Soc Pol-2008-Mayer-154-81

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V I C T O R I A M A Y E R

Crafting a New ConservativeConsensus on WelfareReform: Redefining

Citizenship, Social Provision,and the Public/Private Divide

Abstract

This article traces the development of conservative welfare dis-course in the United States, beginning in the 1970s when a newcohort of conservative intellectuals re-articulated previously com-

peting social and economic projects in ways that allowed their proponents to support a common welfare reform agenda. I analyzehow these writers used race and gender images associated with cat-egories from American political tradition to re-imagine citizenshipand to shift the public/ private boundary. In conclusion, I notehow this new conservative reform project displaced the liberal understanding of citizenship that had anchored the entitlement to

public assistance and promoted the simultaneous communitizationand marketization of public welfare institutions.

Summer 2008 Pages 154–181 doi:10.1093/sp/jxn007# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,please e-mail: [email protected] Access publication May 2, 2008

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Introduction

When President Clinton signed the Personal ResponsibilityWork Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, twenty

years of expansionary changes in federal programs for poor familieswon by social liberals from the 1950s through the early 1970s wereswept away and the door closed on efforts to make cash assistance asocial right within the United States. By eliminating the entitlementto welfare benefits and implementing a new federal block grant,federal policy-makers authorized state and local governments torequire poor mothers to submit to new government regulation of their domestic lives and to work or engage in work-related activitiesin order to receive assistance.

This legislation marked the culmination of over twenty years of political theorizing and strategizing by actors opposed to priorwelfare expansions. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century whenliberals dominated debates, the 1980s saw a renewed conservativemovement that proved more adept at harnessing the discontent trig-gered by economic and social instability to effect welfare reform.Yet conservatives could play this role only by overcoming internaldisagreements between free market proponents seeking to reduce thesize of the welfare state and social conservatives eager to use the

state to re-regulate race and gender relations destabilized by the newsocial movements.Historical studies have produced rich accounts of how free

market liberals and proponents of historic race and gender hierar-chies restricted the development of an American welfare state untilthe 1930s (Orloff 1988; Skowronek 1982). The way federal policy-makers addressed social conservatives’ concerns by incorporatingexisting race and gender relations into the early welfare state pro-grams has also been well documented (Amott 1990; Gordon 1994;

Lieberman 1998, Quadagno 1994). When liberal policy-makers,pressed by the new social movements, moved to protect minorityrights and expand access to social provision, they rekindledresistance to the welfare state among both groups of conservativesbut were able to benefit from a split among conservatives overthe Nixon Administration’s welfare reform plan. Prompted byfree market advocates, Nixon proposed to replace AFDC with amodified negative income tax (the Family Assistance Plan [FAP]).This neoliberal program garnered support from social liberals and

free-market proponents, but because it would have reduced localofficials’ capacity to regulate race and gender relations, socialconservatives in Congress opposed the plan. This division in

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conservative ranks, combined with some liberal skepticism, pre-vented the FAP from being passed.

Detailed and nuanced treatments of this earlier period of USwelfare politics have been produced by Amenta (1998), Lieberman

(1998), and Poole (2006) among others. This article takes up thestory from there, tracing how a new cohort of conservative intellec-tuals sought to bridge these competing economic and social projects.To make clear the political challenges and the strategies theydeployed to surmount them, I first situate them in the discursive andinstitutional context of the 1960s and early 1970s. Here I followGeorge Steinmetz’s suggestion that Esping-Andersen’s concept of welfare regime be expanded to encompass social policies and accom-panying “intellectual and cultural elements” (1993, 41) as well as

Adams and Padamsee (2001) who stress the importance of signifyingprocesses, subjects interpolated by such processes, strategies, andsanctions. Policy paradigms are “potentially mobile templates thatcan in principle be transplanted, may coexist with other, partiallyconflicting logics, and may be abandoned or transmuted into newparadigms of social regulation” (2001, 6). I refer to these as “policylogics” to leave open the possibility that political actors may joinconflicting logics into a single policy regime.

I identify three competing policy logics shaping the discourse sur-

rounding the Nixon Administration’s FAP: a social conservativelogic of behavioral regulation, a neoliberal logic of market freedom,and a social liberal logic of entitlement. Each logic is tied to a dis-tinctive set of rhetorical and normative categories in American pol-itical culture. I show how the legal scholar Charles Reich, on theleft, and economists Fredrick Hayek and Milton Friedman, on theright, fit into this model and why partisan positions did not thenmap neatly onto these separate logics. Although liberal policyexperts also differed (O’Connor 2001), I focus on the conservative

actors, since they play a much larger role in shaping the recentwelfare reform agenda.

