Repeal, not reform, is the essence of the new Bill, writes Martin Woollacott
The 18th-century British literary figure Dr Samuel Johnson said: “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation.” Where, then, does United States civilisation stand after President Bill Clinton’s assent to a Welfare Bill that will cut entitlement to aid and which, according to one critic, could push as many as a million children into poverty?
The answer is that it is diminished by his action, just as on the other side of the Atlantic the Europeans are diminished by the efforts of their governments to “reform” their own welfare states. This hardly means that change in welfare is never desirable. But the very word “reform” attempts to capture the argument before it has begun.
As Senator Daniel P Moynihan has said, what is happening is not reform but repeal. Throughout the West, a concerted effort to redefine the problem of poverty, unemployment and low wages as the problem of welfare has prepared the way for such changes. A similar pre-emptive campaign insidiously suggests that the West can no longer afford pensions and health care and public housing, as presently constituted and funded.
After a few years of this softening-up, the public can hardly remember the earlier, fairer, terms in which arguments about social policy used to be conducted. It is now commonplace to read articles taking as given that the welfare state must be reduced, in the interests of the US economy, or of European monetary union, or of business competitiveness, or of the poor themselves.
The fact that welfare spending has not actually been massively cut in any major industrial society so far is an indication of the attachment of most citizens to the welfare systems under which they grew up, of the inertia of large institutions, and of the inadequacy of the new solutions.
But rhetoric, along with reorganisations that distance governments from the agencies of social provision, continue to prepare the way for future reductions and privatisations. The one blurs argument, the other is intended to blur responsibility for what may be coming.
The worst thing about most of the “reforms” is that they are not even honest in their own terms. Theatre rather than true policy, they propose to end dependency by putting people back to work, but recoil from the costs and difficulties of actually doing so. Or they propose to transfer responsibility from the state to individuals for, say, pensions, but do this at precisely the time when a substantial minority can no longer look forward to the well- paid, secure work that could have financed such a shift.
The Bill ends the federal government’s commitment to provide aid to poor Americans, turning that back to the states, limits benefits to five years, forces welfare recipients to work, bans welfare aid to legal immigrants, and cuts food stamps. Almost certainly, it will change less than it pretends to, shifting around the forms and sources of funding even as it imposes more uncertainty and humiliation on the individuals whose lives it will affect.
But it will legally embody certain tendencies, certain meanings. First, it pulls back the federal government from its role of providing a counterweight to the prejudice, incompetence, and tight-fistedness of state and local government. That was a role which, under Franklin D Roosevelt, then under Lyndon Johnson, the federal government played very effectively, providing for a time the heartening spectacle of one set of government agencies harassing others into significantly better behaviour.
Second, by encouraging all kinds of experimental policies, it regionalises welfare, allowing local government and local business to do what they will with “their” poor.
Third, by its definition of the problem as one of work-shyness or work refusal, it shifts responsibility for poverty from the workings of society and the economy, and the government’s oversight of these, to poor individuals themselves. Finally, it victimises immigrants, punishing the sick and elderly, many with long American working lives behind them, for the alleged free rides of other immigrants.
The welfare explosion in the US in the Sixties was an aspect of one of the most important political changes in that country and the West since World War II. Black Americans, their lives turned upside down by the agricultural modernisation of the South, traumatised by the experience of migration, and of unemployment in the Northern cities to which many of them had moved, increasingly riotous and unruly, claimed the attention of their fellow citizens.
The response was the civil rights movement, the Great Society, and the welfare revolution. Poor Americans, black and white, demanded and got welfare payments and welfare benefits they had never had before. Some were new, some had always existed on paper but had been denied in practice. White liberals helped. The American welfare revolution had its influence on the European welfare states as well. Its style and flamboyance affected inner cities in all the industrial states.
It was a time of idealism and good intentions. But, undoubtedly, the welfare explosion was in part a placatory reaction to the anger of the poor, particularly the black poor. The US political scientists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in their study of the American welfare state, Regulating the Poor, proposed the theory that welfare expansion represents government’s response to an assertive and potentially dangerous poor.
Welfare reduction, on the other hand, represents a reversion to welfare’s more normal, work-enforcing role, in which the poor and unemployed are given harsh treatment of a kind that makes even poor- quality jobs seem a better alternative.
This is so whether or not jobs are actually available, for the purpose is not primarily to find jobs for those out of work but to stage a warning drama for all workers. This understanding of the evolution of US welfare does not have to be wholly accepted. But it makes a plausible connection between falling welfare benefits and falling real wages, and the efforts of corporations to cut labour costs. “The moral seems clear,” they write, “a placid poor gets nothing, but a turbulent poor sometimes gets something.”
The poor, and workers in general, in the US are clearly more passive than they were in the sixties when their mobilisation was part of a more general, cross-class phenomenon. In Europe there is more resistance to welfare cuts. But in both continents, “reformers” push their plans.
Their failure to recognise how hackneyed are their arguments about work and dependency is dispiriting. Strictures about one-parent families are antique. Arguments about dependency are not to be dismissed, but they must always, surely, be secondary to the recognition that unemployment, dislocation and cultural damage come first and that to ask the victims to put these things right is wrong-headed.
White House representative George Stephanopoulos says everybody present when the decision about the Bill was taken “was leavened by the sense of the historical moment. Everybody knew how big this was.” Such hyperbole for as ill-conceived and ill-spirited a law as the US has ever given forth!