NeighborScapes

The Reagan-era assault on welfare, officially known then as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) but more fundamentally a weakening of societal support for any kind of government payments to support people in poverty — food stamps, public housing, Section 8 vouchers, and Social Security Income — was memorably marketed by portrayals of disagreeable individuals who manipulated public benefits.  Stories were trotted out of women who kept having babies in order to receive  greater payments, then spent those payments frivolously.  The “culture of poverty” argument, that communities of concentrated poverty develop dysfunctional value systems, took flight during this time.  The argument dates back to Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report on segregation and poverty and before, but by the 1980s Moynihan’s understanding of the forces shaping the decisions of poor folks had been stripped of their context and “the culture of poverty” was used in the public mind to blame the poor for their own plight.  Charles Murray’s 1984 work “Losing Ground,” credited by some as having changed American welfare policy forever, argued that increases in welfare corresponded with increases in single-female-headed households and increases in poverty.

Murray’s theses have been disproven by analysts from many angles, and the culture of poverty argument has been discredited by ethnographic work that shows that poor people are just as motivated to work hard and provide for themselves as anyone else in American society, but are challenged by structural barriers in the economy.  Still, images of the irresponsible poor, trapped in poverty by welfare policy, linger in the American mind.

We need a more nuanced understanding of poverty to find common ground and provide social supports for the great many of us who risk being in need from time to time.  Right now about 13% of America is considered statistically poor, but that number is transient.  Old folks are poor; children are poor; young families are poor; and people who go through unemployment, medical calamity, and marital dissolution undergo periods of poverty.  The social policy of a decent community should provide a safety net for people to withstand these periods of privation and continue to contribute to society.  But because of the pernicious mythmaking of the 1980s, and its continued echoes in the conservative belief system, voters and regular people remain focused on an infinitesimally small segment of society: the long-term or intergenerational poor population.  Our inability to get past this flawed focus relegates us all to insecurity and an inequitable society.

This is the “what’s the matter with Kansas?” point.  In that noteworthy book, Thomas Frank explores the ways in which the economic policies of the Republican Party are wrecking the livelihoods and communities of Kansans, who are overwhelmingly working class, while benefiting the very wealthy in America.  And yet Kansans support the GOP in great numbers based on allegiance to hot-button social issues like gay rights, abortion and crime.  Kansans either don’t care about inequitable economic policies, or believe that they are likely to achieve wealth anyway.  Rags to riches is a popular strain of American thought, owing much to the novels written by Horatio Alger in the early 20^th Century and the “up-by-the-bootstraps” mythology that arose from them. 

As a result of this ethos, we have developed a political economy that places more faith in bootstraps than in a social safety net.  This may owe something to America’s history as a land of manifest destiny, a place where our westward expansion could create a great nation by tapping untapped natural resources and colonize supposedly open spaces.  This is tied to the notion, captured in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, that the frontier was one of the defining factors in the development of the nation’s character. 

From Teddy Roosevelt through George W. Bush, we have been in significant part a cowboy nation with a frontier mentality – eat what you kill, only the strong survive, devil take the hindmost.  But it is time for America to look around and grow up.  The frontier is gone – and with it, the opportunity to farm new fields and dig new wells and mines.  Now, wealth and value are not discovered so much as they are created by building onto a foundation that has been laid down by our predecessors and is maintained by society as a whole.  Americans need to look around and understand this, and see that if the ladders of opportunity do not have lower rungs to enable the poor in America to get onto the lower floors of this edifice, the next rungs that get knocked off the ladder will immobilize the working class, and then the middle class. 

In an age where economic innovation has largely to do with service between persons, management of information flow and communication, and management and manipulation of financial assets, attainment of wealth is more of a zero-sum game than it ever was when there were unplowed fields and untapped mines in the West.  That is to say, those who get fabulously wealthy off of information, services and asset management do so by benefiting from a tax an opportunity structure that leave many more wanting. 