I then turn to the evolution of conservative reform discourse fromthe end of the 1970s to the late 1980s, analyzing how conservativeintellectuals modified legacies of meaning to craft a new consensusjustifying a shift away from social provision as a citizenship entitle-ment. These opponents of social programs found new ways toexpress resistance to racial integration in discourses of support forpatriarchal family values and the Protestant work ethic. By conflat-

ing class and racial identities and tying them to particular genderrelations, these intellectuals broke the association between freemarket liberalism and social liberalism that had earlier divided con-servatives. Re-defining the goal of social programs as preparing

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mothers for employment and citizenship by fixing their moraldeficiencies, this discursive innovation permitted the reconciliationof free market and social conservative agendas, facilitating enlist-ment of public support.

Although conservatives were thus able to re-align their once-divided agendas, they still disagreed about the proper nature of thenew poverty institutions. Free market proponents sought increasedmarket coordination of social provision, whereas social conserva-tives envisioned increased community involvement. Ultimately theyresolved these differences through a synthetic approach that pro-moted both “marketizing” and “communitizing” the network of state bureaucracies. Marketization here stands for the shift in socialpolicy and institutional organization to conform to norms and prac-

tices that govern market contracts and labor markets, and communi-tization designates the transfer of state regulatory authority tocommunity associations, with the concomitant re-organization of poverty policy according to the norms and practices of privatecharity.

The New Consensus (Novak et al. 1987) marks a turning pointafter which both communitization and marketization were broughtinto poverty policy. By comparing the recommendations promotedby The New Consensus with the recommendations proposed in

five other taskforce reports submitted to Congress as part of the1987–88 welfare reform debates, I identify the novel aspects of thisconservative consensus and its distinctive echo in reform legislationpassed in 1988 and 1996. While not claiming that the new con-sensus alone caused these policy entrepreneurs to succeed, I showthat its formulations affected the direction of welfare reform.

Raced and Gendered Images in Citizenship Discourse

The concept of citizenship is employed as an organizing device toexamine how race and gender politics inform the symbolic andmaterial dimensions of social policy. I focus on two aspects of citi-zenship. First, citizenship as an institutional relationship betweenmembers of a community and the national collective as regulated bythe state highlights how citizenship comprises rights and obligations.Some are legally institutionalized and others less formally regulated(Hall and Held 1989). Second, citizenship reflects the discursiveconstitution of the political community and national identities. The

revolutionary events that produced modern notions of democraticcitizenship and autonomy also produced interdependent ideas aboutnationality and cultural integrity (Calhoun 1997; Gilroy 1993).Marshall’s famous 1949 lecture (1964, 72) expressed this in his




































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definition of social citizenship to “mean the whole range from theright to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right toshare to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civi-lized being according to the standards prevailing in the society”. The

statement indicates both a right and a duty to engage in those prac-tices associated with a presumed national cultural heritage.Contemporary feminist scholars have taken up Marshall’s conceptof social citizenship, but point out how citizenship identities aremultiple, have both raced and gendered meaning and have beenmobilized politically to expand and to circumscribe opportunitiesafforded to different social groups (Orloff 1993; Fraser 1989).

In liberal democratic societies, tensions between citizenship as aset of normative identities and citizenship as a right to freedom are

institutionalized in the boundary between public and private. Socialmovements that seek to produce or eliminate specific regulationsdraw on democratic principles to justify relocating their concernfrom one side of the boundary to the other. Within the private, thereare further divisions among those features of social life coordinatedby the market, by the community, or by the family, each associatedwith different norms of interaction. In the United States, governmentpolicy has often reinforced these norms despite their constructionas private, buttressing unequal gender and race relations originating

in the economy or the family (Glenn 2002; Kerber 1998; Orloff 1993).

Struggles over race and gender relations have always shaped USpolitical institutions. Colonial elites employed enlightenment con-cepts to craft mutually supporting theories of racial and nationalidentity (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Smith 1997). Showing how whiterevolutionaries posed whites as the essence of will and rationalaction and blacks as the essence of “anti-will,” Williams argues thatsuch “partializing ideologies” can endure in their effects beyond the

particular historical institutions they initially supported (1991, 220–221). Thus local southern communities used vagrancy laws, justifiedby images of undisciplined blacks, to require black women to workfor white landowners after emancipation (Kerber 1998). The tropeof black anti-will also endures in public discussions of blackwomen’s reproductive lives (Roberts 1999).

