The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle Over Guaranteed Income Policy (review)

Beautifully written and meticulously researched, The Failed Welfare Revolution is a strong and innovative contribution to contemporary welfare state literature. It is an engaging piece of historical sociology, a convincing example of the combinatory strength of institutional and cultural analysis, and a biting social critique, all wrapped in one.

Steensland picks up a largely forgotten political history: the rise and fall of Guaranteed Annual Income in America. From a mixed heritage of libertarian economists, left-wing critics and technocratic policy advisors, GAI almost made it into legislation, in the form of Richard Nixon’s ultimately failed Family Assistance Plan. Steensland carefully traces every step and turn in the transformation of GAI from lofty ideas to concrete political proposals. It is a process full of contradictions and paradoxes. Conservatives were as deeply divided on the issues as were liberals. Unexpected coalitions and fault lines emerged as different actors brought very different hopes and fears to bear on the GAI issue.

Steensland conducts his analysis from a cultural angle. He argues that what made GAI proposals potentially path-breaking was that they included in the same program all needy people, whether working or not, and regardless of whether they were considered “deserving” or not. If implemented, they could have broken the cultural stigmatization attached to welfare. The inclusion of “worthy” recipient groups would, in the long run, have made it impossible, or at least much harder, to castigate poor people as shiftless and lazy.

At the same time, it was exactly the threat that GAI proposals represented for deeply ingrained cultural categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that made for their undoing. Many conservatives were deeply skeptical about the “moral pollution” that would ensue from bringing the working poor into the same program as welfare recipients. In the South, this came with a racist tinge: concerns about a perceived lack of work ethic among blacks made GAI an unacceptable option. Here, Steensland takes issue with those who have seen the failure of GAI mainly in an economic light. It was not, he argues, because GAI was economically threatening that proposals encountered such resistance; it was because they were culturally threatening in challenging deeply held convictions about the sanctity of work and the moral status of the poor.

Firmly entrenched in the nooks and crannies of the U.S. Congress and federal government, enemies of GAI trapped and finally killed the proposal. In this they were helped by the passivity of potential friends of GAI. Steensland argues convincingly that most liberals failed to see the revolutionary potential of the proposal. They were concerned with benefit levels and the distribution of costs, and offered only lukewarm support for the Nixon plan. Organized labor failed to realize that the proposal was actually in the interest of the working class and not only for the benefit of welfare recipients.

The long-term fallout from the debate over GAI was a strong impetus for the conservative welfare backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. Arguments from the GAI debate about the failure of the welfare system got redressed as arguments for cutting benefit levels and putting new moral demands on those unable to support themselves in the labor market.

The book ends in two chapters. One chapter summarizes the substantive conclusions of the study, where Steensland delivers some interesting cultural framing lessons for would-be social reformers. The last chapter argues for bringing cultural analysis into mainstream welfare state research. Issues about categorization, framing, cognitive schemas and discourse deserve a more fundamental role than current mainstream research allows, and Steensland points out how cultural perspectives may shed new light on important welfare state issues.

Of course there are things to quibble about and extensions to ask for after reading the book. I am not as convinced as Steensland seems to be that the success of the Nixon plan would have made a fundamental difference for future policy developments. It is likely that the very same factors that...