Tropes of Wrath: Virtue, Markets, and the Family
Morone, James
THE LEFT LOST the culture war on a sunny winter day in 1994—at least that's as good a day as any to mark the defeat. Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, met the press...
...The basic assumption—social conditions profoundly shape personal lives—was deeply embedded in both public policy and national discourse...
...beef up the Defense of Marriage Act...
...Free markets—not the 1960s' counterculture—are what subvert the old moral values...
...The right repeats its jeremiad about virtue and splits the nation into "us" and "them...
...Without countervailing forces, the silky claims about market efficiency—wrapped up in moral claims about success as virtue— obscure the real consequences: harsh times on the bottom, a rush of resources to the top, unprecedented disparities between rich and poor...
...By some estimates, more than eleven million children (roughly one in seven) have a parent in jail at some point while they're growing up...
...Work is good, success marks talent, virtue yields riches, and money (as Ted Turner famously put it) is "how we keep score in life...
...The answer is that claims about bad behavior, some plausible, some exaggerated, some flat wrong, add up to a distinctive social vision—hard, fearful, and illiberal...
...In fact, the black teen rate has declined for decades...
...His most recent books are Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (Yale) and Healthy, Wealthy and Fair: Health Care for the Good Society (Oxford...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 95 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY In fact, there is a contradiction between the two conservative values...
...The Virtue Jeremiad The conservative jeremiad reaches back to the seventeenth century...
...That's because conservatives have spent the last forty years laying everything on individual responsibility...
...The great conservative narrative of American decline—a formidable Puritan jeremiad with all the trimmings—routed the Democrats, who promised only more efficient government and more expansive benefits...
...96 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY In Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, a high-octane crook declares that "greed is good...
...A more careful look, however, yields a surprise...
...and make divorce harder to get...
...The original Calvinists read wealth and poverty as signs of divine judgment...
...cut off welfare payments in an effort to push poor mothers into marriage...
...Its demons are insurance companies that duck payment, hospitals that drive families into bankruptcy, or the notion that a woman should be denied family planning and then prodded to work for wages that won't lift her family out of poverty...
...WHERE TO BEGIN...
...The classic progressive perspective shifts the moral burden from individual to society...
...The great question of modern American politics has been how to balance efficient markets with government interventions designed to protect individuals and promote opportunity...
...Walter Rauschenbusch, for example, blamed "the industrial machine"—miserly pay, harsh conditions, and raw need—for the personal vices that so exercised the Victorians...
...But the conservative story draws its power by reconstructing a larger framework: slack values undermine American families...
...Why, then, does the left make so little progress...
...The Victorians' purity dispensation lasted a full century, until Roe v. Wade finally struck down its last great bulwark—and set off another generation of Jeremiahs...
...The argument for solidarity does not rest on economic efficiency or giving everyone a fair chance to compete...
...Worse, the same groups are inevitably tagged as the dangerous "others": poor people, African Americans, immigrants...
...the real dilemma for our families lies in too much pressure and not enough assistance...
...First question: "I have good health insurance, why should I pay more for someone else...
...It is the New Right at its worst...
...JAMES MORONE is a professor of political science at Brown University...
...WHAT WOULD all this mean for public policy...
...Willard staked out the classic socialgospel position by insisting that poverty also caused drunkenness...
...contemporary liberals often strain themselves trying to reshape their proposals around conservative objections...
...The left understands all this...
...Now the left faces an entrenched conservative establishment hell-bent on rewriting all our social policies...
...The social gospel response is unambiguous: Greed is not good...
...Welfare's "cultural destruction," announced the conservative American Spectator, during the debate over welfare reform, "has been [largely] limited to Black America...
...The left will not win support for its social programs until it finds a way to reframe the discourse about both virtue and capitalism and offer a compelling narrative of its own...
...They sponsor abstinence pledges and rallies (untainted by sex education so kids don't get a mixed message...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., neatly summed up the left's view in 1967: it is America—not the bedraggled sinner—that "must be born again...
...Our youth are in danger...
...Meanwhile, conservatives were screaming about the meltdown of the American family: broken homes, unwed mothers, a divorce pandemic, abortions, homosexuality, teenage predators, welfare queens, an underclass—the list went on...
