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1. What Accessibility Can’t Do: The Politics of Welfare Scholarship
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
What Accessibility Can’t Do The Politics of Welfare Scholarship The call for compromise bulks large in welfare scholarship. This is especially the case when welfare scholars take on the role of “public intellectuals” who seek to influence public discourse on issues of social welfare policy. In several ways, a persistent tension runs through scholarship on social policy politics to moderate the level of abstraction and the critical perspective employed in order to reach a larger audience and mobilize a sufficient number of the mass public to support policy reforms. Write simply and propose feasible reforms: these are the edicts of responsible welfare scholarship today. They are often taken as givens, not subject to contestation. They combine to make for a preference for what we can call a “politics of blandness.” The politics of blandness emphasizes clear and simple prose to offer basic facts that prove just how reasonable its proposals are. The hope is that this strategy will then lead reluctant Americans at least to support moderate improvements in social provision. The idea is to provide an analysis that both resonates with and is understood by the mass public. In this chapter, I call this popular strategy into question. I examine two examples: one reflecting the belief that effective welfare scholarship should feature simple writing that focuses on a plain presentation of facts, and another emphasizing how a moderation in proposals is essential for welfare scholarship to connect effectively with politics. In both cases, I suggest that what seems patently obvious is less than meets the eye. Both examples point to what I call “dilemmas of accessibility,” where moderation in terms of both writing style and policy proposals increases one’s access to the mass public. However, this occurs at the cost of the ability to promote a critical perspective that might help get beyond the prevailing prejudices that hold down social policy. Both examples suggest how politically effective welfare scholarship requires something other than moderation of writing style and 1 11 policy proposals. I conclude by suggesting alternative ways in which welfare scholarship can better inform ongoing struggle against the reigning structures of power and thereby can constitute a “praxis for the poor.” Middling Politics One aspect of the accessibility problem for welfare scholars who want to inform public discourse is to make arguments that will resonate with the mass public. This is especially an issue for public intellectuals who seek not only to discourage elitism but also to promote democracy. From this perspective , it is imperative to couch a reform agenda in terms acceptable to the broad middle of the political spectrum. Without an effective pitch that will appeal to the middle classes, attempts to improve social provision are doomed to be ignored. For Theda Skocpol, no recent policy debacle more glaringly highlighted this necessity than the failure of health-care reform in the early 1990s under the Clinton administration.1 In The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy, Skocpol focuses on the need to develop a way to hook the middle class into accepting a more generous and universalistic set of social welfare entitlements.2 For Skocpol, a compelling hook, more than facts or an argument, is what is needed. While arguments and facts are important, to be sure, neither of them will matter much if they are not couched in terms that are appealing to the middle class. Welfare scholarship that seeks to be politically effective will go nowhere if it does not find a way to connect its proposals to middleclass values, ideologies, and interests. Such is the nature of scholarship that seeks to be effective in democratic systems. Skocpol writes: The call to reconfigure social supports to build a family-friendly America amounts to a moral vision, not just a laundry list of legislative prescriptions . This runs against the grain of politics today, because our national conversation seems increasingly dominated by policy wonks and economists mired in technical details or by media people focusing on short-term personal maneuvers and scandals. However, from the 1960s through the 1980s, conservatives showed that a politics of broad social mobilization around clearly articulated values, not just narrow policy prescriptions, could move the center of national debate and reshape the landscape of politics. Now it is time for Americans who believe government has a piv12 | What Accessibility Can’t Do [3.231.146.172] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:59 GMT) otal role to play in building a just society to...