The Right's Campaign Against Welfare

by Lucy A. Williams and Jean Hardisty[1]

In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton betrayed many of his supporters when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) - the "welfare reform" bill. The class, racial and gender assumptions reflected in that bill, as well as its devastating consequences, seemed at odds with the Democratic Party's stated commitment to low-income adults and children. Why would a Democratic President assent to the punitive conditions that the welfare reform bill imposed on the poor?

The answer, of course, begins well before 1996 and is quite complex. In fact, exploring its roots is a case study in how the Right, as a political and social movement, constructed an ideological critique and a policy agenda that was mainstreamed and incorporated into the liberal agenda, culminating in the rollback of a centerpiece of the U.S. social safety net.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) or "welfare" was a New Deal program, enacted in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act. But it was always a program that differentiated among its recipients based on race. In its early years it served primarily white widows and their children, who were seen as the "deserving" poor. Gradually, the welfare rolls became predominantly single mothers and their children. States had wide discretion to determine eligibility and many states conditioned the receipt of welfare on the sexual morality of the mother, using "suitable home" and "man in the house" rules to disqualify many African American single mothers.[2] In the 1960s, as a result of the civil rights movement, welfare rights organizing, and several Supreme Court decisions striking down state mandates, the rolls were opened to African American women, whose number increased by about 15 percent between 1965 and 1971.[3]

Although the vast majority of those receiving welfare continued to be white, it was this increase in African American welfare recipients that triggered the Right's focus on welfare as a magnet to unite various sectors of the Right. The Old Right developed a critique of AFDC that linked it with street crime, busing, deteriorating neighborhoods, and centralization of power in the hands of the federal government. That critique was a central theme in Senator Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign and in Old Right publications such as those of the John Birch Society and the influential right-wing publication Human Events. [4]

The racism in the Right's rhetoric of this period was blatant in many subject areas, including welfare. Thus laziness and immorality were frequently explicitly tied to an image of AFDC recipients as African American, e.g., the immoral sexual practices of a "growing horde of lazy Negros" living off the public dole, or "the unmarried Negro women who make a business of producing children...for the purpose of securing this easy welfare money."[5] Goldwater stated that welfare "transforms the individual...into a dependent animal creature," evoking traditional European American caricatures of African Americans.[6] Others argued that distribution of welfare was designed to buy votes at the taxpayer's expense, with the implication that recipients were African American voters.[7] As the civil rights movement gained momentum, the Old Right increasingly linked War on Poverty and Great Society welfare programs with urban riots and communist agitation.[8] In more respectable political circles, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "Report On the Black Family" added fuel to the Right's critique by arguing that African American male unemployment was caused by the breakup of the Black family, which he correlated with increases in African American AFDC cases.[9]

The Rise of the New Right

With Barry Goldwater's decisive defeat in 1964 and the gradual successes of the civil rights movement, the Old Right's explicit racism and conspiracy-minded anti-communism declined in popularity. Membership in the John Birch Society dropped and the influence of liberal Democrats over social welfare policies increased. However, quietly and somewhat out of the public spotlight, a sector of rightist intellectuals known as neoconservatives built on Moynihan's work to develop an analysis of an African American "underclass" whose social pathologies were aggravated by welfare programs. These intellectuals, led by Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Dector, and including Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell, clustered around The Public Interest, the leading neoconservative publication. While publishing more moderate discussions of the welfare system than those of Human Events, some articles reinforced the erroneous impression that the majority of AFDC recipients were African American and played to white anger.[10] Associated with the image of welfare receipt as primarily a Black phenomenon was the debilitating effect of welfare.[11]

Simultaneously, a core group of right-wing Republican activists whose roots lay in Old Right electoral politics - including Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and Richard Viguerie - were building a new "revolutionary" right-wing movement.[12] Stung by Goldwater's defeat and opposed to the social service programs created by liberals, they adopted "family values" as their central theme and methodically set out in the early 1970s to pull the Republican Party to the Right and eventually capture it altogether. Calling themselves the New Right, they replaced the more simplistic Old Right analysis of biological Black racial inferiority with the New Right analysis that emphasized social pathology and psychological irresponsibility in the African American community.[13] Human Events articles described recipients as ‘bums, parasites and leeches," and discussed recipient fraud and immorality.[14]

The New Right's leadership, including its funders, specialized in building public policy-generating think tanks where a vision, the message to popularize the vision, and the policy to deliver the vision could be systematically developed. In its early days, the New Right's vision was heavily borrowed from that of neoconservatives. New Right think tanks and publications promoted the view of the Black community as culturally vulnerable to pathologies, which were aggravated by AFDC and other welfare programs.[15] Black conservative intellectuals drifted to these think tanks and were supported and published by them. Walter Williams, arguably the "father" of Black conservatism, wrote passionately on the harmful effects on the Black community of welfare programs.[16]

