The truth about welfare reform

Abstract

Why has 'welfare' become so focal in American politics? The answer, we think, is that the organized right made welfare and welfare recipients into a foil to cover their real targets: (1) the larger programs, including medicaid and unemployment insurance which benefit far larger numbers of Americans, and social security which benefits almost all Americans; and (2) the political culture undergirding those programs, with its implicit ideals of social cohesion and mutual responsibility. There were good reasons for this strategy. The people on welfare were already marginalized, and vulnerable. Paupers have always been a despised caste in western societies. Add to this longstanding distaste the fact that, in the wake of the mass migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north and the protests that ensued in the 1960s, welfare had become a disproportionately black and Hispanic program (although the plurality of recipients were non-Hispanic whites.) The presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace registered this fact and demonstrated the political uses of racism even in the north. 'Welfare' became a code-word to evoke and mobilize rising white racial hatreds.