Lost across the political spectrum amid the debate over how to eradicate poverty is the deeper question of whether or not poverty is even eradicable in the United States. The rhetoric of poverty wields substantial power over the terms on which we attempt to fight it. Liberals blindly bear the mantle of Johnson’s war — and the naïve assumption that poverty can be defeated — while conservatives exploit that proverbial blind spot. Molding a new narrative of American poverty could break this longstanding power dynamic, which ultimately stands to the detriment of the poor. If liberals reframe the lexical parameters of their poverty discourse, they may seize genuine opportunities to improve the daily lives of the poor on a bipartisan basis. They need only to reject the verbal flourish at the heart of this partisan feud: Johnson’s unconditional declaration of war on poverty itself, which has long misrepresented the inescapable structural relationship between poverty and American capitalism. Johnson’s portrait of poverty as a tangible enemy laid the foundations for cuts to social programs later enacted by conservatives.
Johnson deployed a robust social safety net, hoping to uproot the conditions that afflict the poor. The War on Poverty began with the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which most notably created Operation Head Start and was followed soon after by the expansion of Social Security and the enactment of Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. With a half-century of history now in the books, ample evidence suggests the triumph of these efforts in alleviating — but not eliminating — the burdens of the poor. A recent study conducted by Columbia University researchers estimates that food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, housing subsidies and unemployment benefits alone lift 13 percent of the population — nearly 40 million Americans — out of poverty. But the specter of the official poverty rate, measured at 15 percent in 2014 — a number unchanged from 1994, 1984 and 1964 — casts a shadow of doubt over the legitimacy of the welfare state.
When the War on Poverty proved unwinnable, liberals had every opportunity to become as jaded with this war as they did with the one in Southeast Asia. And any strategy predicated on winning this poverty war not only misses the point, but necessarily invokes the specter of losing. When L.B.J.’s social safety net failed to measurably reduce poverty, President Ronald Reagan took the opportunity to dismantle huge swathes of it. Nearly a decade after the War was declared, Reagan offered the famous jibe “In the ‘60s we waged a war on poverty and poverty won.” Quite deliberately, Reagan integrated his vision for shrinking the federal government with Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty.
Through little more than a brilliant rhetorical turn, he achieved a seismic ideological shift. The reasoning he pitched to the American people was simple: If poverty was indeed, as Johnson had asserted, surmountable, and two decades of high government expenditure had failed to surmount it, then something else must be to blame — perhaps, Reagan indicated, the poor themselves. The effect was a reimagining of poverty as a byproduct of human nature and an individual, moral failing.
Reagan solidified his rhetorical shift by transforming the image of public welfare from small, white, rural families to urban communities of color. The racialization of public assistance, coupled with the widely propagated myth of the “welfare queen,” contributed to the ease with which Reagan gutted several of Johnson’s programs. These cuts provide modern liberals with a crucial lesson: Even simple changes in discourse, particularly when reframing opposing ideology, can have immense power.
The implication at the core of Reagan’s thesis holds true. Poverty is in the nature of something — but it’s not human nature. Rather, it seems to be in the bones of capitalism, which today cannot be found without some degree of structural poverty. Look no further than the lexicon Americans use to describe the legend that capitalism purports: the archetypal “rags to riches” story that forms the core of conservative poverty policy. For there to be riches, there must be rags. The adoption of this social mobility paradigm may explain why lower-income voters often choose not to vote for politicians willing to provide them with immediate government assistance. A blue-collar worker near the poverty line and in pursuit of the American Dream would often rather reward a millionaire — and dream of becoming one. We are consigned to the inevitability of poverty. If this is true, the War on Poverty is unwinnable by nature.
A revisionist’s take on the original Johnson fable — viewing poverty as an inevitable consequence of capitalism instead of a defeatable enemy — is ripe for use in contemporary liberal rhetoric. But today, even the staunchest of liberals refuse to make this argument, opting instead to insist that the war can still be won. Submission hardly makes for sexy politics, and few politicians ever prove willing to wave the white flag. By declaring war on poverty, Johnson confined liberals to an untenable position — they refuse to surrender, even when it might be a prudent policy for the sake of helping America’s poor. Call it the Johnson Paradox: L.B.J. inspired us to wage a war that, once initiated, gives us little hope of a resolution.
President Bill Clinton’s welfare policies exemplified the chokehold of the Johnson Paradox on liberals. Under Clinton’s watch, the workfare experiments of the 1980s culminated in the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, “ending welfare as we know it.” Decried as a shameful blow to the poor by the left, Clinton’s reform package replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a cash assistance program used as income support, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a work assistance program aimed at boosting employment. TANF imposed rigorous work requirements and lifetime limits on federal welfare recipients. But TANF may have had more to do with politics than poverty. Two numbers reveal its wild political success. The first is the percentage of state budget dollars allocated to cash assistance for needy families, which declined from 77 percent to 44 percent between 1997 and 2002, and the second is the 379 electoral votes that carried Clinton to victory during his 1996 re-election campaign.
Clinton’s brand of “third way” liberalism was itself paradoxical — in order to survive, he was forced into illiberal policies that, following Reagan, cut social welfare spending dramatically. Of children with family incomes below 50 percent of the poverty line, TANF lifted only 23 percent out of deep poverty in 2005, a number that reached 64 percent with AFDC. Antipoverty advocates stand at a crossroads. They must choose between the Reagan narrative of a lazy, idle poor or, taking a page from his book, reframing the poverty discourse entirely. If American voters are to care about poverty, they must first care for the poor. To reconstruct the empathy for destitute Americans that has slowly eroded since the Johnson era, liberals should tell a new story, one that finds poverty in the nature of human systems, not in the nature of humans.
The rhetorical shift should be subtle and consensus-building, rather than partisan and exclusionary. Liberals must stop conflating compromise with giving away the farm, and hone their efforts in on a policy realm with broad, bipartisan appeal: early childhood development and education.
Early childhood development programs offer disadvantaged students and their families educational resources, health screenings and parental counseling services. By expanding Johnson’s Head Start initiatives and universalizing pre-kindergarten, liberals would subtly telegraph the correct message about welfare: Because poverty seems to be coupled with capitalism, a person’s economic status may depend more on the circumstances of their birth than on their own failings.
Moreover, investing in early childhood development appeals across the political spectrum. The left would do well to emphasize the work of Nobel Laureate James Heckman, who points to the provision of preschool services for disadvantaged children as a rare convergence of social fairness and economic efficiency. With child poverty at 22 percent, liberals should set aside their warmongering ways and allocate their resources towards incremental progress.
Well-intentioned leftists actually nurture poverty by refusing to acknowledge that it can be found in the nature of capitalism. Replacing the stale language of war with a fresh and more accurate narrative would not betray core liberal principles. On the contrary, it would mean seizing opportunities for real, if gradual, progress. Government may never declare definitive victory over poverty, as Johnson hoped it could. The poor may never extinguish their own condition, as Reagan hoped they would. Still, there is hope for a future in which the progressive movement inspires bipartisan action that, instead of aiming to defeat poverty, tackles it one step at a time.
Henry Knight ’16 is a potential comparative literature concentrator and Interviews Director at BPR.
Art by Haley Moen