Gender and race identities were also forged in struggles for suf-frage and for a living wage. White working-class men argued thattheir identity as male citizen-workers entitled them to the franchise,

contrasting their position to black slaves and to white wives andchildren (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Shklar 1991). In the 1930s,white citizens demanding assistance from the state sought to tie themale-breadwinner/female housewife cultural model to whiteness,

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inscribing dominant race and gender relations in the social policiesof the American welfare state (Gordon 1994; Kessler-Harris 2001;Nelson 1990). When framers of the Social Security Act of 1935created a federal program to support poor mothers suffering the loss

of a male breadwinner, conservative whites in the Congress requiredthat the program be administered locally, allowing officials toexclude black mothers as unfit mothers or employable members of the community.1 Blacks working as agricultural laborers and domes-tics were also prohibited from participating in new governmentinsurance programs that provided unemployed white male industrialworkers with government funds to support their families(Kessler-Harris 2001; Lieberman 1998). Thus, passage of New Deallegislation did not disrupt the prevailing ideological and practical

relations of gender and race despite efforts by black activists to pressfor minority inclusion in the new programs (Brown 1999; Gordon1994; Kessler-Harris 2001).

In summary, these battles over American citizenship shaped domi-nant understandings of national identity and produced differencesby race and by gender in institutional citizenship and in the regu-lation of the public/private boundary (Glenn 2002; Kerber 1998;Smith 1997). In turn, these discursive and institutional effectsshaped campaigns by civil rights and feminist activists to extend

access to the benefits of citizenship in the second half of the twenti-eth century, and subsequent efforts by social conservatives and neo-liberals to restrict citizenship.

Research Methods

This study traces the political evolution of conservative welfarediscourse from 1970 to the late 1980s. Following the defeat of the

Nixon FAP, conservative think tanks turned their attention to con-structing new proposals for welfare reform. I examined academicpublications, articles published in new conservative journals, likeThe Public Interest , and reports published by publicly and privatelyfunded research institutes to identify influential texts in thedevelopment of a new conservative position.2 I selected Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder (1981), Losing Ground by CharlesMurray (1984), Toward a Family Welfare Policy by Michael Novak(1984), Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship

by Lawrence Mead (1986), and a collective report (Novak et al.1987) published by the American Enterprise Institute entitled TheNew Consensus on Family and Welfare (henceforth The NewConsensus) because they made significant discursive advances in




































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addressing the tensions between free market liberalism and socialconservativism and because both politicians and policy scholars fre-quently cited them.

Like their predecessors, the new generation of conservative

writers justified their policy proposals using key categories associ-ated with citizenship: autonomy, freedom, dependence and subjuga-tion, community, equality, and responsibility. For each of the worksselected, I coded sections of text referring to these key categories.I also look at the concepts of property and privacy, which actorsused to tie the normative concepts of citizenship to particular insti-tutional arrangements. I identify where the authors deployed existingmeanings and where they sought to establish new meanings, andhow these meanings were tied to historically gendered and raced

images of citizenship.I examined how each author used these concepts to argue for a

particular positioning of social provision with respect to the spheresof the market, the community and the state, distinguishing betweenarguments using a logic of exchange, a logic of charity, or a logic of entitlement. This discursive analysis of the conservative positions onwelfare is the heart of my argument. First, however, I situate it in areview of the existing welfare discourses of the 1970s.

The Challenges Faced by Conservative Welfare Reformers

When President Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in 1964,he set the stage for renewed conservative attacks on the welfarestate. Five years after launching an array of programs to increaseopportunity for the poor, the number of families claiming assistancewas still rising and the public began to lose patience. In 1970,Republican President Richard Nixon promoted a dramatically new

FAP to replace the increasingly unpopular AFDC program. The newplan became trapped, however, between two different conservativefactions and social liberals pressing for nationalized benefits andeligibility standards. These three different positions form theimportant discursive precedents and challenges for a new conserva-tive consensus.

Social Liberalism: the Logic of Entitlement

In the early 1960s, economists working in the Kennedy

Administration promoted a new structural explanation of povertythat underlay both the short-lived Community Action Programs andmore long-term changes in legal doctrine (O’Connor 2001). In1964, Charles Reich argued that because contemporary poverty

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resulted from large impersonal forces beyond individual influence,and because new forms of wealth controlled by the state creatednew capacities for public administrators to regulate the behaviorof recipients through a system of rules and “tribunals outside the

ordinary structure of government,” (Reich 1964, 770) state-providedbenefits required new institutional protections to serve, like property,as a means of preserving individual autonomy and a pluralist demo-cratic society. Reich proposed procedural protections such as theright to due process, limiting administrative discretion, and prohibit-ing private organizations from controlling access to public largesse.He maintained that a positive right to subsistence was needed toprevent public officials from forcing individuals receiving publicassistance to relinquish their constitutional rights. While earlier

maternalist arguments for social provision allowed for state regu-lation of mothering on the grounds that mothers were serving asagents of the state in raising their children (Baker 1984; Gordon1994; Koven and Michel 1993; Mink 1995; Skocpol 1992), Reich’sformulation justified an entitlement to assistance in terms of clai-mants’ membership within a democratic society, public assistancebeing their rightful share in the commonwealth, serving to protecttheir freedom.

