Darren Barany - The New Welfare Consensus

Ideological, Political, and Social Origins

DARREN BARANY

Cover: Photo of National Welfare Rights Organization March in NY to End Hunger (Series 8, Poor Peoples Campaign, MayJune 1968), from the Jack Rottier Photograph Collection, 19531983, courtesy of George Mason University Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries. Photo of Clinton and Reagan, courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library, C49841-11A 10/13/88.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2018 State University of New York

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Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barany, Darren, author.

Title: The new welfare consensus : ideological, political, and social origins / Darren Barany.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017040344| ISBN 9781438470559 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470566 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Public welfareUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Welfare stateUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Welfare recipientsEmploymentUnited StatesHistory20th century. | United StatesPolitics and government1945-1989. | United StatesPolitics and government1989

Classification: LCC HV95 .B28 2018 | DDC 361.973dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040344

Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to the memory of my parents,
MARY AND ERNIE

Policy, of course, is the Machiavellian term for deceit,
so immediate and overt honesty can be camouflage
for ultimate exploitation

Marshall McLuhan

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

MEMES THAT CELEBRATE NEWS OF STATES SUBJECTING NONWORKING POOR parents to drug tests so that they and their children may continue to qualify for poor relief or grumble about food stamp recipients buying premium products with their benefits at the grocery store are familiar on social media. These sentiments come up casually in conversations about wasteful welfare programs and welfare cheats. A genuine and pervasive lack of empathy for poor families and the practice of blaming them for the conditions of poverty in which they live, especially poor families of color, is evident and encoded in contemporary policy discourse. In the existing ideological climate, stark conditions of inequality are explained away by conjuring narratives about personal failings and accountability, cultural pathology, and family disorganization. This book reexplores the history, social conditions, and relevant texts to tell a story about how aspects of this milieu came to be. It addresses poverty, inequality, and policy through an interpretive analysis of welfare state discourse in particular. It is a story about political ideas that, in certain conditions (economic, social, ideological, and political), became orthodoxy in relation to policy reform and policy analysis. It is an important story because it clarifies why we think about work, family, poverty, personal responsibility, the welfare poor, and antipoverty measures the way we do.

The investigation mainly covers the interval from the interwar period to the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. While this era saw the sequence of legislative developments leading up to the bill, more importantly, it is one in which an emerging social policy narrative was essentialized in the public consciousness and within formal policy circles. Pages have been dedicated to these matters before, but this text focuses historically on the contemporary welfare consensus in relation to its ideological and political foundation and how its persistence has affected the existing policy culture, one which constrains antipoverty policy discourse as well as legislative endeavors and outcomes. It considers the theoretical and historical origins of todays political debates around social policy, equality, and distributive justice, both between the right and left and also within each political formation, as they have endured particular intellectual struggles and histories. The literature on poverty, inequality, and policy is quite vast. However, critical texts that look at the tensions bound up in welfare state programs and the corresponding political discourse, as well as how politics, programs, and policy are mediated by prevailing ideologies, are far less prevalent.

This work entails a comprehensive history and analysis of the ideas and policy that now encompass mainstream thinking on welfare. The study represents a theoretical approach that draws on antecedent and key developments associated with the tradition of critical theory. One might regard it as a critical theory of the welfare state that engages the key tenets bound up in the contemporary welfare consensus in connection with the social, political, and economic systems that both generate and are generated by such ideology. Offered here is a contribution to the larger policy studies discussion, which clarifies the systemic necessity and content of ideological practice in order to shed light on the logic, meaning, and objectives of contemporary welfare state discourse in relation to the ethos and requirements of late capitalism. It details that process as it relates to the imperative and internal logic of late capitalisms survival and through unfolding the meaning and tensions bound up in the relevant texts and rationale of the corresponding political institutions and corresponding conditions that contributed to dispersing those ideas and gradually helped restructure the American political culture to one in which austerity- and poverty-induced misery have been largely normalized.

Not long before this books release, it was tempting to interpret developments like the passing and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or the movement behind Bernie Sanderss 2016 presidential campaign as evidence that perhaps the moratorium on benefit expansion has receded. Rather, the culmination of these developments reveals that the existing policy consensus that steers outcomes toward system interests is very much intact. Even at the time of the ACAs development and passing, this consensus steered that legislative process toward a modest market-oriented strategy, which, while expanding coverage, ensured large profits for insurance companies and excluded a public option after a protracted and ugly ideological fight from right-wing advocacy groups. Regarding Sanderss campaign, due to the leaking of private Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mails, it is now known that top officials in the DNC disparaged Sanders, despite presumptions of neutrality, and, as a clear gesture of partiality, worked to shield Hillary Clinton from criticism during the primary campaign (Shear and Rosenberg 2016; Sainato 2016). During the primary election cycle, Sanders openly criticized the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, a significant part of President Bill Clintons legacy. At the time of the bills passage, Hillary Clinton supported the measure and helped garner public and legislative support for it in her role as First Lady. Despite Sanders polling more strongly against possible Republican challengers, including President Trump, it was apparent that DNC leadership was operating to move Clinton, the austerity candidate, forward as their nominee (Quinnipiac University 2016; Real Clear Politics 2016).