MOYNIHAN AND THE RESPONSIBILITY CONTROVERSY

Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not invent the notion that government programs might have deleterious impacts on American citizens. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis (Reference Lewis1959) and political scientist Michael Harrington (Reference Harrington1962) were two of the most prominent scholars in the postwar period to postulate a “culture of poverty,” a term Lewis used to describe the possibility that poverty might be caused by cultural factors as well as structural inequalities. Nascent theorists of neoliberalism, most prominently Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek (Reference Hayek1944) and Ludwig von Mises (Reference Mises1949), argued that Keynesianism would rot the moral fabric of society and replace capitalist competitiveness with collectivist mediocrity. Early twentieth century liberals also harbored real concerns about the corrupting impact of government relief programs (Davies Reference Davies1996). In his 1935 State of the Union address Franklin Roosevelt characterized welfare payments that did not also require work as a “narcotic” and a “subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

The notion that welfare discourages people from taking responsibility for themselves and their families predated Moynihan’s Reference Moynihan1965 report. However, the controversy surrounding the report inspired a new variation on the dynamic between responsibility and welfare, forcing the issue of responsibility into mainstream discussions of race. For some observers, “The Negro Family” inaugurated a new discussion of race relations in America that made space for considering the responsibilities that African Americans had for their own communities. Commentators nonetheless praised the new embrace of cultural explanations of racial inequality.

Journalists characterized President Johnson’s “To Fulfill These Rights” speech as a call for greater responsibility in the African-American community. Liberal journalist Mary McGrory saw Johnson’s calls for more introspection in the black community as a positive development, calling his speech “a dramatic departure, both in content and context” (McGrory Reference McGrory1965 in Rainwater and Yancey Reference Rainwater and Yancey1967, 369). “He was the first president,” she observed, “to ask the Negros, with their legal rights all but won, to help find a remedy for their own social plight” (ibid). The speech would herald a new age of race relations whereby blacks would tackle the problems in their communities. “In persuading the Negroes to talk frankly about their own troubles, [Johnson] hopes they will find solutions of their own” (ibid, 371). The Wall Street Journal opinion page reacted similarly: “Finally, promoting self-help must realistically appear as a large past of the ultimate answer” (New Stage in Civil Rights 1965). Such self-help thinking regarded government action as having exhausted the available formal channels for addressing race inequality; the time had come for “enlighten[ing] even the most downtrodden Negro to the middle-class outlook” (ibid).

Some worried that the report could be misinterpreted as a call for more responsibility from African Americans at the expense of government programs. As McGrory’s comments made clear, these concerns were not unfounded. Members of the civil rights community reminded the nation that African Americans needed more government assistance. Bayard Rustin penned a response for America magazine in which he wrote, “Negroes should be individually virtuous—and so should whites.” Rustin reminded his readers that other minority groups had overcome inequality, not through individual achievement (for example, because they “got religion or psychology”), but through economic opportunities provided by the state. ^{Footnote 2} For Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others in the Civil Rights movement, the Moynihan Report’s findings revealed the need for more, not less, government activism to combat urban poverty. Moynihan shared this view of the importance of expanded government opportunity. Though left out of the original report, Moynihan envisioned a programmatic governmental response targeting poor families, including “guaranteed full employment, birth control, adoption services, etc. But first of all a family allowance” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1967, 36 emphasis on original). Not all Americans agreed, however, that the tangle of pathology could be undone with the introduction of more federal anti-poverty programs.

GILDER, MURRAY, AND INSURGENT CONSERVATISM

The urgency of decisive action addressing racial inequality and family breakdown waned in the aftermath of the Moynihan Report. Urban riots in Newark, Watts, and Detroit simultaneously confirmed Moynihan’s thesis of inner city decline and provided justification for abandoning the prospect of meaningful government intervention all together. Moynihan reflected the changing moods of the early 1970s when, in his capacity as policy adviser to President Nixon, he penned an executive branch memo calling for a period of “benign neglect” on race issues. Moynihan felt that government overtures on civil rights issues simply inflamed “hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides;” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1970; see also Moynihan Reference Moynihan1987, 41–42); ignoring race for a time might calm tensions in the inner city. The benign neglect memo demonstrated growing cynicism in Washington about the possibility of proactive government programs. Amidst this pessimism, policy makers embraced more individualized solutions to welfare dependency, most notably stricter child support enforcement. In the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, created in 1974, lawmakers developed an enforcement bureaucracy that could search out and recoup monies from fathers whose biological children ended up on welfare rolls. ^{Footnote 3}