When poor black women mobilized in the late 1960s to claim

the citizenship rights exercised by many white women (Amott1990; West 1981), they encountered a federal judiciary already sen-sitized by Reich and others to problems of class and racial dis-parity in the exercise of citizenship (Bussiere 1997). They broughtcourt cases against welfare agents that denied them access toresources to raise their children and were rewarded in a series of decisions preventing states from imposing eligibility criteria beyondthose set by Congress (King v. Smith 1968). The Supreme Courtstruck down rules regulating poor parents’ interstate travel and

moral behavior and required agencies to allow claimants to contestdecisions to terminate their benefits in a pre-evidentiary hearing(Goldberg v. Kelly 1970). Although the Warren Court interpretedthe Social Security Act of 1935 as conferring a statutory entitle-ment to public assistance, to be administered in accordance withdue process standards, the Justices stopped short of interpreting theFourteenth Amendment as conferring a substantive right to welfare(Farina 1998). Thus, when Nixon took office, the logic of socialprovision as an entitlement was supported by members of the

federal judiciary and liberal members of Congress. Yet, neverformerly inscribed as a substantive right guaranteed by theConstitution, the entitlement to assistance remained a target forsocial conservatives.




































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Social Conservativism

By authorizing states to administer the new ADC program, theSocial Security Act of 1935 allowed communities to use federalresources to regulate participation of poor white and black parentsin domestic and paid labor (Quadagno 1994). During the 1950s,when federal officials moved to expand eligibility for social insur-ance programs and to standardize application and enrollment pro-cedures for AFDC, conservative state legislators enacted newbehavioral restrictions to formalize limitations on access to welfarebenefits (Reese 2005). The specific character of these restrictive pol-icies reveals how social conservatives sought to promote patriarchalfamily arrangements and to protect racially organized labor markets.State “man in the house” rules, for example, allowed agencies tostop assistance when a man was discovered in the family home and“suitable home” policies allowed conservatives to deny benefits tochildren born to unwed women. “Employable mother” rules author-ized local agencies to decide which mothers were employable andtherefore ineligible for assistance. This allowed local officials topress poor single black mothers into employment when demand fortheir labor was high, while continuing to provide assistance to whitemothers (Goodwin 1995).

When minority movements demanded civil rights exercised bywhites, and feminist organizations pressed for gender equity, socialconservatives fought the changes. When federal court rulings, civilrights laws, and poverty programs threatened the ability of localelites to regulate access to public resources (Reese 2005), theyshifted their focus from the state to the national political arena.

“Economic Liberalism”

Like social conservatives, free market proponents were disgruntled

with the Great Society programs. Although free market discoursepreceded the welfare state, contemporary economic liberalism datesback to 1944 when Hayek attacked the New Deal social programs,arguing that as forms of centralized state planning they threatenedefficiency and liberty. According to Hayek markets offer “theonly method by which our activities can be adjusted to eachother without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority” (1994,41242).

Unheeded during the 1940s, Hayek’s call for free market capital-

ism was furthered by economist Milton Friedman. Friedmananchored his arguments to a very thin definition of citizenship.Commenting on President Kennedy’s oft quoted exhortation to “Asknot what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for

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your country,” Friedman argued that “[n]either half of the statementexpresses a relation between the citizen and his government that isworthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.” “The free man,”according to Friedman, “will ask neither what his country can do

for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather‘What can I and my compatriots do through government’ to help usdischarge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goalsand purposes, and above all to protect our freedom?” (Friedman1962, 1– 2). Friedman argued that the nation was nothing morethan a collection of individuals who share a preference for individualfreedom and for efficiency. He emphasized the responsibility of “thefree man” for his own destiny, but unlike later conservative formu-lations, he argued that this responsibility was to oneself and not to

society.Like the social liberals, Hayek and Friedman argued that the

welfare state had expanded government control too far, hinderingthe efforts of citizens to pursue their individual preferences. UnlikeReich, who suggested it was necessary to entitle poor citizens topublic assistance to protect democracy, Friedman saw public assist-ance as exogenous to the operation of democracy. If the majorityshould abandon a preference for supporting the poor, then an econ-omic liberal theory would not justify continuing it. Yet as long as

the majority chose to allocate resources to alleviate poverty,Friedman argued that benefits should be distributed without con-ditioning their receipt on adherence to behavioral prescriptions thatviolated the right to self-determination.