Rightist authors such as Martin Anderson at the Hoover Institution refined the Right's critique by directly attacking liberal arguments for welfare. In his 1978 book simply titled Welfare, he argued that poverty statistics were "faulty," that there are few poor people in the United States, and that welfare destroys the incentive to participate in wage work.[17] The dubious social science research of two right-wing scholars, Charles Murray and George Gilder, augmented the ideological groundwork of neoconservative intellectuals.[18] Heavily supported by right-wing think tanks and fellowships, Murray and Gilder developed the statistical "proof" that welfare was a failure and that it created dependency and pathology. [19]

Early in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had relied on many of these ideas in his California welfare reform scheme. Reagan argued that welfare should be under state and local control and proposed a "belt-tightening" welfare reform program that was described as "a program that would save nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars, put many welfare recipients to work and eliminate the chiselers."[20] Charles Hobbs, a principal architect of Reagan's welfare reform plan, pointed to another theme of the Right's analysis of welfare: that it unfairly forces the conscientious working family man to subsidize the support of "his welfare-collecting neighbor."[21] In California, mobilizing the resentment of those who do not receive welfare against those who do was a key organizing tactic used by the Right in promoting welfare reform. Nearly a decade later, Reagan would take his California formula to the federal level.

Throughout the 1970s, conservative Christians were emerging as a political force. Long-established as a subculture and a community of belief, conservative evangelical Christians had only sporadically been involved in politics. But spurred to action by the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the banning of prayer in schools, and an increase in militant organizing by lesbian and gay organizations, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists were ready to be mobilized by young ambitious leaders such as Rev. Jerry Falwell. The New Right's theme of traditional family values resonated vividly in this community. In the 1970s, conservative Christian evangelicals began the journey that made them, by century's end, the most disciplined voting block within the Republican Party.

The Right's welfare reform agenda, developed between the 1960s and the signing of the welfare reform bill in 1996, fits neatly into its larger agenda: devolving control of public policy to the state level; defeating liberalism and its social safety net programs; and unleashing the "free market" as the great provider of prosperity for all hardworking Americans. At the center of this agenda is the traditional (Christian) family and its traditional values, one in which the role of the wife and mother is tightly conscribed, but racially determined. The role for "good" (visualize white married) women is to be a stay-at-home Mom and homemaker.[22] As the new image of welfare recipient is constructed as African American, the role for single mothers - assumed to have loose morals, low work ethic, and self-destructive behavior habits - is to be in the workforce.[23] The Right constructed welfare as the cause of poverty, illegitimacy, crime, and sexual depravity. Having made that profoundly inaccurate argument, the remaining job was to sell it to the American people.

The Role of The Welfare Queen

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 officially ended any influence by liberals over social policy. Flying the banner of the New Right rather than the Old Right, Reagan brought the program of welfare reform he had promoted in California to Washington. Rightist think tanks became influential players, generating welfare policy proposals for the Reagan Administration. The Heritage Foundation and The Hoover Institution were only two of the panoply of think tanks that earned the Reagan administration the title "the think tank presidency." Robert Rector, Heritage's man on welfare policy, was one of the most influential policy players in the "welfare reform" process. Reagan himself, however, made a vital contribution with his promotion of a vicious stereotype he labeled "the welfare queen."

In the 1970s, the debate over welfare occurred among intellectuals, those interested in public policy, and policy practitioners directly involved in the welfare system. But in order for the Right to popularize its anti-welfare message in the 1980s, it needed a more basic message that built anger and resentment toward welfare recipients. The image needed to capture the "moral depravity" created by welfare, the way that welfare supposedly led women to have multiple children out of wedlock and then raise them in poverty, resulting in a generation of criminal adults. It needed to bolster the assertion that welfare recipients abused drugs and cheated the system. That image was the stereotype of the "welfare queen."

Reagan repeatedly used an inaccurate story of a Black "welfare queen" in Chicago to explain his anti-welfare position. He told the story - to voters, members of Congress, and even foreign leaders - of a Chicago welfare recipient named Linda Taylor, who was convicted in 1977 for fraud and perjury involving $8,000 in welfare checks. In Reagan's telling of the story, however, Taylor cleverly worked the system so that she gained a tax-free income of more than $150,000.[24] This image of the cheating Black woman getting rich off the public's tax dollars reinforced the Right's drive to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor and demonize those labeled "undeserving." In this formulation, the race of the undeserving recipient was simply an accident of circumstance.