As official consensus on the efficacy of proactive anti-poverty programs broke down, a conservative insurgency began to reframe the need for greater community responsibility into a moralized appeal to individual responsibility. Conservative writers like George Gilder and Charles Murray were concerned about the moral effects of government aid, viewing welfare as corrupting of the very spirit of American capitalism. Whereas Great Society Liberals like Moynihan worried about welfare’s impact on family structure and community cohesion, Gilder and Murray brought the analysis down to the level of the individual. Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981) made the moral case for reduced government aid and supply-side economics. In effect, Gilder united culture of poverty thinking with Hayekian free-market liberalism, conceptualizing welfare as a “moral hazard” that has “a dramatic negative impact on motivation and self-reliance (Gilder Reference Gilder1981, 116). Attributes like motivation and self-reliance refigured the problem of welfare as primarily a matter of individual effects rather than community impact. Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) advocated an even more explicitly individualized solution to welfare’s responsibility effects: “scrapping the entire federal welfare and income-support structure” (Murray Reference Murray1984, 227). Such a program, Murray asserted, would “leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services” (ibid, 228).

Gilder and Murray’s rejection of structural accounts of poverty replaced Moynihanian views of the important role government can play with an intellectualized justification for supply-side economics and individual responsibility. Tellingly, these thinkers spoke favorably of the Moynihan report’s normative implications of familial decline while simultaneously ignoring its calls for greater government action. By synthesizing culture of poverty theories with neoliberal economics, writers like Gilder and Murray provided an intellectual rationale that could unite fiscal and social conservatives. Their observations about the negative effects of welfare became official government findings in two reports published in 1986. The first, written by Reagan’s Undersecretary of Education Gary Bauer, was titled “The Family: Preserving America’s Future.” Whereas “The Negro Family” had made the case for national action, “The Family” was a sort-of anti-Moynihan Report. Bauer’s central argument was that basically all government action negatively impacts families by superseding parental authority over children. ^{Footnote 4} A second report, written for Congress and titled “Poverty, Income Distribution, the Family, and Public Policy,” attributed childhood poverty to the individual decisions made by adults. Authors Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway argued that government programs incentivize laziness and encourage men to not take responsibility for their families. They theorized a phenomenon of “voluntary poverty” or “poverty by choice,” ^{Footnote 5} an individualized behavioral account of economic inequality resonant with the principle of personal responsibility. These reports represented a new phase in American public policy, the first official recognition from the federal government of an opposition between government aid and individual responsibility.

As New York senator, Moynihan himself began to embrace personal responsibility thinking in his approach to welfare reform. In his widely read Harvard University lectures, published in 1987 as Family and Nation, Senator Moynihan articulated a case for strengthening federal child support regulations in an effort to address child poverty. The federal government should have the authority to “hunt, hound, [and] harass” biological fathers to ensure they financially support their children, he believed. ^{Footnote 6} In contrast to conservatives, he viewed promoting personal responsibility as impractical without government programs to support poor parents. Abandoning the belief that mothers should stay home to care for their children, a central tenet of AFDC, Moynihan called for government childcare subsidies because “the able-bodied mother of the child also has a responsibility to support her child by working” (Dowd Reference Dowd1987). He remained wary of “family values” politics and its attendant individualized solutions to poverty, preferring instead a pragmatic mixture of personal responsibility and government subsidy. ^{Footnote 7} The 1988 Family Support Act, authored by Moynihan, combined stricter child support enforcement with job training programs. ^{Footnote 8}

“PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY” AND PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC

Ronald Reagan was the first president to conflate welfare with irresponsibility, although his embrace of responsibility rhetoric came rather late in his presidency. In a radio address to the nation on August 1, 1987, Reagan explained the need for welfare reform by focusing on the irresponsibility of parents who do not care for their children. He legitimized increasing federal spending on child support enforcement by highlighting the same social phenomenon that bedeviled Moynihan: dependency. He told the nation, “[C]hanges in our child support enforcement system can reduce welfare dependency. Parents who bring children into the world have a responsibility for these children, whether they live with them or not” (Reagan Reference Reagan1987). Reagan reiterated familiar connections between responsibility, child support, and welfare reform a year later when he signed Senator Moynihan’s Family Support Act.

