Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1996 by Adam Yarmolinsky

OVER MORE THAN I three decades in public life, Pat Moynihan I has had a disturbing habit of calling attention to problems we have lived to regret ignoring, and of offering I sound advice that we have lived to regret not taking. It began with his 1964 report on the disintegration of the black family, for which he was generally vilified. His welfare reform proposal of the 1970s, the Family Assistance Plan, which could have made a modest beginning on a now almost impossible task, was rejected by an unholy alliance of right and left, which also rejected his proposed Family Support Act of 1995. And his recent prophecy that turning welfare over to the states without adequate resources or federal safeguards will leave thousands of children sleeping on grates has apparently gone unheeded, to our possible future discomfiture.

Moynihan's pronouncements are prescient, but he is also willing to revise them in the light of experience--and of his remarkably persistent study of social science literature. They make this compact volume, a pastiche of previously published articles and speeches stitched together with new commentary, a valuable and lively re-examination of issues that are both fundamental and very much alive today.

The book explores a range of current public policy issues, from full employment budgets and the foolishness of the proposed balanced budget amendment to the newly discovered worldwide increase in illegitimacy rates and the forgotten history of the drug wars. But the consistent principal theme tying all these issues together is the impact of postindustrial society. Here Moynihan raises new, troublesome and imperfectly understood questions. On the old questions, he points out, we could at least look to European models. But new problems of family structure and ethnic and race relations are arising first in American society, so that now we are exposed to the risks and challenges of being pioneers.

For a major political figure, Moynihan is refreshingly aware of how much he--and we--don't know; in the face of our ignorance he presses for the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm" He is particularly persuasive on the folly of turning over to the states the problem of long-term welfare dependency, arguing that it is "so large a problem that the state governments where it is most concentrated simply will not be able to handle it" In a long introduction, he quotes himself responding to a reporter who accused him of giving up on welfare reform: "People who say nothing can be worse than the present welfare system, just you wait and see. We are dealing with a profound social change. And those of us who first spotted it are entitled to be heard a generation later when we are saying we still don't understand it"

His despair is clearly related to his concern, vividly articulated, that we are "defining deviancy down" This is not Dole's nostalgia for a lost golden age, but rather a sense that important social changes are taking place and that we need to find ways to reconcile them with the demands of civilization. It recalls the reputed ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times "

Moynihan has lived in interesting times, poised at the intersection between politics and social science. His experience is a bit breathtaking: the U.S. Navy in World War II, the London School of Economics, Averell Harriman's Albany, John Kennedy's New Frontier, a Harvard professorship, the Nixon White House, ambassadorships to India and the United Nations, the senatorship from New York, leadership of the Senate Finance Committee, and re-election to a fourth term by a landslide even during the Republican revolution of 1994. In these many roles he has been sometimes contentious but never dull, more often a source of innovative ideas than of political compromise.

It is still much too early in his career for a summation; thus this book is really a kind of interim report. But he does capture the essence of his political credo in a Harvard lecture quoted in the book's introduction: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself" That is what Pat Moynihan has been about: calling on politics to save our changing culture from itself.