The Moynihan Problem

...In places like Chicago and Los Angeles as well as in Southern cities, municipal officials were openly hostile, even before anyone attacked them...

...Similarly to be overlooked is the utter absence in Nixon's past of any attachment to social change, however innocuous...

...others were unclear about the objects of their agitation...

...There appears to be another reason why Moynihan finds Nixon acceptable...

...To radicals, the War on Poverty and the Great Society simply prove that even a populist President supported for at least two years by a liberal Congress can accomplish comparatively little...

...In the past these traditional arrangements encouraged the ordinary citizen to accept legitimate authority rather than yield to (or revolt against) sheer power...

...Moynihan himself, for example, may quickly realize that the Nixon Administration has about as much to do with the classical values of conservatism as it does with Pop Art and black power...

...then complain that people are going around disrupting things and chastise local politicians for not cooperating with those out to do them in...

...As the threnody runs, from the French Revolution onward reformers and revolutionists have attacked and by now nearly destroyed the institutions binding men to each other—family, church, and the hierarchial structure of personal relations...

...Of course, there was no dramatic improvement...

...Have middle-class civil servants hire upper-class student radicals to use lower-class Negroes as a battering ram against the existing local political systems...

...Moral: Do the best you can with the politicians who are on hand...

...To affiliate with this Administration as the token Irishman alongside one's Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger, the token Jew, it would seem necessary to reinterpret the men and ideas influencing the President...

...Nixon has truly promised nothing to the cities, the poor, or the black...

...I see no need to impute such unrealistic views or expectations to the experienced Moynihan...

...Inevitably, this is the question posed by Daniel P. Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (Free Press, 218 pp., $5.95), a rather disjointed history and critique of the community action programs made famous by the War on Poverty...

...The men are predominantly rich, white, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon—not precisely a global coalition of groups, colors, and interests...

...The social scientists (with the exception of the wisely conservative economists) are Moynihan's second target, partially overlapping the first...

...As radicals judge it, the United States is a conservative, affluent, racist country...

...Well, he might become a radical...

...In the end, Moynihan's association with Nixon and the rationale for it implicit in this book lend force to the radical criticism of the American political process...

...Radicals are dangerous types who must be resisted despite the price to be paid for their defeat...

...Moynihan, however, goes much further...

...Saul Alinsky has maintained for some 25 years that nobody will give anything important to the powerless poor...

...The "social scientist" of Moynihan's invention appears to be merely a group description, composed without affection, of the author's opponents...

...And at the height of the Great Society nobody seems to have thought publicly supported integrated housing in the suburbs was a live proposition...

...He returns frequently to one sin of the radicals—their tendency to stir up people for whom they will or can do very little...

...The apparent answer sheds some light not only on Moynihan's personal strategies but also on the demoralized state of the liberal Establishment in the wake of the Great Society...

...at no time were substantial resources devoted to residential desegregation, rebuilding of urban slums, public employment, or income maintenance...

...Nixon gives Moynihan the opportunity to rephrase the opening words of Wildavsky's recipe for violence to read: "Promise nothing...

...In part it appears to require a definition of the Nixon Administration as potentially healing, constructive, and unifying in purpose and effect...

...Try a variety of small programs, each interesting but marginal in impact and severely underfinanced...

...When the poor become militant and organized they rapidly improve their own condition, not by soliciting alms but by wresting concessions...

...The social scientists can defend themselves...

...Does Moynihan hope that even after Vietnam this President will prefer children's allowances, guaranteed public employment, and liberalized welfare to tax reduction, revenue sharing with the states, and national defense...

...If, as David Rogers persuasively argues in 110 Livingston Street, school segregation in New York City, surely the nation's most liberal community, has actually increased since Brown vs...

...Although his assault upon social science theory occasionally approximates caricature, I heartily concur in one major conclusion: "The role of social science lies not in the formation of social policy, but in the measurement of its results...

...But had they been ever so wise, they would still have been defeated by adverse political and military circumstance...

...The sullen, bitter, alienated yet conveniently passive poor were to take their fate into their own hands and, as a direct result of their "maximum feasible participation" in the planning and operation of poverty programs, convert slums into tolerable human communities and slum dwellers into bands of brothers...

...Whites own its resources, and blacks suffer from its problems...

...I for one will welcome him back and review his next book with forbearance...

...The working class, increasingly the author's ideal, is naturally conservative...

...The radicabzation of sociologist Richard Cloward and others like him (which appears to puzzle Moynihan) stems from the growing recognition of just how little can be achieved for politically weak groups by following procedures approved by the politically strong...

...If Moynihan and the radicals are right, all of us including Moynihan (who will face increases in the conflicts he dislikes) and the radicals (who as a small minority will be subject to forcible repression) have occasion to be apprehensive...

...WRITERS&WRITING The Moynihan Problem By Robert Lekachman Why should an urban expert publicly identified with social improvement and Democratic politics associate himself with a Republican national administration whose leader has consistently opposed the remedies he advocates...

