The Unworthy Poor

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked recently that, as president, he would focus on the problems of the great bulk of the American people rather than on the very poor, who enjoyed a “safety net.” Since Governor Romney seemed to think that the very poor, plus perhaps the very rich, constituted maybe 5% of the population, one might parse his comments to mean that he was thinking of disabled people of working age. That did not prevent his opponents from taking the occasion to portray him on one hand as a neo-Social Darwinist who hoped that the poor would die in the snow to reduce the surplus population and on the other as a guardian of the welfare state who believed that the 20th-century social safety net was sustainable and desirable. Frankly, the governor’s remarks were plainly made off the top of his head, and cannot reasonably be used to ascertain anything he might think about social policy in general or the care of the poor in particular. Such remarks are best used as hooks to hang speculation about points the governor might have made had he had any interest in the matter.

Editorial Note: Readers will have noted that although Mr. Romney has not been governor of anything for some time, he is nonetheless referred to as “Governor” above. The usage conforms to this blog’s policy of encouraging the restoration of honorifics before surnames in public discourse; it is good practice to normally refer to people who have held important public office with their last title. So, even people who are no longer associated with pubic institutions should still be referred to as “Senator,” Ambassador,” or “Prisoner 6754Xc5,” as the case may be.

As a rule, the people who care about the poor really should not design public institutions with them in mind. When you do, the result is often public services fit for indigents.

The most conspicuous example of this is mass-transportation policy. There is an argument to be made that rail-based urban transportation is not particularly efficient, but the fact is that people like trains. At any rate, people in nice suits can tolerate getting into a train or trolley in a suburb in the morning to come to a city center. Buses, on the other hand, tend to become a filter against the bourgeois. Middle-class people will take them out of necessity, but not after they can afford not to. Good transportation systems, in the sense of systems that are reasonably comfortable to use, do not force this choice. They are designed for the respectable; the unworthy benefit as an afterthought.

The same principle applies to health care systems and education. Governments might, for budgetary or cultural reasons, decide that these things should normally be provided by the market, with a public “safety-net” for people the market can’t serve. That decision means that you have decided to tolerate the formation of social castes. By and by, you will discover that the lower caste is not going to be frictionally small. It is going to be a large part, perhaps a plurality, of a society that is intransitive, not of a piece, whose members identify horizontally rather than vertically.

The Next American Nation by Michael Lind is a book I reviewed 17 years ago. (17 years!?!) Though I did not and don’t find the author’s views ideologically congenial, nonetheless the book is has held up depressingly well as description, if not necessarily as forecast. American “elites” really did decide at some point in the 1970s for efficiency over solidarity, with what results we see in the decline in income equality and the redistribution of insecurity downward.

“Elite” has to go into scare quotes. The search for the Responsible Parties tends to degenerate into political sloganeering. The silliest slogan is perhaps the Occupy Movement’s villainous 1%; to the extent, you can use the term “class” here, the group in question is more like 20%, and the Occupiers are members of it. Lind’s depiction of the Overclass is a better approximation in terms of size and ideology, but his model is still “populist.” He still assumes the existence of a people whose virtue is being outraged. Furthermore, his view of the Overclass may need updating.

Perhaps a more recent book I should read is Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which apparently deals with many of the issues in the Lind book (no honorific needed: “Lind” is an adjective here). I know the book only from reviews and editorials, like this one from David Brooks

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad….People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese…Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses…The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids…Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

The proportions of the total population in the upper group is about 20%, in the lower about 30%. Again, we are to some extent just seeing the return of older social patterns. In 18th-century England, there was a similar tendency for the lower orders (a majority of the population) to have informal family structures, only spotty connection with organized religion, and regrettable personal habits that involved gin, a cowboy rug,  and communicable diseases. Their betters, fearing with some reason their servants might murder them in their beds if they did not take matters in hand, then undertook to make cosmic busybodies of themselves in terms of social reform. By the middle of the 20th century, the campaign had produced remarkably egalitarian societies with high political morale. Within two decades the elites relaxed, perhaps believing that Spanish-speaking servants will be better behaved.

This attitude of nonchalance may not wholly misplaced. A less labor-intensive society does not require such a self-disciplined working class, particularly if the upper caste is large in absolute terms.

Where does this all lead? If you believe the Roman analogy, we are almost due for something like a post-Gracchan Restoration, which was a revolution tricked out as a conservative reaction. (The constitutional gimcrackery advocated by so much of the American Right smacks of what Sulla did to the Republican Constitution somewhat later.) Such events are nominally conservative, but they are in fact a case of one faction of Optimates leapfrogging over another.

So here is a paradox for the 2012 election: President Obama could be the forlorn conservative, standing astride the train tracks of history and crying “Halt!” to the Spengler Express.