...The very idea of social welfare became deeply entangled in the provocative picture of black children having children...
...Virtue lies not in sobriety or rising above others but in constructing a just social order...
...Just say no...
...And when progressives point to "the system," they mean, first and foremost, an often harsh and biased economy...
...The social gospel flatly condemns bare-knuckled capitalism...
...The conservative jeremiad pins social problems on irresponsible individuals...
...It is an American classic: fears of the immoral "them" always gather around people of color...
...Recapturing the national debate will be an enormous job...
...However, Americans slip a strong dose of morality into their economics...
...reanimate the stigmas that once marked bastardy (only progressives wince...
...And why oppose efforts to foster virtuous behavior...
...Governments buffer citizens from economic storms with family allowances, housing subsidies, public assistance, generous pensions, and national health care programs...
...today, markets still measure worth...
...We understand that "the sixties" do not lie at the root of our troubles...
...it celebrates unfettered markets and divides the rich from the poor...
...Free markets are also cruel and always churn out losers alongside the winners...
...God was punishing them because "children and servants [were] not kept in due subjugation . . . their masters and parents being sinfully indulgent towards them...
...The left needs to reclaim its own formidable values: virtuous people minister to others, strong communities nourish healthy families, markets are cruel unless we restrain them...
...The administration offered the nation economic self-interest, technical wonkery, and a smidgen from the pork barrel...
...In the same spirit, contemporary conservatives approach the family with plenty of moralizing sticks and carrots...
...THE MOST STARTLING consequence of the neo-Puritan fears is the army of Americans doing jail time...
...And, predictably, the brunt of the crime war falls on Black America...
...The Puritans set an enduring pattern—they explained social problems by discovering a moral crisis in the family...
...It is corroding ours...
...Conservatives blame individual sinners for society's problems...
...Facing the chaos of industrialization, a new generation of Jeremiahs moved to restore the nation's "hearthstone values...
...where the right frets over a lazy welfare class, the left finds poor people struggling to get by—blending low-wage jobs, government assistance, and family help (like emergency shelter...
...Corrosive Markets The values jeremiad is exacerbated by another conservative theme—the celebration of economic competition...
...They did not serve the free lunch with moral arguments or family values...
...Because it fails to challenge the right's great tropes—much less offer alternatives...
...The United States incarcerates its people at four to five times the rate of other nations, even though our crime rates (murder aside) are roughly typical of industrial countries (and our murder rate is down below the level we experienced in 1918...
...Today, moralists reprise the old warnings...
...We struggle to blunt the harsh consequences of bare-knuckled markets...
...The perspective reached its apotheosis during the civil rights movement...
...The left brims with helpful programs (such as national health insurance) and liberating values (like equality) but offers no overarching narrative for our times...
...A genuinely progressive frame challenges—indeed, reverses—the conDISSENT / Spring 2005 93 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY servative perspective of both virtue and markets...
...The spirit of evil environs them...
...It is greedy...
...On the contrary, mainstream Democrats acquiesce (well, yes of course, family values are important), compromise ("mend it don't end it"), and wanly mimic conservative ideas (our new health plan relies on market competition...
...Welfare programs simply transfer cash from the hardworking responsible "us" to the vice-ridden "them"—in effect, government pays "them" for misbehaving...
...These dark days will be worth all they cost us," said Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address, "if they teach us that our true destiny is . . . to minister to . . . our fellow man...
...The right began on the fringes— an atavistic voice apparently crying out against modernity itself—and slowly remade the national conversation...
...After the terrible murder spree at Columbine High School, state legislatures rushed to shore up parental discipline...
...The hedonistic culture of the 1960s had eroded the nation's morals...
...the rich and powerful must answer for the poor and the weak...
...It will corrode any society...
...The rebels always face extraordinarily long odds...
...Forget the long decades of steady progress...
...Roosevelt introduced the idea of Social Security by claiming that all religions condemn "the spirit of mammon," the "jungle law [of] the survival of the so-called fittest" and the "unbrotherly . . . distribution of wealth...
...The global economy quickens the trend, as do a host of other factors, which include declining unions, suburbanization, racial politics, and a rising premium on specialized knowledge...