But the Right's argument against welfare was based on more than the racist demonization of the "welfare queen." It rested equally on the inaccurate assertion that there was a "crisis of illegitimacy" in the Black community. By highlighting this so-called crisis and associating it with welfare, welfare opponents could assume a mantle of caring and concern for the health of the community. Charles Murray was the most prominent promoter of the Black crisis of illegitimacy, though he was simply building on Daniel Patrick Moynihan 1965 Report on the Black Family. He was also an early proponent of the assertion that receipt of welfare was an incentive to bear children.[25]

When Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981, he immediately propelled through Congress major welfare provisions contained in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. These provisions revised the way in which earned income was calculated, removed many work incentives for AFDC recipients, and made most wage-earning recipients ineligible for welfare payments. This left many of the working poor economically poorer than they had been when they received supplemental AFDC and Medicaid. But subsequent efforts by the Administration to win Congressional approval for its California-style plan to give the states complete control over the administration of welfare programs failed.[26]

To get around that lack of Congressional approval, the Reagan administration created a system of federal "waivers."[27] A waiver is a grant of "permission" by the federal government for states to ignore specific federal requirements in programs that are partially federally funded. Waivers allowed states to experiment with various aspects of "welfare reform." Most waivers granted exemptions that allowed a state to terminate previously eligible welfare recipients. This encouraged experimentation with various welfare reform policy ideas, including policies intended to control and punish the behavior of welfare recipients. In 1990, then-Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who would go on to become Secretary of Health and Human Services in the George W. Bush Administration, was one of the first to use the waiver system when he obtained a waiver for Wisconsin's Learnfare program.[28] The program reduced AFDC benefits for families whose teenagers failed to attend a sufficient number of days of school. Subsequent waivers allowed the denial of increased AFDC benefits for children born while the mother was receiving AFDC (known as "Family Cap" or "Child Exclusion"). To speed the review and granting of waivers, the Reagan Administration established the Low Income Opportunity Advisory Board (LIOAB).[29] According to Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, "[t]hough the Board has attracted scant press and public attention since its creation in 1987, it is one of the most important gains for federalism in recent years." [30]

Throughout the Reagan and George Bush, Sr., Administrations, right-wing "experts" kept up a drumbeat of articles, statistics, and radio and TV appearances. Decrying the disintegration of the family and the resulting crime and pathological behavior in the Black community, they linked this degrading image of inner city communities to the effects of welfare and the immoral and cheating habits of welfare recipients.

At the turn of the decade, a number of right-wing spokespersons were articulating a new theory of "empowering the poor," freeing the poor from the shackles of their poverty and the demoralization of bureaucratic control through federal government incentives. As the threat of communism ebbed as an issue around which the Right could effectively mobilize, the Right adopted a particularly American value-oriented brand of populism, with welfare as a central wedge issue. As a result of a decade of message development, the Right was able to augment the justification for the elimination of federal social programs; they should be defunded not simply because they tax our pay checks, but because they destroy recipients' character. [31]

Poverty and Personal Responsibility

The election of President Bill Clinton in 1992 held the promise of the rehabilitation of the image of the welfare recipient. Clinton aligned himself with the gains of the civil rights movement, while holding centrist positions on economic issues. He was counted as a friend to poor people and people of color. While a central campaign slogan was "ending welfare as we know it," Clinton's proposals for "welfare reform" built largely on David Ellwood's ideas in his book, Poor Support. These ideas included substantial revenue investments in education, training, and job supports, as well as job creation.[32] It seemed unlikely that his Administration would pursue a punitive attack on welfare recipients.

But the Right's analysis of poverty and the role of welfare in perpetuating poverty was now both widespread and embraced by the American public. To help mobilize that public support, in 1993 Charles Murray kicked off what amounted to a right-wing media blitz against AFDC with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, claiming a runaway epidemic of illegitimacy in the Black community.[33] Murray followed up with multiple appearances on TV and radio talk shows, and was later joined on the media circuit by William Bennett, a Heritage Foundation fellow, neoconservative Irving Kristol, Heritage's Robert Rector and other right-wing strategists and scholars.[34]

When a Republican majority took control of Congress in 1994, political pressure to pass a welfare reform bill mounted. In fact, the passage of such a bill was the third of ten items listed in the Republican Contract with America, effectively and widely touted by Speaker Newt Gingrich during the 1994 Congressional elections. Congressional Republicans introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 1994, sponsored by then-Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) and 15 other Senators, which was to become the PRWORA.

