The End of Liberalism: Narrating Welfare's Decline, from the Moynihan Report (1965) to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996)

Between 1965 and the end of the century, welfare--that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)--expanded dramatically; came under attack from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; and then, in the 1990s, was virtually eliminated as a federal program through legislation that had broad, bipartisan support. Throughout that process of growth and declension, social scientists played central roles in shaping perceptions of welfare, most significantly by examining the impact of welfare on the work ethic, on family structure, on gender relations, on poverty, and on inner-city, black communities. This is an enormously complex story, and I have engaged it by focusing on four influential texts, each by a prominent social scientist: Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), otherwise known as the Moynihan Report; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1982); Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978); and David T. Ellwood's Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (1988). Although this approach inevitably oversimplifies somewhat, it also makes possible a more intensive critical reading of these key historical documents.

The story the documents tell is the story of the decline of liberalism, tracked and facilitated by the social sciences. The story of the decline begins with the psychological, therapeutic, and historical perspective of the Moynihan Report--liberal but, even then, cautious. It continues in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when psychological and historical understandings of the welfare experience and of human nature give way in the work of Anderson and Murray to a very different set of understandings, based on economics, the marketplace, and the transcendent value of work. Its concluding chapter takes place in the midst of the Reagan presidency, when a troubled and confused liberalism, represented here in the work of Ellwood, abandons its faith.

The Politics of the Therapeutic

The Negro Family (1965) appeared just as the civil rights movement was negotiating the turn to "black power." Not only was sociologist and Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan aware of the importance of that moment, but his Report was very much a response to its exigencies. Moynihan feared a revolution based on rising expectations, as blacks turned from the quest for legal equality and equal opportunity to another quest, more threatening to the society: this one for equality of results as a group. Moynihan did not say that this goal was wrongly conceived (although he did argue that it was different from, and essentially beyond, the traditional "white" understanding of equality); indeed, he seemed forthright in declaring that the nation must invest itself in the achievement of that goal. "The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution," he wrote, "is to make certain that equality of results will now follow." Moynihan's next words reflected the deep anxiety that underlay the Report. "If we do not," he wrote, "there will be no social peace in the United States for generations." ¹

Given the dire consequences that Moynihan predicted would follow from a failure to produce "equality of results," it is remarkable how little the Report is concerned with results of any kind. Most of the document is, of course, an indictment of the "crumbling," disorganized, dysfunctional, and pathological Negro family. ² Although the title calls for "national action," none is advocated. The Report argues that because the Negro family is disorganized, blacks will inevitably be frustrated in their search for equality, implying that the black family must be repaired and brought back to health before progress toward the goal of equality of results can be made. On that level, the Moynihan Report seems to be less a road map to black equality than a roadblock. While ostensibly committed to the...