...The troublemakers are upper-class radicalized intellectuals and the militant poor whom they have stirred up...

...Any hope for continued experiment was effectively destroyed by the Vietnam war, which devoured both funds and psychic energies...

...Moynihan, who writes of Alinsky with respect, admits that the failure of liberal programs can be seen as additional justification for a strategy of conflict...

...Lead people to believe they will be much better off, but let there be no dramatic improvement...

...If I read him correctly, he accepted his new office because he believes it essential to work within existing political channels...

...Social policy is a matter of valuation and moral discrimination, not of anybody's special expertise...

...For if Republicans and Democrats are closer to each other than either party is to blacks, poor whites, disaffected intellectuals, and militant students, then the disruptions of the present will be mild overtures to the storms of the future...

...These should turn out to be substantial enough to rally the spirits of dejected reformers, sober some of the more suggestible radicals, and recall everyone to the salutary effort of opposition...

...Even if this were not true (and accepted by most social scientists), there is precious little that is solid enough in the specialists' portentous generalizations to justify founding public policy upon their premises...

...The type of major employment program supported by Moynihan would have cost more than Congress, devoted even in its most enlightened moments to tax reduction over social welfare, ever envisioned...

...The Quest for Community," this volume's opening chapter, is a set of variations upon classical conservative themes...

...Some of them were painfully naive in expecting cooperation from local politicians whom they stimulated their clients to undermine...

...What should a man of goodwill do...

...For him social scientists are guilty of more than hubris, the intellectual's characteristic sin...

...In the past Moynihan has worked with Averell Harriman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, and he has run for public office with Paul Sere vane...

...Time was short and appropriations were scant...

...anything he does will be a shocking surprise...

...They are politically radical, prone to derive policy from ideology, indulgently found of the poor and the black, and ill-disposed to sympathize "with the desire for order, and anxiety about change, that are commonly enough encountered among working-class and lower middle-class persons...

...How could there have been...

...But the outcome may prove less dismal...

...Much of the Great Society benefited the prosperous and the wealthy...

...In 1969 that price seems steep...

...The Nixonite must heroically minimize his hero's devotion to increased military spending, his appointment of an anticonservationist Secretary of the Interior, and his selection of an Attorney General dedicated—as far as the public record runs—only to municipal bonds and law and order...

...Although Moynihan argues otherwise, there were no lost opportunities of any consequence that superior Presidential strategy and better social science judgment could have seized...

...Moynihan's message, oddly similar to the radical's judgment, is that there really is not enough difference between the major parties to get excited about...

...I expect Nixon to do liberals the considerable service of sharpening the differences between Republican and Democratic administrations...

...I do not believe that liberalism is quite as dead as Moynihan and the radicals seems to think...

...At the outset, Moynihan quotes approvingly Aaron Wildavsky's recipe for violence: "Promise a lot...

...Those who ultimately cast their votes last November for Hubert Humphrey concluded that there was a substantial difference between Democrats and Republicans...

...An appropriate radical inference from the inadequacies of the Office of Economic Opportunity is less a criticism of specific people and programs than of the liberal confidence in social amelioration achieved through existing political institutions...

...Board of Education despite the professed devotion to integration of the United Federation of Teachers, the Board of Education, two mayors, major Jewish groups, and the Citizens' Committee for Children, then what on earth can be anticipated in less enlightened places whose official ideology is more in accord with the realities of interest and privilege...

...It is more interesting to try to draw the appropriate lesson from the failure of poverty programs and the perception of the limits of social science...

...and the Nixon Administration is the only power structure available until 1972...

...deliver a little...

...During the brief life of the Great Society, America got about as much social change as could have been anticipated, possibly even a little more...

...To say this is not to reject the burden of Moynihan's tale: that the country deserved better service from the bright people who conceived and administered community action...

...After his own experiences of social reform, Moynihan has emerged in quite different intellectual country...

...Avoid any attempted solution remotely comparable in size to the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve...

...As Moynihan proceeds to document it, the official rhetoric of the War on Poverty in general and community action programs in particular did indeed promise a lot—nothing less, in fact, than the transformation of the powerless into the powerful...

...it does not apply to the social scientists who write for the Public Interest?like Daniel Bell, Aaron Wildavsky, Robert Nisbet, Robert Solow, James Q. Wilson, and Moynihan himself—or to the austere scholars who display their heavy wares in the American Sociological Review, the American Political Science Review, and the American Economic Review...

...What most people crave, Moynihan avers, is order, respectability, decorum, stability, and regularity in their daily lives...

...In the present period of conflict and confrontation Moynihan turns wistfully to those better days, somewhat vaguely situated in time...

...The press, on the hunt for corruption and Communists, was quick to harass, not always without cause...

...deliver about the same...

...Possibly this is a reasonable sketch of some of the contributors to the New York Review of Books...