Wolfgang von Skeptik

The Bipartisan Banishment Of The Poor

IN THE AFTERMATH OF the presidential debates, my two best friends and I were discussing how none of the candidates had said anything genuinely significant about measures to combat the stubborn problem of chronic poverty in the United States – this despite the profoundly damning data that shows today’s poverty is not only growing with near-record rapidity but is beyond the reach of the ephemeral economic recovery. My friends, a married couple with whom I have been kinfolk-close for well into four decades, are John Kerry supporters, and I will of course vote for George Bush, but we all have long life-histories of working to ease the plight of the poor, each in our own way, and though we often disagree on methodology, we all wholeheartedly agree that one of the most telling measures of a society is how well it cares for its miserables. All of us believe in the wellspring Judaeo-Christian notion that, “as you do unto the least of these, so you do unto God,” with the result we regard the absence of the poverty-issue from the electoral debate as a symptom of grave deterioration in the social contract – the often unwritten stitching that presumably binds America together.

As I said somewhere – I don’t remember now whether it was on this blog or in some comment I posted to Lucianne.com – during the vice-presidential debate the only difference between the candidates’ approaches to poverty was one of style. Dick Cheney spoke of poverty as if he were reciting distasteful crime statistics or perhaps an exceptionally uneventful agricultural forecast, while John Edwards mustered up the kind of Southron passion Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement once made nationally famous with his “how long, Lord, O how long” speech on behalf of John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic Convention. But neither candidate said anything new or even added any insights to the ever-more-faltering national dialogue on the subject, with the result that Cheney’s lack of enthusiasm came off as indifference even as Edward’s passion was reduced to meaningless histrionics. The presidential debates were equally unfulfilling: George Bush predictably endorsed trickle-down economics and faith-based charity, while John Kerry predictably touted income redistribution – taxing the rich to build ever bigger bureaucracies to oversee the poor.

Though it is obscured by the electoral hurly-burly, in truth there is merit to each of these proposals.

In a normal economic recovery, the trickle-down theory is demonstrably valid: note what occurred during the 1990s. But today’s recovery is abnormal for a number of reasons, not the least the wage-shrinkage due mostly to outsourcing. And then there is the wild-card effect of skyrocketing petroleum prices: even those of us who are economic dunces – as I surely am – recognize the rising cost of fuel may yet flush the whole recovery down the proverbial commode. Moreover, given the radical reduction in available revenues that is already the byproduct of the federal deficit – a contraction that a new recession would multiply by several orders of magnitude – expanding faith-based charity may be the only possible response. Some of America’s churches have been leaders in charity and social justice projects since the birth of the nation. And there is compelling evidence they do this work far more effectively (and economically) than the sluggishly vast, sullenly unresponsive and manifestly parasitic government welfare bureaucracy – which is above all else a latter-day WPA-type jobs program for radical feminist agitators. But there are other churches – especially fundamentalist churches – that should not be allowed to run an ant farm, much less an orphanage, a food bank or a soup kitchen.

And there are some brands of poverty that are so huge and unyielding, they are beyond the means of any church or even consortium of churches to ameliorate. This is the sort of poverty that plagues Cleveland, where the corporate overlords of the city’s industrial base outsourced all production to the Third World and abandoned something like 35 percent of the workforce to what amounts to permanent unemployment. The result of this Big Business irresponsibility is a genuine depression: a depression that, though local, is actually worse than the Great Depression, in which the national unemployment rate topped out at around 25 percent. And just as it took Franklin Delano Roosevelt to New Deal us out of that unspeakable disaster (and thereby save America from both Communism and Nazism), it will take a similar pragmatist with similar programs to be the salvation of Cleveland and all the other places like it. Of necessity, such programs involve both income redistribution and the creation or expansion of government bureaucracies – there is no other way to get such a huge number of people so quickly back to work at living wages – but perhaps the proposals can be designed to minimize bureaucratic recalcitrance: the government-employee version of exactly same moral imbecility that is expressed by corporate outsourcing.

I realize what I have written will be regarded as rank heresy by people on both the Right and the Left, but I have undertaken this blog with a promise to myself (and to you my readers) that it will be above all an honest recounting of reality as I see it, or at least as best as I can understand it, hopefully complete with useful insights. That said, I cannot be anything but what my own experience dictates I be. I have seen some of the churches of America work wonders in their attempts to cope with poverty, just as I have seen others perpetrate genuine horrors, and my experience with government is equally mixed. I have witnessed first hand some of the miracles of the New Deal – especially how it lifted much of the Appalachian South out of poverty. My own late father’s long career in various aspects of the housing industry began with a New Deal laborer’s job in one of FDR’s then-radical experiments of priming the private-industry pump with federal dollars; within two years my father had been promoted from a Long Island construction site to a Manhattan executive suite and a short time later was troubleshooting America’s first pre-fabricated housing plants in Florida and Virginia. This was the New Deal at its best: not socialism, but overt (rather than covert) government assistance to business. Conversely I have both seen and experienced in person what happens when benign government intent is perverted to malignance by ideology and hatred: note in this context what feminists and both Islamic and Christian fundamentalists have done to local school systems, and what matrifascists with their hateful quota-mongering have done to social services throughout America.

But on top of all that, I believe the collective values of the American public have deteriorated radically, so that the amoral and thus ultimately vicious selfishness that was once the defining pathology of a few Wall Street robber barons has now become the near-majority ethos of the nation. This is the real reason why there was no genuine discussion of poverty issues in this presidential election campaign: a huge segment of the electorate simply does not give a damn. Indeed the difference can be seen in the microcosm of the contrasting attitudes of the workers of my father’s time, who whether in government or the private sector believed firmly in giving a whole day’s effort for a full day’s pay, and the employees of today – especially the bureaucrats – for whom malingering and subversion is all too often second nature. The people who work in the good and effective private and faith-based charities are an absolute exception to this ever-more-applicable rule: they are there not for job security or to glory in nearly omnipotent power to indoctrinate underlings in revolutionary ideologies; they are there instead only because of their fierce commitment to their work and their equally strong sense of obligation to the global version of an old Boy Scout notion: that you leave the campsite in better shape than you found it. Thus it may be that faith-based or private charity is our only hope: the only realm to which the poor can dependably turn for aid that will neither exploit nor belittle nor propagandize them into endless dependency.

Some of the broader implications of this topic – particularly the attitudes of America’s religious leaders, and the feeling of the poor themselves that their treatment by the presidential campaign is yet another form of banishment – are discussed here in a revealing report on Beliefnet.com, to which a tip of my hat: this is the essay that prompted me to write the above.

Of course the one potential flaw in the entire faith-based charity proposal is radical Islam. God help us if in the name of battling poverty we allow the jihadist Muslims license to wage their 1400-year war against civilization via the institutions of American liberty.

Posted by Loren at October 28, 2004 04:09 AM