Friedman proposed replacing Johnson’s Great Society programs,seen as inefficient and paternalistic, with a negative income tax.These goals were agnostic — in the case of efficiency—and antithetical—in the case of self-determination—to social conservative aspirationsof reforming social programs to reassert race and gender hierarchies

destabilized by the War on Poverty and the new social movements.While distancing himself from the position that social provisionshould be an entitlement, by making access to public assistance con-ditional only on financial eligibility and standardizing assistancelevels nationally, Freidman’s negative income tax proposal was com-patible with social provision as an aspect of citizenship.

Conflict over Nixon’s FAP

Differences among adherents to these three logics of social policy

came to a head when the Nixon administration introduced its FAP.The plan was based on Friedman’s negative income tax proposal,but it assumed new service provisions as it moved from the halls of academia to the White House (Moynihan 1973; Quadagno 1994).




































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Unlike AFDC, the revised program would provide a guaranteedincome to poor families with minor children, regardless of the pre-sence of a male household head. Consistent with an entitlementnotion of welfare, it would establish a national income floor and

would be administered by the federal government. Benefits would bedetermined solely on the basis of family size and financial status,declining in amount as family members earned more income, but ata marginal tax rate that would still provide an incentive forincreased participation in paid work (Aaron 1973; Steensland2006). The program would provide training programs for unem-ployed recipients. Unlike the negative income tax proposed byFriedman, which was insensitive to family structure, the FAP wasdesigned to promote family formation among poor urban blacks by

providing training programs to black men. Daniel PatrickMoynihan, then assistant to the President, promoted these trainingmeasures to reverse the erosion of the patriarchal family in blackcommunities and to reduce black men’s participation in urbanviolence.

According to Moynihan (1973), the program appealed toPresident Nixon because it would allow the administration to quellblack unrest and win political support from disaffected southern,working-class whites, without alienating powerful capitalists who

preferred federal assistance to raising the minimum wage. Promisingnew federal support to large numbers of poor southern families, theprogram was warmly received by the southern press (Moynihan1973) and by the House of Representatives. AFDC benefits, fundedjointly by the federal and the state government, were so small inmost southern states that AFDC would be entirely replaced by theFAP, in effect removing local regulation of access to poverty benefits.This turned conservative southern and western members of theSenate Finance Committee against the program (Quadagno 1994).

Their resistance, combined with opposition from a smaller numberof liberal senators, sympathetic to the argument that the FAP wouldreduce benefit levels in northern cities, prevented the bill frommaking it out of the Senate Finance Committee (Moynihan 1973;Quadagno 1994).

Steensland (2006) has argued that social conservatives resisted theFAP because it transgressed the existing categorical distinctionbetween the deserving and undeserving poor by providing benefits toboth breadwinners and unemployed adults through the same

program. Yet by ignoring the racial and gender dimensions of thesecategories, institutionalized in both social programs and local labormarkets, he misses the nature of the political challenge that sub-sequently faced conservatives seeking to reshape the welfare state.

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In 1973, Henry Aaron (71) noted that “none of the several min-orities seeking diverse and inconsistent changes in the present systemha[d] the power to impose its will on the others.” Social liberalscould not introduce national eligibility and benefit standards, econ-

omic liberals failed to replace federal social service agencies with abureaucratically smaller and less intrusive negative income taxprogram, and social conservatives were unable to enact an alterna-tive block grant program that would tightly regulate the movementof poor mothers between domestic and paid labor. National welfarereform would wait until conservative intellectuals produced a newarticulation of the relationship between democratic citizenship andcapitalism that bridged the conservative dissensus.

Aligning Social Conservatism and Economic Liberalism

Supported by a new network of conservative organizations, intel-lectuals experimented with ways of reconciling the competingRepublican projects in the mid-1970s. Their reformulation of bothwelfare and citizenship re-aligned conservative forces around acommon reform agenda. My analysis begins with a consideration of how George Gilder and Charles Murray re-articulated economicliberalism as in conflict with social liberalism. Then I show how

Michael Novak and Lawrence Mead defined poor parents as unpre-pared for citizenship, to make a case for paternalist social programsdesigned to regulate the behavior of the poor. Finally, I demonstratehow Murray, Novak, and Mead, along with other taskforcemembers, synthesized these discursive advances in a new conserva-tive vision of the welfare state presented in the collectively authoredThe New Consensus on Family and Welfare (Novak et al. 1987).

