Retroactivist. - Review - book review

National Review, June 25, 2001 by Adam Wolfson

The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, by Michael B. Katz (Metropolitan, 469 pp., $35)

In this age of multiculturalism, identity politics, the Third Way, and postmodernism, it's easy to forget what liberalism meant even 25 years ago. It was not about assembling a "cabinet that looked like America" or allowing gays to serve in the military or putting more cops on the streets. Nor was it about deconstructing the classics and eliminating "dead white males" from college curricula. Rather, it was mainly about expanding the welfare state begun by the likes of FDR and LBJ. Liberals of this persuasion dreamed of a classless society, and thought about how to bring capitalism to heel. They believed in raising taxes, redistributing income, creating new government programs, and nationalizing certain industries. The New Deal and the Great Society were the most tangible accomplishments of this liberal impulse; Walter Mondale, who in 1984 actually promised the American people a tax hike, typified it.

In the 1990s, this older kind of liberalism had perhaps its last hurrah. The unreconstructed liberals of the Clinton administration set their sights on nationalizing health care, only to be resoundingly defeated. Soon after, Bill Clinton declared the death of Big Government and signed historic legislation (forced on him by a Republican Congress) to repeal the federal entitlement to welfare. It was, to paraphrase Clinton, the end of liberalism as we had known it.

So it's nice to be reminded by Michael Katz-if only for nostalgia's sake-what liberalism once meant. A noted social historian at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about poverty and U.S. welfare policy, Katz is something of a dinosaur, an old-school welfare-state liberal who loathes capitalism and wants to bring back the days of Big and Bigger Government. His intellectual hero is Michael Harrington, to whom he dedicated an earlier book. Thus it's not surprising that Katz seems blissfully unaware of the large body of scholarly literature on why socialism can't work, and unconvinced by the failure of socialism everywhere its been tried. He also naively thinks that the redistributionist state can be sold to the American people, who have never shown much interest in it. In his latest book (partly written, as we learn from the acknowledgments, in the picturesque village of Oquossoc, Me.), he unapologetically defends the welfare state and calls for reversing the damage done to it by Newt Gingrich in league with the New Democrats.

Katz's architectonic idea is that over the last two decades, the ideal of social justice has been subordinated to market imperatives: "By tightening the links between benefits and employment, the late- twentieth-century welfare state has stratified Americans into first- and second-class citizens and undermined the effective practice of democracy," he argues. "Everywhere market price has superseded social justice."

A little explanation is in order. When Katz uses the term "welfare state," he does not have in mind simply public assistance such as food stamps. Rather, he means the entire structure of public and private assistance, from AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), Social Security, and Medicare, to soup kitchens for the homeless or employee benefits for those who work. In his view, this whole structure has been overturned by a few well-funded right-wing ideologues. Public aid has been revoked or made contingent on work, while nonprofits like the Red Cross have gone commercial, competing, for example, over the blood supply. The result, he argues, is not simply the end of Big Government but the end of both the national ideal and the idea of a common citizenship.

Katz's approach is best measured in his chapter on "The End of Welfare." In the most far-reaching social policy innovation of recent decades, Congress replaced AFDC, the nation's most important cash- assistance program, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. Drawing on the work of three conservative thinkers in particular-Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and Marvin Olasky-TANF transformed public assistance. Not only did it repeal the federal entitlement to aid, it also sought by various means to encourage work and discourage out-of-wedlock childbearing; for example, individuals were now limited to five years of assistance, and only two years without working. Coupled with charitable choice and, more recently, George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives, the conservative approach to welfare seeks to turn lives around, not subsidize their destruction. In contrast to the Left, which sees poverty as exclusively an economic problem, it emphasizes the broad behavioral and moral dimensions of poverty.

Although it is too early to say that TANF is an unqualified success, results so far are encouraging. By 1999, welfare rolls had fallen by 49 percent from their high of 5 million in 1994. This is unprecedented. As Douglas Besharov has pointed out, whether the economy has been healthy and growing, as in the period 1963-73, or weak and stagnant, as in 1989-94, welfare rolls have always grown at a fantastic clip. Of course, many questions remain, such as what will happen to the poorest in the event of an economic downturn. But all in all, TANF has been a remarkable improvement.