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3. The Conservative Case against Learned Helplessness
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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98 THREE The Conservative Case against Learned Helplessness O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded? Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Unguarded Gates” Barely two months after Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration in January 1981, his secretary for Health and Human Services , Richard Schweiker, began purging the Social Security disability rolls of people claiming pain as their disability. Reagan waged his promised war on welfare and big government on several fronts, marrying heated rhetoric with social policy. Reagan once quipped dryly that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are, “Hi, I’m from the government , and I’m here to help.” In a previous run for president, Reagan had turned one woman—Linda Taylor—into a running commentary on welfare , labeling her as a “welfare queen driving a Cadillac” because of her extravagant fraud.1 The charge became a recurring motif, part of the Reagan formula for vilifying liberals and the federal programs they had built. In his inaugural address, he continued to press the case—insisting that “in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem ; government is the problem.” Once in office, Reagan instructed Schweiker to escalate a review of all disability claimants—a policy that his predecessor Jimmy Carter had begun. People claiming pain as the source of their chronic disability came under special scrutiny at Health and Human Services, a department that had been created when the former Health, Education, and Welfare department was split into two—Education and HHS. For neoconservatives, the pain complainant was close kin to Taylor. The affront was not only THE CONSERVATIVE CASE AGAINST LEARNED HELPLESSNESS 99 the fraud itself but also the gullibility of liberal government in seeking to “help” citizens—which, they claimed, only fed dependence. Consistent with this worldview, HHS became the place where (as one commenter noted) the Reagan revolution “most often collides with the modern social welfare state.” This was a pivotal moment, a fulcrum in American pain politics—a time when the accusation of pain fraud figured prominently in the critique of liberalism and when conservatives promised that they had better ideas for managing people in pain.2 Schweiker and his Social Security commissioner, John Svahn, shared the conservative view of liberalism as ideologically bankrupt. They believed in the promise of a nation restored by the conservative principles of a smaller federal government, lower taxes, more free enterprise, and fewer regulations on business and industry. Svahn embraced the challenge of “weed[ing] out ineligible Social Security beneficiaries.” Over in the White House’s Office of Policy Development, Peter Ferrara feared that vague complaints of pain had become a subterfuge for the growth of government. “Over the years, the disability benefit provisions were significantly over-liberalized as compared with the original concept of paying such benefits only for truly permanent and total disability ,” he wrote. In his view, the decades-long expansion of disability benefits told the story of liberal excesses. Now was the time for a change of course.3 The Reagan White House portrayed its disability reforms not as a revolution but as a conservative restoration—as Ferrara put it, to“change back the definition of disability so that it would rest solely on medical grounds and would not take into account vague . . . factors, which are so difficult to determine in a consistent manner.” Here was one hallmark of Reagan’s formula. His adherents imagined that there had once been a time when objectivity was sacred. Their agenda was merely, they said, a return to these former times. For those frustrated with liberal governance, the appeal to objective reason resonated. A conservative reform would mean creating consistency across disability cases, relying on objective medical evidence rather than subjective complaints, and removing undeserving cheats and frauds from the welfare rolls, all while attacking the growth of government and restoring an old order that, they alleged, had been corrupted by liberalism. Ferrara would have liked nothing better than to get rid of Social Security entirely, but scrapping the New Deal contract [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:59 GMT) 100 PAIN between state and citizen was a tall order.4 Instead, the agenda of Reagan ’s first term became a slower, more methodical assault—to empty the program of illegitimate claimants. Over the next three years, HHS’s review of the program systemically removed nearly half a million people from the disability rolls, using newly conservative pain standards to weed out pain fraud. For...