Re-articulating the Relationship Between Economic Liberalism

and Welfare PolicyGeorge Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981) presented a symbolic

rapprochement between free market capitalism and social conserva-tivism. Valuing capitalism, Gilder attacked the economic liberals’assessment of capitalism and their libertarian values. Gilder assigneda moral dimension to capitalism, claiming that because economicgrowth requires “disciplined, creative and essentially moral produ-cers,” (1981, xxii) capitalism evokes these characteristics within thepopulation. As a corollary, he asserted that re-distributive state pro-

grams harm recipients because they break “the psychological linkbetween reward and effort” (1981, 79). Moreover, the taxesrequired to support these programs are also harmful to middle-classfamilies because they push mothers into paid employment and




































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undermine the capacity of fathers to be male breadwinners.Therefore, Gilder argued, welfare benefits should be diminished toreduce both taxes and the moral hazards associated with publicassistance.

Gilder also claimed that integration posed risks for white middle-class families that threatened to undermine the cultural traits thathad enabled their success. He represented white resistance tocourt-ordered desegregation as an issue of class, not race, defendingthe freedom of white families to regulate the moral influences theirchildren were exposed to. His argument rested on assigning differentbehavioral traits to whites and blacks, asserting that white middle-class families were economically successful because they exhibitappropriate attitudes and behaviors; they work hard, delay gratifica-

tion, and live in patriarchal nuclear families. This recast mandatoryintegration as an attack on the cultural freedom of middle-classwhite communities. With this re-articulation, Gilder both obscuredthe racial dynamics of segregationist politics and negated structuralfeatures of class dynamics by locating the causes of black poverty inthe moral character of the poor.

Three years later, Charles Murray provided an alternative syn-thesis of economic liberalism and social conservativism in Losing Ground (1984). Building on Gilder, he claimed that by promoting

structural explanations for poverty, elites had steered social policyoff course, causing the state to distribute economic opportunitiesand rewards outside the salubrious action of the market. He encour-aged discontent among working-class whites by suggesting that theGreat Society programs generated benefits for blacks at the expenseof white families. Drawing on social conservative views of the min-ority poor as cultural outsiders who avoided work and had childrenout of wedlock, he argued that public transfer programs underminedthe freedom of middle-class Americans to choose not “to subsidize a

life style” that deviates from their own (Murray 1984, 19).For Murray, this new interpretation of economic liberalism justi-

fied re-incorporating discretion into social provisioning. Instead of campaigning to remove legal notions of entitlement and due processstandards, Murray suggested replacing state assistance with privatesocial provision. In the conclusion of Losing Ground , he proposedeliminating all government programs for the needy and “leave theworking-age person with no recourse whatever except the jobmarket, family members, friends, and public or private locally

funded services” (1984, 2272

228). A complete shift in social assist-ance from government programs to charity would have little effecton “most citizens,” while requiring poor individuals who might betempted to use public resources to shirk responsibility, to engage in

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practices valued by “middle-class Americans” in order to secureassistance.

By re-articulating their resistance to welfare in behavioral ratherthan essentialized race-based terms, these authors opened the door

to collaboration on welfare reform between racial conservatives andblacks and whites who were concerned about the increased inci-dence of single-parent families among inner city black communities.Furthermore, by arguing that the current welfare program violatedthe rights of middle- class taxpayers to refrain from supporting beha-viors they disapproved of, Murray, in contrast to Freidman,re-articulated economic liberalism as being in tension with socialprovision as an entitlement.

Bridging Paternalist State Poverty Programs and EconomicLiberalism

These early discursive interventions were endorsed by the Reaganadministration but they did not eliminate support for public pro-vision. Other conservative writers disagreed with Murray’s proposalto move to private assistance presumably limited to morally accepta-ble families. In Toward a Family Welfare Policy, Novak (1984)suggested that undesirable behavior may not be a choice, as Murrayassumed, but rather a result of poor mental health or a lack of skills

and attitudes.Novak’s argument relied on an historic understanding of depen-

dency as reflecting personal insufficiency; however, unlike the whiteswho deployed this interpretation to justify black slavery, Novakrecast the moral virtues associated with self-reliance as “a problemof human potential.” According to Novak, “[m]any of the poor,especially among the young, need[ed] help in learning skills and atti-tudes: how to read, how to apply for and hold a job, how to governthemselves and conduct themselves.” He wrote, “self-reliance is a

virtue of many parts,” which “can be taught” (Novak 1984,54255). According to Novak, reducing poverty required the inter-vention of traditional institutions, like the church, that were patern-alist and possessed moral expertise.

