, the deficit widened— which, as we later learned from David Stockman, was intentional...

...Use WordPerfect 5.1 or standard text ASCII format, and send us the disk...

...And once categorized by the programs, the poor are denigrated by the treatment accorded them...

...As the national government is less and less able to do what governments do, responsibilities will devolve to the states...

...Government has not suddenly been made helpless before markets, and especially the American government is not helpless...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...

...Welfare, the argument goes, allows young women to quit school or work and have out-ofwedlock babies...

...As a consequence, the proportion of babies born out of wedlock in the black community has indeed zoomed...

...No one has ever successfully predicted the moments when ordinary people find their footing, discover new capacities for solidarity and power and new visions of the possible...

...Early in this century, for example, efforts to pass state worker compensation laws were stymied by business threats to move to other states—until manufacturers themselves, prodded by multiplying damage suits in the courts, decided to back modest legislation...

...This time the plan to make up for the forfeited tax revenues with cuts in programs for the poor and the elderly had less opposition...

...And they draw their fury from the awful anxieties that people experience as their familiar worlds collapse...

...State governments have grown more susceptible to bribes and threats of business investment and disinvestment as capital has become more mobile...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...Not least important, sexual and family mores are changing, eroding a world in which men are men, women are women, and the rules for mating and family life are clear...

...And there is no correlation between benefits and out-of-wedlock birth rates within the United States, where outofwedlock birth rates have risen despite sharply declining welfare benefits over the past two decades...

...Finally, recipients are kept very poor, ensuring their marginalization in an affluent and materialistic society...

...But although there are deep currents of dislike for the poor and the "dependent" in American culture, we still have to understand why they have welled up now...

...The easiest way to get them is to take them from the poor, who generally have neither lobbyists nor beholden politicians to defend them...

...First, tax cuts and spending cuts...

...Think, for example, of the ancient practices for dealing with the supplicant poor, including the lash, the brand, and other rituals of public humiliation...

...In short, if political leaders are shrinking from voter mobilization through economic appeals, it is not because economic change has rendered the American government helpless to regulate the economy...

...AFDC accounts for about 1 percent of the federal budget...

...This, together with the fact that most movement ofAmerican business still takes place within our national borders, makes the fiscal and regulatory powers of the federal government more important than ever...

...Slashing welfare will not create jobs for unskilled women burdened with childrearing responsibilities...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...But divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births are increasing in all Western societies, and among all social classes, in no apparent relationship with the generosity of social assistance...

...But much of this mobility is within our own borders...

...Most other industrial nations are far more exposed to international trade and capital movements than the United States...

...Huge takebacks are planned not only in welfare spending, but in Medicaid, housing, and social service programs...

...And the states invented the symbolically potent schemes to use benefit cuts to change behavior, reducing grants if a woman gives birth while on welfare, for example, or if a child is truant from school...

...And as the consequences of "welfare reform" spread, dragging down broader swaths of the population, the raw and simple politics of victim-blaming will become less persuasive...

...The enormous changes sweeping through the economy are clearly generating discontent and anxiety...

...To be sure, the United States does have more single-parent families than other Western countries...

...No dot matrix submissions, please...

...62 • DISSENT Welfare ter all, the politicians leading this campaign are elected...

...The answer lies in the failure of political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, to articulate rational solutions to the economic hardships and insecurities that dominate the popular mood...

...By segregating the poor into different programs, American welfare policy reinforces the separation of the poor from working- and middle-class Americans, and also creates sharp divisions among the poor...

...With that, the race was on, and the president, the Congress, and the governors all tried to position themselves as leaders in the campaign to dismantle AFDC...

...Still, greed could not be the whole of it...

...These cuts involve far larger sums, and they will mean enormous job losses in the public and voluntary sectors, with potentially devastating effects on working-class urban neighborhoods, and on the landlords and small businesses that depend on poor and workingclass consumers...

...What it will do is crowd the low-wage labor market with millions of desperate women, ready to work at any wage and under any conditions...

...Changes of this sort can generate terror, perhaps because they challenge meanings deeply imprinted in early childhood...

...The Republican Congress elected in 1994, tutored no doubt by business-backed think tanks, pushed for a series of new constraints on the national government that would indeed leave 64 • DISSENT Welfare it helpless to regulate markets, thus making the ideology of globalism "true...

...Viewed together, it is clear that these proposals work to further decentralize the American state...

...So much for the facts...

...For one thing, the program cutbacks under the banner of "welfare reform" will have wide reverberations...

...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...

...And this may well be why congressional Republicans are determined to hobble those powers...

...One is that the drive for tax cuts is forcing welfare spending cuts...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...I think globalization has been used too sweepingly to explain economic trends in the United States...

...In the end, the most important feature of the Clinton proposal was a twoyear lifetime limit on cash assistance...

...Meanwhile, inequalities are widening at a dizzying pace, as income and wealth shifts from workers to owners and managers of capital...

...All of the means-tested programs, as well as student loans and Medicare, were slated for big cuts...

...Why these animosities...

...And still other measures are designed to discourage citizens from turning to the courts to resolve grievances against corporations...

...And as the old mass production industries shrink, new and onerous forms of work are spreading, in chicken processing or garbage recycling plants, for example, where the pace is hard and the work filthy, or in speeded-up service sector businesses where computers monitor keystrokes or bathroom breaks...

...And why, in the 1994 election, were there heavy Democratic losses to the Republicans among less educated whites, who are among the big losers from labor market change...

...The Rise of Irrational Politics When people are blocked from dealing with the problems of livelihood, community, respect, and security through politics, they become more susceptible to fundamentalist appeals...

