DISSING THE UNDERCLASS

...Although he's frustrated by Wilson's waffling about the extent to which these conditions create a self-reproducing "culture of poverty," Klein appreciates Wilson's focus on black pathology...

...He made it onto the first string of the pundi-tocracy—Newsweek column, regular status on the network newschat circuit—as a Democrat who attacked liberalism and chastised blacks for complaining about racism...

...Klein also supports Taub's "slightly wacky but intriguing suggestion . . . that native-born blacks brought north with them a skittish Southern sense of honor, a hypersensitivity to being 'disrespected'" that induces them to respond poorly to affronts and thus undermines their work discipline...

...by the way...

...In Klein's view, again like Murray's, any economic explanation of the rise of the underclass is wrong-headed, a tired liberal bromide...

...Wilson basically set up Klein's thesis by centering the policy discussion on what Wilson himself defines as "ghetto-related behavior...

...Ellwood hedged this provocative idea, which he publicized in his 1988 book...

...It's not clear whether Taub is motivated by consciously malign intentions or is just a racist fool...

...It's a move that is so transparently self-defeating that 1 suspect bad faith, though its proponents attempt to justify it in the name of realpolitik...

...Nowhere have the moral and political deficiencies of this idea of realpolitik been more clearly exposed than in the Clinton Administration's welfare-reform program...

...Well, he may have outdone himself...

...away from the reach of a supposedly emasculating black matriarchy—and oh...

...Perhaps not all that many...

...Declining wages and lack of opportunity can't be blamed for poverty among black Americans, Klein argues, so efforts that address these problems are fruitless: "The cultural forces pulling in the opposite direction are simply too powerful...

...Klein's attack on Wilson underscores a fundamental problem with liberal politics...

...Long before that, however, he had established his bona fides as a slimy character...

...Moynihan has issued several jeremiads about the dangerous consequences of this legislation...

...Along the way...

...But he carefully avoids discussing the brute facts of corporate power...

...The real problem for poor black people, Klein argues, is that they were led astray by a permissive, indulgent consumer culture...

...The Clinton Presidency embodies this continuity...

...Like Wilson, he blew them off as naive ideologues...

...In an April puff piece in The New Yorker on Wilson, none other than Charles Murray himself said that until you get to Wilson's policy recommendations his analysis of the character of inner-city poverty is indistinguishable from those proffered by Murray and other rightwingers...

...The gist of this argument is that the so-called underclass emerged from the departure of relatively well-paying, low-skill jobs from urban economies just as the central city areas became increasingly blacker...

...Klein, though, has a definitely nasty agenda...

...And notice how Edelman's pal Hillary led her "whole village" so easily from raising a child to stoning poor families in support of hubby's signing of the hideous welfare bill...

...There's an eerie continuity that runs from Moynihan's absurd prattle about the need to inculcate discipline among the poor, to Wilson's focus on social pathology, to Klein's ugly rant against poor people's supposed lack of "restraint...

...Ellwood sought to distance himself a few months ago by announcing, well after the train had left the station, that he never meant for the two-years-and-off plan to be so draconian...

...Ellwood and his former colleague and co-author Mary Jo Bane (reunited as sub-cabinet-level officials in Clinton's Department of Health and Human Services) joined HHS Secretary Donna Shalala in defending Big Bill's welfare-reform package...

...It was Moynihan who proposed turning unemployed black men into cannon fodder for the Vietnam War to teach them how to be proper men...

...And then there's Moynihan...

...His column appears in this space every other month...

...There's a revealing irony in these attacks...

...When are we going to wise up...

...Critics on his left argued that the costly bundle of safeguards he proposed would go nowhere without a direct and forceful challenge to the very rightwing consensus that his two-years-and-off slogan accommodates...

...Neither he nor Ellwood nor the various other liberals associated with the Clinton Administration will own up to the fact that corporations and investment bankers use public policy to drive down wages, keep unemployment high, and enhance their plunder...

...They mirror the way that Wilson himself, in his 1987 underclass tract...

...In the October 28 issue of The New Republic, Klein takes sociologist William Julius Wilson to task for not facing up to the fact that black poor people's bad behavior and attitudes are the real cause of inner-city poverty, not lack of jobs...

...far more were porters and ditch-diggers and stock clerks—service jobs that became increasingly frustrating as the voluptuous festival of American excess materialized in the living rooms of the slums each night...

...But focusing on the behavior of the poor makes ii possible to sidestep that reality...

...Wilson and Ellwood refuse to face up to the class realities of American politics...

...In inner cities, "the rudiments of civilization have vanished like cellophane on fire...

...In the same vein as the tilt-right-to-go-left approach that Wilson advanced in The Truly Disadvantaged (a more accurate title would have been The Truly Dissed), David Ellwood, a highly regarded liberal poverty researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School, invented the now-famous two-years-and-off notion as a foundation for welfare policy...

