Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up

CHAPTER 4. THE POOR LAW, THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE NEW POLITICS OF REFORM

102  CHAPTER 4  THE POOR LAW, THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE NEW POLITICS OF REFORM When conservatives tell the story of counterrevolution, two themes invariably loom large. One is the moral failure of liberalism . The other is the power of conservative ideas. Nowhere do they come together more powerfully than in the story conservative intellectuals tell about the book that brought about the counterrevolution in welfare, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984).1 In the now legendary annals of counterrevolutionary triumph, the story begins with Murray as an obscure scholar toiling away at an equally obscure think tank known to only a very few as the Manhattan Institute, both on the verge of a major social policy breakthrough. He is a lone, clear-eyed numbers-cruncher, challenging a hopelessly liberal research establishment. Daring to think the unthinkable, he comes to the reams of social scientific data with a new set of questions and no stake in what the numbers reveal. What he learns is nevertheless a stunning revelation that smashes conventional wisdom. Welfare, not poverty, was the problem. Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty had actually made poverty more pathological, self-perpetuating, and entrenched. All this could be told through the (basically flawed, as critics showed) statistical correlations , but it was the story behind the numbers that no one else had ever dared tell. Liberals had set the poverty pathology in motion in exactly 1964, with morally permissive policies that blamed the system, undermined individual responsibility and self-reliance, and effectively created incentives for poor people to choose unemployment , single motherhood, and welfare rather than subject themselves to the natural discipline of the low-wage workforce. Murray told this story in what would become a famous “thought experiment” involving a mythical couple named Phyllis and George. It was with such pithy policy stories, legend has it, and with the help of a scrappy publicity effort that Charles Murray is said to have changed the conversation overnight. Those, and Murray ’s startling conclusion—end welfare, and with it the scourge that the permissive liberal welfare state had visited on the poor.2 As an object lesson in the post–liberal politics of knowledge, the story of Murray’s book does highlight important themes. Losing Ground did cause a major stir in policy circles and did establish Murray and his Manhattan Institute sponsors as figures to be reckoned with. It did help to make ending welfare a part of the policy conversation, even if as the unimaginably radical, mean-spirited right-wing extreme.3 It did reflect the conscious and explicit injection of ideology into expertise that would become a hallmark of the right-wing “advocacy tanks.”4 The story has also been thoroughly absorbed into conservative movement culture, where Murray’s book provides the proof that ideas do have consequences. One recent publication, using it to punctuate the point, referred to Losing Ground as a “bible of sorts for reformers in the Reagan and Bush Administrations.”5 As the story of conservatism’s capture of the welfare issue, however , the heroic saga of Losing Ground is as basically flawed as Murray ’s statistical analysis turned out to be. For one thing, Murray was hardly a voice in the political wilderness and Losing Ground was hardly based on a new idea. Indeed, it was based on questions endlessly asked and answered over two centuries of poor law reform .6 Does welfare make poor people lazy and idle and begging for more? Does it enable the poor to breed without suffering the natural consequences of hunger and privation? Most recently, they had been asked and for all intents and purposes answered in the populist antiwelfare politics of the newly resurgent conservative right. Losing Ground, then, owed its success not to a brilliant insight, and not merely to a brilliant public relations effort, but as well to Poor Law and Politics of Reform 103 the larger conservative movement and to its ability, with growing momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, to gain control of and reframe the essential terms of the social question, and from there of the welfare debate. Murray, of course, was identifiably a part of that movement as an intellectual and a fellow of Antony Fisher’s free market Manhattan Institute. The ground he stood on, however, was as firmly based in electoral, and reform, and especially in movementbuilding politics as in the more esoteric...