Reagan did not speak of welfare and responsibility as antithetical societal values, preferring instead the slightly narrower conflation of responsibility with child support. The argument that welfare encouraged irresponsibility writ large was made by George Bush, who made personal responsibility a key facet of his rhetorical case against welfare. As Steven Teles (Reference Teles1998) has noted, Bush was not overly concerned with welfare reform until then-Governor Bill Clinton announced his “New Covenant” campaign platform that included the promise to “end welfare as we know it.” ^{Footnote 9} In response, Bush uttered the phrase in 32 separate speeches and proclamations in 1992, compared with 18 utterances in the three previous years combined. Bush considered conflating welfare and responsibility an important campaign tactic to head off the challenge posed by Clinton.

Bush’s rhetoric distilled decades of debate on AFDC into a simple argument: welfare and personal responsibility are inversely linked. Spurred onto the subject by his Democratic challenger, Bush was also forced to highlight his social conservative bona fides in response to Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican primary challenge. The “personal responsibility” theme allowed Bush the chance to confront both opponents at once. On the campaign trail Bush told the audience that problems like drug abuse, disability, and HIV/AIDS were at least partially caused by a breakdown in responsibility. “Maybe I am a little old fashioned,” he said, “but I believe personal responsibility has a lot to do with making America a better country” (Bush Reference Bush1992a). Bush thus extended his predecessor’s conflation of responsibility with parenting to a number of social ills, amplifying conservative arguments that America had lost touch with its traditional values. Bush connected the depleted values theme to the welfare system, characterizing AFDC as out of sync with American traditions. In a radio address during the election season, he said that the nation needed a welfare system that “recognizes the importance of personal responsibility, self-respect, independence, and self-sufficiency.” People on welfare had a responsibility to “[establish] lifestyles that will enable them to fulfill their potential, not destroy it” (Bush Reference Bush1992b).

In referring to a “lifestyle,” Bush personalized the problem of poverty and attributed the need for welfare to the irresponsible lifestyle decisions of individual recipients. Bush’s responsibility rhetoric was simultaneously racialized to portray the problems specifically facing black inner city communities as stemming from miscarriages of responsibility. In the aftermath of riots in early 1992 in response to the police beating of Rodney King, Bush said that the problem facing urban communities was the government benefit system. In his speech to the nation Bush praised police officers, churchgoers, and “citizens who showed great personal responsibility, who ignored the mob, who at great personal danger helped the victims of violence, regardless of race” (Bush Reference Bush1992c). The argument for greater responsibility within African-American communities in response to the Moynihan Report was articulated in the early 1990s as a more radical call for individual welfare recipients to get their lives in order.

When he took office, Bill Clinton tried to resuscitate a structural account of poverty that nonetheless retained the rhetorical importance of personal responsibility. As part of his promise of a “new covenant” with America, President Clinton spoke of both the need for greater responsibility as well as the importance of providing opportunities for those who needed help (Carcasson Reference Carcasson2006). Clinton initially spoke of the need of both greater individual responsibility as well as government action on jobs and education. Initially, his rhetoric demonstrated a desire to move beyond Bush’s tactic of directly blaming welfare recipients for the system’s problems. Announcing his candidacy for president, Clinton told the nation, “Government’s responsibility is to create more opportunity. The people’s responsibility is to make the most of it” (Clinton Reference Clinton1991). In response to the Republican congressional takeover of 1994, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America,” and in anticipation of the 1996 presidential election, Clinton’s rhetoric tracked rightward. The importance of providing opportunities to the less fortunate receded and the language of personal responsibility took its place. In a speech commemorating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Clinton again spoke of his new covenant promises. However, this time he spoke only of “certain opportunities” to which citizens have a right, including the right to safe communities secured through the passage of Clinton’s controversial crime bill. Instead, he emphasized the importance of responsibility on an individual level, thereby backtracking on previous efforts to not vilify welfare recipients. In the MLK speech he said that one of the advantages of welfare reform is that it would make poor people better parents, reiterating the Reaganite argument that accepting government aid makes an individual a bad parent (Clinton Reference Clinton1995).

The triangulated thinking underlying Clinton’s reelection strategy led him, in August, to sign the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWORA). And while the title of the act borrowed from Clinton’s insistence on both greater responsibility and better opportunities (Carcasson Reference Carcasson2006), the law itself did very little to improve opportunities for those on welfare. Senior officials in the Clinton administration quit in protest. Indeed, Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself spoke out against the welfare reform bill. “The premise of this legislation,” he said, “is that the behavior of certain adults can be changed by making the lives of their children as wretched as possible” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1996b). Despite opposition, AFDC was a thing of the past.