...Frederick Lewis Allen observed back in 1931 that the automobile wrecked American morals simply by giving ordinary people a place to sin away from the prying eyes of the neighbors...
...Purity reformers launched a great political campaign that outlawed abortion (which had been widely available), contraceptives (also widely available, rubbers were six cents apiece), and obscenity (moral crusaders used the new anti-smut laws to repress progressive and feminist views of the family...
...Conservatives have been tightening their grip on power ever since...
...Jane Addams added the daring proposition that difficult circumstances and cold neighbors, not personal depravity, pushed women into prostitution...
...After all, free markets generate innovation, wealth, and liberty...
...Frances Willard rallied the Women's Christian Temperance Union (then the largest women's movement in American history) to fight for "home protection...
...Three states now permit "Covenant Marriage," which bars divorce except for special circumstances, such as adultery...
...Until the early 1970s, this kind of collective thinking was part of the conventional wisdom...
...Once those lines are drawn, you can forget about social justice, progressive thinking, or universal programs...
...Liberals are sometimes disarmed by these proposals...
...Since the "crime war" began in the mid 1980s, 70 percent of the new inmates have been black or Hispanic—far out of proportion to their share of serious crimes (under 40 percent...
...Surrounded by troubles, New England's ministers met in 1679 and diagnosed their underlying problem...
...Martin Luther King's speeches are a primer on the social gospel—his text was always the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule, and the Beloved Community...
...The most troubling aspect of contemporary moralizing is the old racial 94 DISSENT / Spring 2005 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY imagery lying just below the rhetorical surface...
...Ronald Reagan was especially brilliant at scorning "underprivilege" or "poor socioeconomic conditions" or (sotto voce) "racism" as the explanation for problems...
...the harsh images focus on the same old heads—poor school kids, their would-be welfare moms, and their criminal dads...
...I don't mean to suggest that a better speech would have changed anything, only that the Clinton administration's politics reflected a fundamentally Republican paradigm...
...Today, these notions all sound like a naive echo from the era of idealism, manual typewriters, and rotary phones...
...Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, met the press to explain the Clinton administration's progressive centerpiece, an ambitious universal health insurance plan...
...The fears of moral decline sound vaguely plausible...
...Good people think about the whole community...
...Look at the spirit of solidarity that runs through many West European countries...
...however, Willard mixed individual prescriptions (teach males responsibility, forbid liquor) with system reforms—a living wage, labor unions, and equal pay for women...
...Today, a fully-wired, consumer-choice society delivers endless temptation, opportunity, and alternatives—along with nerve-racking insecurity, low wages, long hours, and rising inequality...
...The line, originally meant as social criticism, quickly morphed into a serious proposition debated in Business Week, the Economist, and Newsweek...
...Let's go back to that press conference in 1994...
...The moral perspective resurrects an American classic most memorably articulated by the Victorian preacher Henry Ward Beecher: "No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin...
...Jeremiads always divide society into a good "us" and an immoral "them...
...As a result European societies are far more egalitarian than the United States, where an increasingly unfettered economy produces a bifurcated nation, a land of billionaires and homeless children...
...Although most welfare recipients are white, the images run black...
...In short, virtue lies in social justice...
...At every turn, the market undermines traditional norms by serving up choices that were not available a generation ago: Internet pornography, dubious shows on cable television, hip alternatives to the venerable classics in the university core curriculum, endless opportunities to meet new people...
...It seeks to help working families but does not contest the conservative construction of either virtue or markets...
...The same place all rebellions begin—with a clarion call and a compelling story...
...Yet, when liberals propose policies designed to help working families, fierce opposition immediately gusts up...
...Every good Victorian knew that drunkenness caused poverty...
...Meanwhile, sinners are people who abuse power, ignore injustice, or exploit others...
...However, in the past three decades, the great American balancing act—economic liberty versus regulations for social justice—has shifted decisively to the former...
...Progressives introduce programs that might help families cope with the rush of pressure from job and home...
...One out of six black men have spent time in prison...
...Up go the old lines between us and them...
...Still, any student of American history will be impressed by how often it has been done—by abolitionists, by civil rights crusaders or, for that matter, by the conservatives after the 1960s...
...Conservatives smeared national health insurance as another big-government, something-for-nothing program aimed at the wrong people—the poor, the failed, and the lazy...