Lawrence Mead presented the conceptual basis for aligning econ-omic liberalism and social conservativism in their current form. InBeyond Entitlement (1986), Mead described a new articulationbetween citizenship as identity and as institutionalized relationshipto the state that treated self-reliance as not just a moral good but a

prerequisite for citizenship. He re-introduced the concept of socialobligations, drawing on historic racialized images of citizenship tojustify state enforcement of the new obligations. In the introductionto Beyond Entitlement , Mead noted that “Americans regard




































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minimal social competences like work or getting through school asobligatory even if they are not legally enforced.” He argued thatalthough, “[t]hese social obligations may not be governmental . . .they are public in that they fall within the collective expectation that

structures an orderly society” (1986, 12).Mead’s discussion of social obligations bears some resemblance

to Marshall’s definition of social citizenship; however, unlikeMarshall who equated social duties with other duties, like voting,that were expected but not enforced, Mead and the other authors of The New Consensus argued that outside intervention was needed toensure that the poor assume these responsibilities:

This new thing, which we have called “behavioral dependency,”

is more like an inability to cope. Many of the poor need orderin their surroundings and in their lives . . . . Low income is com-paratively easy to remedy; to overcome behavioral dependencyrequires a much more human, complex, and difficult engage-ment. (The New Consensus, Novak et al. 1987, 5)

The contrast between this description of the new poor and the self-reliant citizen resembles the will/anti-will dichotomy that Williamsnoted in slave law. But unlike Murray and Gilder, who suggestedeliminating state programs in order to restore the salutatory disci-

plinary effects of market competition and private charity, Meadargued that the state, and not the economy or the community, wasresponsible for disciplining poor parents. In his view, “the welfareproblem emerges as one of authority rather than freedom.” Accordingto Mead, “The best hope for solving it is, not mainly to shift theboundary between society and government, but to require recipients tofunction where they already are, as dependents” (1986, 4).

Mead’s re-conceptualization of social obligations was central tothe report—The New Consensus—Novak et al. submitted to

Congress in 1987. Inverting the logic of entitlement, which assertsthat only by removing non-financial conditions on the receipt of welfare can poor citizens retain their autonomy, Novak et al. (1987,5) argued that the government must supervise the behavior of welfare recipients in order to help them “to live as full and indepen-dent citizens.”

Fraser and Gordon (1994) suggest that prior racialized and gen-dered images associated with key words like “dependency” shapepublic debate without being stated; however, the writers of The New

Consensus explicitly invoked race. In contrast to essentialized racialcategories used by social conservatives in pre-World War II politicaldiscourse, the conservative reformers linked race to “dependency,”through a new category, “the urban underclass,” applied to poor

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blacks and Latinos living in urban areas. Under the subheading“The Urban Underclass,” the authors of The New Consensus wrote:

This concentrated population is increasingly black and

Hispanic . . . . Since this concentrated urban population seemsunusually resistant to economic growth, and since it runsagainst the grain of a traditional American sense of opportu-nity, upward mobility, and classlessness, both popular writersand social scientists have felt driven to describe it in the newand deliberately shocking term “underclass.” (Novak et al.1987, 35–36)

Relying on this characterization of the minority poor as “anticiti-

zens” lacking in will and “resistant to growth,” Mead and the otherwriters sought to harmonize social conservative desires to regulatebehavior and economic liberals’ libertarian goals by mapping themonto two different categories of people. Welfare is conceptualized asdisciplining “the poor” to prepare them for incorporation within thepolity, while the non-poor are considered to have mastered “theskills” now considered prerequisite for citizenship, and can be freeto pursue their desires through the market. Unlike racial discoursesassociated with slavery and Jim Crow, this model distinguishes

among poor and non-poor minorities and considers that poor blacksand Latinos under public tutelage can develop the traits required for“self-reliance.” According to Novak et al. (1987), welfare caseloadswill drop as the new paternalist state programs succeed in schoolingwelfare-dependent underclass women to become citizen-workingmothers.

In contrast to racialized images of citizenship, which facilitatedthe new alignment between social conservative and economic liberalprojects, gender politics proved more problematic for the new con-

servatives. As the full title, The New Consensus on Family and Welfare implied, they sought to initiate changes in both work anddomestic relations. The authors emphasized families from the outset,identifying the family as “the matrix within which the citizen is wellformed or misshapen” and decrying the increasing number of female-headed families among the poor (Novak et al. 1987, 16).The New Consensus suggested that single-parent family povertyrequired a “change in social behavior and parental assumption of responsibility” (72), but now defined parental responsibility for both

mothers and fathers in terms of a male-breadwinner model, whichprioritized work outside the home in order to support the family.The authors also argued that requiring mothers on assistance towork would eliminate the incentive to bear children outside of




































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marriage, which they associated with AFDC because it allowedsingle mothers to stay home with their children.

