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Jacob S. Hacher, Suzanne Mettler, andJoe Soss Chapter I The New Politics of Inequality: A Policy~Ccntered Perspective Compared to the generation that grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Americans coming of age today confront a world of greatly expanded possibilities. The overt forms of discrimination that plagued women and racial minorities since the nation's founding have now been mostly rendered a thing of the past. The American public has become more tolerant of diversity and more comfortable with group differences. And status in American society is now less closely tied to race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation than it was even a few decades ago. Yet this era of new possibilities has also turned out to be a time of deepening disparities . As older forms of hierarchy have receded, economic inequality has intensified sharply. The equalizing trends that prevailed in the decades after World War II reversed course in the 1970s. Since that time, most Americans have seen their incomes grow only slowly, while the assets and incomes of the very richest have spiraled upward to new heights. Alongside this growing inequality, Americans have also learned to live with greater economic insecurity, as jobs and families have changed in ways that undercut traditional sources of income protection and intensify social risks. Although those disadvantaged by growing inequality and insecurity defy simple characterization, historically marginalized groups remain disproportionately represented among the impoverished and insecure, despite the expansion of civil rights. Americans today also confront a new world of politics and public policy. Increasingly bitter partisan struggles have produced a broad and deep restructuring of government 's role in relation to the economy and society. The welfare reform legislation of 1996, which redefined the purposes of public assistance and ended entitlements for the poorest Americans, is perhaps the most prominent example. Yet it is only the tip of a larger iceberg. Revisions to tax law, labor regulations, and social policies-often made beneath the radar screen of public awareness-have combined to produce changes in nearly every sphere of government action affecting economic inequality and insecurity in the United States. These changes have not had a single or consistent effect. Some have actually increased the generosity of public benefits for the less advantaged and those at risk of economic loss. But, as we shall see, most have reduced government's role as a source of opportunity and security for poor and middle-class Americans, while expanding the scope and size of benefits for the well off. This book is an attempt to come to grips with these changes-to make sense of them and explore their implications for the future. It is also an effort to put these changes in a larger explanatory context, advancing a new perspective on the transformation of the 4 RemakingAmerica American polity and economy that places the evolution of American public policy at the very heart of the story. The premise of this book is that, in the space of roughly a generation, the role of government in the lives of Americans citizens has changed fundamentally, in ways that are not wholly appreciated in contemporary scholarly and popular commentary. The goal of this book is to unearth this broad restructuring and show how it has both reflected and propelled a major shift in the basic economic and political relationships that connectand , increasingly, divide-Americans. The aim of Remaking America, in short, is to explore how recent political and policy changes affect not just economic inequality and insecurity but also the character of democratic citizenship in the United States today. To pursue this ambitious goal, this book develops a distinctive perspective on the study of public policy-one that breaks sharply with the two most common approaches to policy development. In the first of these approaches, found in standard political analyses , policies are seen mainly as outcomes to be explained. In the second approach, standard in policy analyses, policies are seen as causes of social and economic outcomes, the forces that affect societal phenomena such as poverty, income inequality, and the like. This division of labor between political analysis and policy analysis has value. But it comes at a substantial cost. In particular, the prevailing organization of scholarship has discouraged attention to the politicalconsequences of public policy. On both sides of the divide , scholars routinely fail to ask how policies, once established, become part of the political process and transform it by their presence. Thus, in most efforts to understand inequality and democracy in America...

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