The Essential Ellen Willis

Ending Poor People As We Know Them (Village Voice, December 1994)

323 In the Sunday Times’s Week in Review, Jason DeParle points out a central contradiction in the discussion of welfare reform: “It is hard to imagine a less popular word than welfare. . . . But shift the conversation to the fate of ‘poor children,’ and the psychic landscape is transformed. . . . These twin forces— disdain for welfare, concern for poor children—are the seismic forces beneath the debate over public assistance. . . . It is the age-old conundrum of welfare reform: The more one seeks to punish the parent, the greater the risks to the child.” He quotes last week’s New York Times/CBS poll: 48 per cent of respondents supported cuts in “government spending on welfare,” while 13 per cent called for an increase; yet asked about “spending on programs for poor children ,” 47 per cent advocated more spending, with only 9 per cent wanting less. DeParle (whose Times Magazine cover story profiling a former welfare recipient appeared the same day) clearly sees in this contradiction an opening to the left. He implies that if the debate can be reframed to focus on children rather than welfare, Americans might be convinced that the real issue is not how to end welfare but how to end poverty. I wish it were true, but my own observation of the psychic landscape suggests otherwise. Americans are ambivalent about much of the right’s program, yet are more and more influenced by the right’s cultural imagination, in which the end of welfare means the return of domestic tranquility and order, the defense of Judeo-Christian morality against a dark outlaw class that represents all the heresies of the ’60s. Filtered through that vision, compassion for poor children—inevitably mixed with fear of the teenagers and adults they will become—easily slides into fatalistic pity for damned souls who should never Ending Poor People As We Know Them 324 THE NINETIES have been born, or into fantasies of somehow rescuing the kids from their hopeless parents. The welfare debate needs to be seen in a larger context: ever since the election , the media have been promoting a right-wing myth of cultural counterrevolution that, despite its ambiguous connection to the voters’ actual intentions, is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not a question of partisanship. Conservatives are basically right about the press—it is an integral part of a cultural establishment that’s essentially liberal and secular on social issues. For the most part, the mainstream media are nervous about the right, which keeps breaking their rules of Civil Discourse, i.e., noblesse oblige and multicultural politeness. Yet as their centrist self-definition struggles with the unconscious erotic attraction of energy and power, the center drifts steadily toward the vortex. Time, for instance, recently ran a cover depicting a scowling Gingrich, in top hat, striped pants, and goatee, as “Uncle Scrooge.” “’Tis the season to bash the poor,” the cover type reads. “But is Newt Gingrich’s America really that heartless?” No, the story inside argues: “. . . in their unbridled willingness to go after immigrants and the poor, the new House firebrands may be getting out ahead of the public mood.” But forget about the words; the image melds Gingrich with an America embodied in a stubborn, cranky geezer raring to, in the machoid lingo of the day, kick some ass. Just as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” persona became—contrary to its protagonist’s conscious intention—a Reaganite icon, Uncle Scrooge is easy to imagine on a conservative bumper sticker. The trajectory of welfare politics offers the most striking evidence of how the deep, unconscious appeal of the right’s world view drives the framing of political issues, not the other way around. Consider Newsweek’s cover on “The Orphanage: Is It Time to Bring It Back?” A box next to the headline informs us that this question refers to “The Welfare Debate.” The illustration is a photographed assemblage of short-haired, poignant-looking little white kids holding out their hands to the viewer and wearing what looks like white nightgowns, or are they choir robes? What do these cherubs have to do with the welfare debate? Not much, in practical terms; a lot, symbolically speaking. As originally floated by Charles Murray and other conservatives, orphanages were simply an answer to the bleeding-heart question, “If you throw women off welfare and they can’t find work, what happens to their kids?” If taking children...