This is tough medicine to swallow, but growing up means that after looking around and seeing how the modern economy works, we need to learn how to share.  That’s what it means to grow up.  America needs to create a national health care system, commit to effective public education nationwide, and agree on an equitable taxation policy while overcoming the socio-political equivalent of tantrums: tea parties, talk radio rants, accusations of creeping socialism, and gated communities with security guards out front.  So long as too many Americans believe they can get rich, and that the road to that wealth lies in unregulated markets and small government, too many Americans will remain poor.  A decent social safety net is not incompatible with Democratic Capitalism.

8.  Too many good national advocates on poverty commit adultery.  All of them are men:  John Edwards; Jesse Jackson, Sr.; Henry Cisneros; Bill Clinton.  Notwithstanding Clinton’s much-resented reforms of welfare in 1996, each of these men has had in the past two decades a moment of promise during which he was bringing poverty to a greater level of public awareness or was poised to elevate himself to greater stature on the national stage.  Each of them (except Edwards, whose lies have compounded in a nature beyond the pale) is still a strong voice nationally and even in a couple cases internationally, but the fact is that the public admissions of adultery took the wind out of t heir sales at just the wrong moment, deflating simultaneously any momentum that we might have been gaining on why we have so much poverty in the world’s richest nation.  This is a good point to raise over the Halloween weekend, since the outcome itself is such a ghastly disappointment to fans of these leaders, and since the post-admission leader is always a ghost of who he was before.  Thank God for the Shrivers (Eunice Kennedy and Sargent) the Edelmans (Marian Wright and Peter), and Hillary Clinton.  At least some of our good advocates can remain monogamous.

                Recently, adultery has been a problem that has plagued all kinds of public-sector leaders.  Clearly there is an individual moral failure in each of these instances.  But one is tempted to wonder whether the magnanimous leader who takes on poverty in a public fashion is the type of personality that so loves people, and the world, that he has trouble setting appropriate boundaries with his affections.  The root meaning of philanthropist is ‘one who loves humanity,’ and with too many politicians – and these champions of the poor in particular – we all are disappointed when this encompassing instinct fails to square with monogamy.  We should all pray for Barack and Michelle’s marriage, because while the political process will likely constrain too much pure advocacy for the poor during the Obama presidency, as an ex-president and former first lady, the sky will be the limit as far as the opportunity to advocate for social change in a Carter-Clinton mold.

America’s primary anti-poverty measure for the last two decades has been the lockup.  Marshaling recidivism statistics that suggest falsely that convicted offenders cannot successfully be rehabilitated, authorities have made prison sentences longer for more and more offenses.  As a result, the prison population — disproportionately poor, black and Latino, but increasingly also female — has exploded during this time period.  For a nation of metropolitan areas that generate 3/4 of the GDP, prison construction and corrections careers started to look like good economic development for economic units seeking in vain for the next new new thing.  The old economic standbys are fading away as the rust belt rusts and manufacturing flees to the global south, and so for communities across the country that may not be the next silicon valley (NoCal) or global financial center (NYC), prisons read as good job creation for construction and facilities maintenance, and corrections looks like an honorable human services career.  I have heard men of color explain becoming a corrections officer out of a desire to “help the community” or “work with people.”  In the olden days (and in the future we should desire), such aspirations would lead to teaching or parks & rec jobs.  But in the “Neo-years” of neoconservatives and neoliberals, we have lost humane impulses to the unconscious reflex of imprisonment. 

But prison leads to poverty, as we should have known from the start.  Prison impoverishes the prisoner, as it literally strips him of assets and income and cripples him with lifetime employability stigmas.  And it also impoverishes the society, as it fails to utilize untold human capital for the good of society.

We will always need prisons.  Sweden and Canada have them, and some people just need to be locked up.  But until we can stand up and tell the honest truth about the failure of a pro-incarceration human capital policy, poverty will continue to live strong in direct proportion to the health of the prison-industrial complex.