...Earlier periods of aggressive and reckless business mobilization, in the 1890s and 1920s, helped precipitate the popular mobilizations that made possible the great political reforms of the twentieth century...

...Meanwhile, business groups mounted a formidable ideological campaign, launching an argument about the natural primacy of markets over politics and the state (no matter that organized business was itself using politics and the state to secure enormous new advantages, and not least to create some of the conditions for international penetration that were then described as natural and inevitable...

...Other provisions would restrain any wayward state inclined toward generosity by imposing rigid work requirements and strict time limits on the receipt of aid...

...Capital is using the leverage it gains from the increased mobility of goods and capital—or perhaps from the specter of increased mobility—as well as from the insecurities generated by downsizing in a series of vigorous political campaigns to achieve its preferred public policies...

...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...

...The proposal for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is intended to put a brake not only on spending by the national government but on its ability to raise taxes as well, by requiring supermajorities for the passage of tax increases in Congress...

...But why does it take such perverse form...

...But this sort of argument is not won or lost with facts, and certainly not with facts alone...

...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our email address is dissent@igc.apc.org...

...The reason for this blockage in the political system is not the rise of a global economy, in which threats of capital flight and low-wage competition fatally weaken the ability of nation states to control their economies...

...But it makes little sense...

...Politicians are trying to direct popular attention away from the issues of wages and jobs to a politics of individual responsibility and "values...

...State politicians campaigned on the promise to slash welfare and then forged ahead with grant cuts and time limits...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...Nor does the all-too-familiar view that welfare is the cause of illegitimacy among black women stand up...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...Whether the causes lie in of global markets or in the politics of the capitalist class, electoral mobilization by means of economic appeals characteristic of the industrial era has weakened...

...Clinton did the reverse...

...It will not only be poor women and their babies who will huddle over the grates...

...The nonmarital birth rates of black women have risen in tandem with the overall trend...

...And then, during the campaign, Bill Clinton tried to steal the issue for the Democrats by promising to "end welfare as we know it" with reforms that would mean "two years and off to work...

...And for the moment at least, a very American kind of fundamentalist irrationalism, which the obsession with welfare signifies, is compensating for the vacuousness of contemporary economic appeals...

...They need voter support...

...Something like this seems to be underway in the United States...

...Business representatives and business money flowed into the Republican party and developed a political agenda, funding new think tanks, policy institutes, and journals to do the work that, after the 1960s, universities could not be relied upon to do...

...At the same time, however, marital birth rates have declined, because unemployment, falling wages, and rising incarceration rates mean that there are fewer men in black communities who have the income or stability to be reliable husbands...

...It was assumed that economic conditions dominated modern elections, indeed, that electoral outcomes could virtually be read from the economic indicators...

...And other bills target Medicaid and low-income housing programs...

...But this development has none of the politically enervating implications of globalization, because the consequences of such innovations are entirely susceptible to government regulation...

...Welfare, in short, is encouraging the spread of a moral rot in American society...

...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...

...This part of the story goes back to 1981...

...He allowed a weak economic stimulus package to fail, never pushed hard for a restoration of the buying power of the minimum wage, didn't promote legislation FAIL .1996.63 Welfare to strengthen the unions, and joined with the Republicans to become a champion of free trade, promoting the deregulation of international markets under the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade...

...To be sure, this was not an entirely new development...

...The Usual Explanations Before I turn to this broader argument, I need to deal with more familiar explanations that also bear on the rise of welfare politics...

...The reason for this tilt against programs for the poor seems transparent...

...Or take a chance and send us your article...

...Do these horrors guarantee a reversal of course...

...Thus, there is something to the argument that attributes welfare cutbacks to the voters' antipathy to the program...

...Finally, there is the radical rollback of federal meanstested programs...

...When institutional reforms seem impossible, frustrated publics are more likely to respond to calls for a politics of individual moral rejuvenation, typically coupled with calls to mobilize against some vulnerable group...

...Sweatshops again are clustered in the older cities...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...Ideological battles are not fought with words alone...

...After all, generations of pundits took for granted that voters held candidates responsible for the performance of the economy...

...As a result of these statelevel initiatives, most of which had to be approved by the Clinton administration before they were implemented, AFDC caseloads are already dropping rapidly, even before federal cutbacks are implemented...

...However, such programs cost big money, much more than the AFDC program...

...Class Politics and Restructuring the State A good deal of light can be cast on the decline of pocketbook politics if we shift attention from economic change to the politics made possible by economic change...

...Since the 1960s, when the welfare rolls expanded, Republican presidential contenders have regularly homed in on welfare, as if it were one of the country's big problems...

...One of Ronald Reagan's first initiatives was a round of tax cuts skewed toward business and the affluent, coupled with rapid increases in military spending...

...In this area, the states have indeed been a laboratory of sorts...

...THE EDITORS FALL • 1996 • 67...

...And as the 1996 campaign began, Clinton was echoing the Republican budget balancing, tax cut, and spending cut proposals...

...In fact, new production methods that facilitate outsourcing and reliance on less skilled workers may have much more to do with the alarming trend of increasing productivity and stagnant or declining wages than international competition...

...Certainly it doesn't fit the dominant view of how elections are won or lost in the United States...

...And program costs are modest...

...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...

...Yet no other rich democratic nation has been so hard hit by the traumas that are widely attributed to globalization, including the evisceration of unions, the enormous wage cuts, the slashing of the public sector, or the extremes of poverty and wealth...

...At the same time, business organized to change public policies, especially regulatory and tax policies...

...Why is popular ire now directed against the most vulnerable...