Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

1. Race and the Limits of Solidarity: American Welfare State Development in Comparative Perspective

chapter 1 Race and the Limits of Solidarity American Welfare State Development in Comparative Perspective robert c. lieberman The 1990s was not the ‹rst era of American welfare reform in the twentieth century. Three times before—during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society—Americans dramatically reshaped welfare policies, creating the familiar complex of programs that was reformed yet again in 1996. Perhaps the dominant theme of this history has been the deepening and increasingly troubling link between race and the politics of American social policy. The relationship between African Americans and the American welfare state has been a varied and changing one. Largely excluded from Progressive and New Deal policies of social provision, African Americans increasingly claimed rights to social bene‹ts, culminating in the War on Poverty and the expansion of welfare rights in the 1960s. Far from excluding African Americans and other minorities, these developments explicitly targeted attention and resources on problems of minority poverty and exclusion. In each of these episodes of reform, the status of African Americans in national politics has been crucial in shaping policy outcomes (Skocpol 1995a). In the Progressive Era, most African Americans lived in the South, where they were denied civil and political rights under the violent repression of Jim Crow segregation. Thus they were almost universally 23 ⠂ excluded from state-level Progressive social policies such as mothers’ pensions. The New Deal represented a major breakthrough both for national social policy and for the political status of African Americans. The Social Security Act of 1935 created the ‹rst permanent national welfare policies, and northern African Americans began to switch their political allegiance to the newly dominant Democratic party. But the major partner in the New Deal coalition was the white South, whose disproportionate power limited the New Deal’s capacity to include African Americans in social provision on equal terms. In the generation after the New Deal, however, African Americans both moved north in large numbers and mobilized a national social movement to demand the civil and political rights long promised but not yet ful‹lled. As that movement bore fruit in the 1960s, African Americans were able to use their newfound political status to demand greater access to existing welfare bene‹ts and new policies to promote equal opportunity. But the cruel irony of the Great Society is that these very policies fueled growing racial resentment and widened a burgeoning split in American welfare politics that divided white from black, middle- and working-class Americans from the poor, and cities from suburbs, leaving African Americans increasingly isolated—politically, socially, economically, and geographically —from the main currents of the American political economy. The pattern of twentieth-century reform suggests that a crucial question in understanding the fate of African Americans in the American welfare state is whether they have been part of the broad national political coalitions that are always necessary to achieve lasting policy reform. The terms on which African Americans participate in these coalitions have shaped welfare policies, particularly by shaping the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that those policies embody. These boundaries, in turn, affect the prospects for minority incorporation into social provision, whether as honorable bene‹ciaries or as marginal clients. These considerations , moreover, are not mere remnants of the past. The racial divide was at the very center of the politics of welfare reform in the 1990s, because of racialized perceptions and misperceptions of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other policies, racially divided opinions about the proper direction of the welfare system and the federal government’s role in social provision, and the shifting place of African Americans in electoral and party politics (Gilens 1999; Bobo and Smith 1994; Williams 1998). Thus in order to understand the politics of welfare reform in American politics in the 1990s and the prospects for minorities Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform 24 in the new American welfare regime, it is essential to understand the historical dynamics of race and the politics of welfare policy coalitions. Race is often held up as the essence of American exceptionalism, the single feature of American society and politics that, more than anything else, distinguishes the United States from other countries. Ira Katznelson (1981), for example, argues in City Trenches that racial (and ethnic) divisions inscribed in the urban landscape of the late nineteenth century account for the distinctive pattern of American working-class formation. Others point to racial and ethnic heterogeneity to explain the peculiarities of...