...Poverty comes from bad behavior: drinking, drug abuse, sloth and—more than anything—sex...
...the progressive alternative flips the assumption—vice and virtue reside in our social system rather than in individual people...
...The moral frame restores an analysis of poverty that bluntly blames poor people for their own troubles...
...Worse, stereotypes about immorality have justified every bout of racial repression in American history...
...Unregulated markets will not educate everyone's children, conquer racial segregation, treat all the sick, house the homeless, or spare lowskilled people from hellish working conditions...
...In every generation the key to their success is the same: A powerful idea, deep conviction, inspiring leaders, and a growing band of true believers who are willing to rage, rage, against what seems—sometimes for years—like the dying of the light...
...Conservatives even managed to make left-leaning words disreputable: liberal, collective, union, and abortion...
...The social gospel reverses the social metrics...
...Where conservatives see lax morals, progressives see relentless pressure on hardworking men and women...
...Anthony Comstock, the most effective book burner in American history, offered his famous diagnosis in 1872...
...Again, liberals hesitate to criticize capitalism (and the media are primed to tsk about "class warfare" when they do...
...When a disturbed young woman drowned her two little boys, House Speaker Newt Gingrich immediately fingered the liberal culture...
...Conservatives blame the poor for poverty, progressives point to a remorseless economic system...
...Between 1970 and 1997 (that is, from the end of the dreaded 1960s to the implementation of welfare reform) the black teen birthrate fell 20 percent—the largest drop for any group...
...Conservatives managed to seize and reframe two great American canons: Virtue (which they called "family values") and Capitalism (celebrated as "the free market...
...The term, "social gospel" comes from reformers operating at the end of the nineteenth century...
...The right proffered a simple explanation for all the social troubles...
...Why oppose decent efforts to help families like universal health care, child subsidies, or housing allowances...
...the social gospel responds that hard social conditions push decent individuals into "bad" behavior...
...Media attention focuses on the hot wedge issues: abortion and gay marriage...
...In this narrative, the sinners are always the selfish, the greedy, the grudging, and the system that maintains them in their wealth and power...
...DISSENT / Spring 2005 97...
...Restoring the Social Gospel The forgotten alternative shifts the focus—the responsibility for vice and virtue, wealth and poverty—from individuals to society...
...The unregulated market grows ascendant, almost unquestioned...
...villainy—the left will have to reacquaint itself with moral claims—lurks in every sort of social injustice and especially in the greed of untrammeled markets...
...they permitted parents to "paddle, spank and switch" their children (Oklahoma), required teens to "sir" and "ma'am" their teachers (Louisiana), forbade body piercing without a note from mom or dad (Indiana, Tennessee) and the U. S. House of Representatives passed legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools...
...Teenage girls get pregnant, unwed women bear children, couples split, and irresponsible men shirk both work and family responsibilities...
...Rather, the solidarity principle insists—and good societies ensure—a decent living for everyone...
...We must persuade a nation to rethink the fundamentals— its visions of vice and virtue, its images of success and failure...
...Instead, he kept urging, take personal responsibility...
...Yes, the black teen pregnancy rate is much higher than the white...
...It is never easy to shift the entire political frame...
...The trusty moral narrative explains every shocking item that makes the news...
...The social gospel would have given the secretary a very different answer: permitting sick children (or anyone else, for that matter) to go untreated so you can pay less in taxes is wrong...
...Because the politics of virtue frames these well-meaning programs as misguided efforts to assist "them"—the poor, often black, unworthies who ought to help themselves rather than rely on us...
...Teen pregnancy and divorce are social problems...
...Oh, explained Shalala with the Democrats' cheerful B-School logic, thanks to our new efficiencies there is already (almost) enough money in the system to cover everyone...
...Avarice is a deadly sin...
...Substance abuse and "father absence" plagued poor families then as now...
...Two centuries later, the Victorians repeated the routine with more direct consequences for us...
...No matter, the virginity warriors barge in talking zero tolerance and slamming down their stigmas...
...Republicans soon converted the backlash into a "Contract with America" and seized control of government by winning the House, the Senate, both legislative chambers in eleven new states, and—over three years—fifteen new governors' offices...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