Ninety-eight Democrats in the House of Representatives and 25 Democrats in the Senate supported the PRWORA. Bill Clinton, a Democratic President whose approval ratings had slid alarmingly during his first two years in office, signed it in his fourth year. With the passage of the PRWORA, AFDC was replaced by time-limited Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Public approval for the bill undoubtedly explains some of the Democratic support for the PRWORA. However, the Right's campaign against welfare, stretching over nearly two decades, also played a crucial role in its passage.

During the political build-up to the signing of PRWORA, the Right further developed and highlighted its earlier assertions of an epidemic of illegitimacy, widespread abuse in the welfare system, and generations of permanent welfare recipients in the same family. These inaccuracies went almost unchallenged in the media and even by many Democrats. No amount of correction and clarification of the Right's inaccuracies and misrepresentations could dent public support for welfare reform. For example, in a 1994 press release, seventy-six social scientists with varying political viewpoints issued a joint statement that previous research does not support the conclusion that welfare is a primary cause of rising non-marital births.[35] Yet a White House Report issued soon after this press release maintained that:

Statistical evidence does not prove those suppositions [that welfare benefits are an incentive to bear children]; and yet, even the most casual observer of public assistance programs understands there is indeed some relationship between the availability of welfare and the inclination of many young women to bear fatherless children.[36]

Michael Lind, in his book Up from Conservatism, has pointed out that sociologist Charles Murray's statistics on the "dramatic increases in Black illegitimacy" were an artifact of an entirely different development in the African American community.[37] While Murray enflamed popular opinion by touting that "[i]llegitimacy has now reached 68 percent of births to black women. In inner cities, the figure is typically in excess of 80 percent.",[38] Lind points out that four-fifths of the increase in African American illegitimate births as a proportion of overall African American births is explained by an increase in married employed African American women deciding to have fewer children. An examination of the rate of babies born to unwed African American teenagers remains virtually unchanged from 1920 through 1990.[39]

But the Right's analysis, based on misinformation, blatant distortions, and racial stereotypes, carried the day in 1996 and persists after the passage of the PRWORA. In 1995 the Cato Institute, a right-wing libertarian think tank based in Washington, DC, issued a report claiming that welfare paid more than a low-wage job in every state in the nation.[40] However, in its calculations, Cato researchers counted as income programs such as WIC and housing assistance, which the vast majority of welfare recipients did not receive.[41]

Similarly, the myth of widespread permanent welfare status proved equally impossible to correct. Numerous reports and studies demonstrated that welfare was a transient state for most recipients and that it served primarily as a temporary safety net during financial crisis caused by job loss or family crisis.[42]

Misinformation and stereotypes persist in the popular imagination and right-wing think tanks continue to press for ever-more punitive measures against the poor. In the Heritage Foundation's Candidate's Briefing Book called Issues 2000, Robert Rector repeats the same distortions that have built support for welfare reform in the past. He asserts that there is little material poverty in the United States, as the public generally understands the term, never mentioning the burgeoning homeless population. He maintains that illegitimacy in the Black community has skyrocketed as a percentage of overall births, never discussing the decrease in the birth-rate among married African American women. And in his four point program for expanding welfare reform, he emphasizes first and foremost "fostering marriage" through various government funded pro-marriage initiatives, including: governmental affirmation of the institution of marriage, short-term pro-marriage counseling programs, mandatory pro-marriage mentoring programs within TANF and Medicaid, and a government funded pro-marriage public advertising campaign.[43] Ironically, while calling for less government interference in our lives, the Heritage Foundation, in this case, advocates virtual behavior modification. In fact the pro-marriage program is consistent with Rector's belief, stated elsewhere, that welfare reform should focus on a "behavioral content" approach to aid for the poor. He sees soup kitchens and food banks as paradigmatic examples of the "permissive entitlement" philosophy of welfare - the core of the "problem" of welfare programs. Behavioral content-based programs are based on the assumption that the expressed need of the recipient is not necessarily authentic and a "one-way" handout is not constructive.[44]

It remains to be seen whether the elected members of Congress will have the will or the ability to reexamine the flawed process that led to the passage and signing of the PRWORA and seize the opportunity to correct it. If instead, they perpetuate the Right's disdainful view of welfare recipients and re-authorize or even extend the punitive policies of PRWORA, the demonization of the poor and the shredding of the social safety net will continue apace.

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Lucy A. Williams is a Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. She has published and lectured widely in the area of welfare law and poverty. (Beacon Press, 1999).

Footnotes