Why Americans Hate Welfare - Review

Washington Monthly, July, 1999 by John Harwood

WHY AMERICANS HATE WELFARE by Martin Gilens University of Chicago Press, $25

For at least 20 years, people in and around national politics have operated on the assumption that public debate over welfare policy was powerfully influenced by race. Anger over welfare abuses was the anger of middle-and working-class whites convinced that their tax dollars were being squandered on undeserving black beneficiaries. And many journalists, in particular, assumed they knew who was responsible for inflaming those feelings: Republican politicians seeking white votes. In combination with other racially-charged issues such as crime, taxes, and civil rights, welfare has been portrayed as a "wedge" that Republicans Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush exploited to identify Democrats with their black constituents, split off disgruntled whites, and hold the presidency.

Those assumptions weren't unfounded. But the most important contribution of Martin Gilens' Why Americans Hate Welfare is to identify the responsibility of another agent--the journalistic community itself--in turning the welfare issue into a racial Rorschach test.

It's an interesting notion, given the widespread and largely accurate belief that reporters and editors at major news organizations tend to sympathize with blacks and Democrats in those political arguments and view GOP "wedges" as callous demagoguery. The journalistic imperative to "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is not an auspicious formula for Republicans in such debates.

But consider what Mr. Gilens, a political scientist at Yale, discovered from an examination of the content of TV broadcasts and newsmagazines dating back to the Eisenhower era. During the 1950s, the relatively spare media coverage of poverty was dominated by images of whites. The same was true in the early '60s, after works such as Michael Harrington's The Other America had helped prod a Democratic administration into launching the War on Poverty. When Newsweek magazine ran a twelve-page takeout on the subject in February 1964, for example, its cover photo depicted a young white girl in a ramshackle rural setting. The story highlighted hard times in Appalachia; only 14 of 54 people featured in photographs for the story were black.

But soon after, Mr. Gilens argues, coverage of poverty-related issues was increasingly "racialized." Blacks began to assume an outsized role in depictions of the poor, and particularly in stories about problems and abuse in programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children or the ill-fated Comprehensive Education and Training Act. Whites, by contrast, were featured more prominently in sympathetic portrayals of poor people, as victims of economic downturns such as the 1981-82 recession that marked Ronald Reagan's first term

Mr. Gilens ties part of the shift toward the increasing prominence of the civil rights movement and its leaders' emphasis on the problems of the poor. And he doesn't suggest that the journalists responsible for those depictions were motivated by racism. But he does argue that "subconscious stereotypes" deeply ingrained in American culture--that blacks are lazy and thus more responsible than whites for their own disadvantage--were at work notwithstanding the journalists' left-of-center bent. Whatever the explanation, he finds those "media distortions" especially consequential, because "[t]he belief that black Americans lack commitment to the work ethic is central to whites' opposition to welfare."

This book is not a sparkling read. Mr. Gilens dissects opinion polls on welfare and racial attitudes at painstaking length in attempting to fathom the federal government's "feeble" attempts to combat poverty. But his conclusion that Americans support programs benefiting "the deserving poor" (Head Start, education, child care, job training) while looking askance at welfare checks will strike many readers as no surprise.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in this book, however, is one of timing. Three years after a Democratic president and Republican Congress set time limits on welfare receipt and ended the federal entitlement, welfare is not "one of the most incendiary issues in contemporary politics," as the book jacket asserts.

To the contrary, welfare and its racial subtext have largely vanished from the political radar screen. In a booming economy, rolls have plummeted with no sign of the social disaster that opponents of the 1996 reform predicted. In this happy environment, black and white Democrats are united, wielding their own political "wedges" (gun control, abortion rights, Medicare, environmental protection) against a GOP burdened by images of mean-spiritedness. And politically-adept Republicans, beginning with presidential front-runner George W. Bush, have placed top priority on shedding the party's Scrooge image and proving their "compassion" for those who need help, if not in the ways Mr. Gilens might favor.

It is true, as he observes at the end of the book, that the acid test will come in the next downturn when unemployment rises and the rolls swell again. Perhaps then Americans will "hate welfare" once again. For the moment, they're not thinking much about it at all.