...The result was that, as opportunities for stable employment declined, fewer and fewer young people grew up with role models who could teach them the mind-set required to function in the paid labor force...

...In his latest book, Wilson rehashes the argument he made a decade ago, which catapulted him to the head of the class of academic poverty researchers...

...whom Wilson—like Klein—has portrayed as a misunderstood prophet...

...It has seamy practical implications...

...In this appreciation Klein is not alone in the world of racist gastropods...

...The real problem is values...

...The Truly Disadvantaged, chided unspecified liberals for not tough-mindedly confronting the pathology that he imagined to have spread through inner cities...

...Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund concocted as a stratagem a focus on the suffering inflicted on children...

...Now that they are forced to confront the consequences of their complicity, we see grand gestures and crocodile tears coming from these liberals...

...There is something more insidious about this liberal accommodationism than false cleverness...

...They got too big for their britches, wanting the same irresponsible, affluent "lifestyle" they saw on TV...

...is a professor of political science at Northwestern University...

...It is the absence of restraint," Klein writes...

...Wilson points out that the inner cities have suffered from federal housing and transportation policies...

...This is the kind of drivel that only stereotypes make plausible...

...The critics' fear, now realized, was that Ellwood's liberal credentials would legitimize the twoyears-and-off rhetoric as a goal without any of his finely crafted hedges...

...Liberals and conservatives pack different adjectives around their briefs against poor people's alleged behavior, but always it is the poor themselves who are to blame for their plight...

...Poor Support, with calls for a battery of support services that would accompany expulsion from the welfare rolls...

...The most perverse feature of Klein's screed in The New Republic is his contention that affluence in the society at large has created the underclass by allowing poor people to think that they should be able to have consumer goods and better lives and to avoid degrading, underpaid work...

...after years of crafting and rationalizing Clinton's version of the attack on poor people, resigned from HHS several weeks after the President signed the disgusting bill...

...So liberals have followed and rationalized and pimped for him throughout his Administration right up to the point where he repealed welfare...

...His Report on the Negro Faniilw more than thirty years ago...

...Klein's cover article, "Money Isn't Everything: What William Julius Wilson and other liberals don't understand about the underclass," is a five-page racial slur in response to Wilson's new book, When Work Disappears...

...He even dredges up the ludicrous argument of Wilson's former University of Chicago colleague, Richard Taub, who has decided that Mexican Americans in Chicago do better than blacks because they come from a culture that makes them want to get married and that they are therefore more likely to accept low-wage, dead-end jobs...

...As if that weren't disgusting enough, when Moynihan proposed that we could be witnessing the processes of "speoation" at work in today's inner cities, the) asse'nted...

...meeting the troop needs of the first big escalation of the war...

...Wilson talks about manufacturing jobs lost, but he never estimates how many of these 'good' jobs were actually held by blacks," Klein contends...

...Bane and Peter Edelman...

...Wilson has basically invited Klein's attack with a lifetime of work that characterizes poverty in behavioral terms, and accepts that social pathology—rather than, say, inequality, or social injustice—is the main reason for public concern about poverty...

...This move has become a hallmark of contemporary liberals: embracing the right's frame of reference to bash one's allies as a means of demonstrating credibility...

...Chronic unemployment therefore increased, as attachment to the idea of working dissipated...

...In his latest book...

...in effect, conceding their worthlessness to focus on their presumably innocent kids...

...he wants to blame poor people in the inner city for social inequality...

...Predictably, the likes of Klein, Murray and others laud Wilson's acquiescence in the rhetoric of pathology while attacking his calls for jobs programs and social supports as naive...

...Not only is this save-the-ba-bies politics the maudlin equivalent of a Keane painting...

...each of the state welfare-reform programs he endorsed, as well has his toadying up to business, his retreat from civil-rights enforcement, and his fetish for deficit reduction and downsizing government, exacerbates poverty...

...They proclaimed that the purpose of the President's welfare initiative was to eliminate out-of-wedlock births in the United States—thus playing to one of the vilest rightwing canards...

...At Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1994 Senate Finance Committee hearings on welfare reform...

...In Wilson's tale, this dynamic fuels and is fueled by spreading social pathologies—most significantly, teenaged childbearing, out-of-wedlock birth, female-headed households, crime, and drug abuse...

...it also acquiesces in the right's demonization of poor adults by...

...Yet no one in the United States lodav has greater personal responsibilitv, to use the piety of the day, for this travesty than Moynihan himself...

...established the imagery of inner-city poverty as driven by behavioral defects and social pathologv among the poor themselves, and explicitly linked to black women's reproductive activity...

...the problem is not the absence of jobs...

...Like rightwing sociologist Charles Murray, Klein dismisses Wilson's call for a massive jobs program as the response to the proliferation of the underclass...