Ideology and Public Policy: Antistatism in American Welfare State Transformation

Henry David Thoreau's influential essay "Civil Disobedience," published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: "I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—'That government is best which governs not at all.'. . . the character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way."¹ Thoreau's statement summarizes a central thesis in political theory, what has become a historical constant in the minds of researchers seeking to explain the development and parameters of the American welfare state. This thesis is that any power given to the government is subtracted from the liberty of the governed, a concept best captured by the term "antistatism."² Thus, Lipset contends that the United States is dominated by an encompassing liberal culture that honors private property, distrusts state authority, and holds individual rights sacred.³ Similarly, according to Huntington, Americans live by a creed that views government as the most dangerous embodiment of power.⁴ For Morone, American government is a "polity suspicious of its own state."⁵ Hartz, too, asserts that the master assumption is that "the power of the state must be limited."⁶

The idea of antistatism as a driving political force was first asserted by socialist theorists at the turn of the twentieth century to explain the seeming absence of working-class radicalism and the lack of a socialist movement or labor party in the United States. Then as the welfare state became the primary site of the civil functions of governments, antistatism became the preferred explanation of many historians and social scientists for why the American welfare state was slow to develop, why its array of programs was incomplete (no national health insurance or family allowances), and why the benefits granted were less generous than those of other countries.⁷ This argument has been a staple across all historical eras. In the Progressive Era, Lubove contends, proposals for state welfare programs failed because an entrenched ethos that "enabled groups of all kinds to exert an influence and seek their distinctive goals without resorting to the coercive powers of government."⁸ Then Jacobs argues, "When Medicare was formulated in the early 1960s, politicians and policy specialists responded both to the public's support for expanding health care and its uneasiness with direct and visible government regulation of the associated costs."⁹ In the 1990s, according to Skocpol, President Bill Clinton's plan for national health insurance was defeated by opponents who were able to convince middle-class citizens that Health Security was "a misconceived big government effort that might threaten the quality of U.S. health care."¹⁰

Although welfare state theorists imply that social programs are constructed around specific core values, they largely ignore how values get integrated into social policy outcomes. In this essay we first describe in a general way how ideology is embedded in conceptions of various welfare-state regime types and describe the particular portrayal of the United States as an archetypal "liberal" welfare state. We next consider various causal explanations regarding the proposed relationship between values and social policies. Finally, we compare the programmatic manifestations of ideology in the United States with two other "liberal" welfare states, Great Britain and Canada, to assess whether the American welfare state is more distinctively antistatist.

Our review of the historical record suggests that the American welfare state has never been as "exceptional" as is often suggested. Further, recent trends in welfare state restructuring toward what Gilbert has termed the "enabling state" (that is, one based on a market-oriented approach that seeks to promote labor force participation and encourage individual responsibility) have shifted social policy in the United States closer to other nations in character.¹¹ We conclude that, although antistatism frequently appears as a theme in political discourse, it does not represent an...