Unlike the ill-fated FAP that promised to eliminate the financialincentive for family dissolution by extending benefits to poor

families with working fathers, The New Consensus proposed elimi-nating the incentive to remain single by requiring poor single parentsreceiving benefits to work. This strategy is inconsistent with theprior assertion that AFDC claiming results from “an inability tocope,” but it also conflicts with the social conservative aspiration tore-establish the patriarchal nuclear family model as hegemonic.Labor market demand for low-wage service workers and familyneeds for care-giving labor posed a problem for welfare reformerswho were trying to satisfy both free market liberals and social con-

servatives. In the past, southern lawmakers resolved this conflict byrequiring black mothers to work when service or agriculturalworkers were needed, but now civil rights legislation and principlesof non-discrimination demanded a new strategy. Unable to resolvetheir dilemma by explicit racial differentiation, The New Consensusproposed redefining citizen-motherhood as encompassing both paidwork and unpaid carework. Unlike the earlier defenders of thefamily who lobbied for a family wage, these reformers simply notedthat two parents working at the minimum wage were needed to

keep working-class families above the poverty line.This shift away from the older image of the care-giving-citizen-

mother to one of the working-mother-citizen elicited a harshresponse from George Gilder. He saw this as dangerous for poorfamilies and for all “traditional” family structures. Gilder thoughtwork requirements would send a message to all mothers to “[p]utyour job first, children second” (1987, 21) and would hurt male-breadwinner families by re-distributing resources away from them tosubsidize public child care. Unable to foster agreement among con-

servatives on how poor citizens should balance the demands of themarket and domestic work, the authors refrained from addressingthe issue in The New Consensus. Their silence shifted the problemof resources for family care to state-level policy-makers, welfare casemanagers, and the welfare claimants who would have to find waysto address the needs of families, within a policy regime demandingparticipation in paid work from all adults.

Repositioning Social Provision with Respect to the State,

the Market, and the CommunityIn contrast to the challenges of organizing care, conservative

reformers were explicit on how to foster economic self-reliance. Thetask, according to Mead, was to build a new welfare system that

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would “create for recipients inside the welfare state the samebalance of support and expectation that other Americans faceoutside it” (1986, 4). Yet re-organizing the state to function accord-ing to the principles of market and community coordination

breaches liberal democratic boundaries that divide public fromprivate institutions. It was just this kind of threat to private life thathad motivated Reich to call for institutionalizing property-like pro-tections for recipients of government aid. Because this re-positioningof social provision is central to both the new conservative consensusand the institutional changes conservative reformers promoted,I review the sequence of shifts in the articulation of the public/private boundary, from the debates over the FAP through thewriting of The New Consensus, including the specific policy rec-

ommendations it presented.Despite their differences, in the 1970s, social liberals, social con-

servatives, and economic liberals shared a classical liberal conceptionof the public/private dichotomy. This conceptualization separatessocial interaction into a public sphere of action, uniformly regulatedby the state, and a private sphere in which individual citizens arefree to exercise moral and political autonomy. Positioning theboundary between public and private was central to the argumentsof each group. Reich argued for extending private property-like pro-

tections to public aid in order to protect the moral autonomy of reci-pients, while social conservatives resisted federal busing mandates byarguing that school choice was private, and economic liberalsargued for a reduction in state regulation of the economy and com-munity life. When Murray suggested re-introducing discretion intoeligibility decisions, he proposed shifting social provision from thepublic to the private sphere in order to accomplish this.

An important turning point came when Novak and Meadasserted that, rather than eliminate government social provision, the

country should re-organize public poverty programs to reproducethe regulation imposed by private institutions. Mead and Novak haddifferent visions of what the new welfare institutions should looklike, however. Mead preferred to re-organize the public sphere andthe state to conform to the norms and practices associated withmarket coordination, whereas Novak pushed for sharing state regu-latory authority with private associations, and a concomitantre-organization of poverty policy according to the norms and prac-tices of discretionary private charitable giving.

In the final section of The New Consensus, Mead, Novak, andthe other authors recommended a synthetic approach that promotedboth marketization and communitization of government bureauc-racies interacting with the poor. They re-classified work and




































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domestic responsibilities as obligations of citizenship, re-fashioningthem like an employment relationship by conditioning receipt of public assistance on the completion of work or work-preparationactivities, while also recommending new forms of caseworker discre-

tion in determining eligibility for assistance and compliance. Theauthors also recommended granting new regulatory authority tonon-governmental organizations to supplement “the governmentalsector” which was “unable by its nature to engage the problems of the underclass at the necessary moral depth” (Novak et al. 108).

In making their case, they associated both government agenciesand voluntary associations with the category “public,” ignoringrecognized boundaries between these different types of institutions.They compounded this issue when they included businesses along

with religious and philanthropic organizations in the list of “volun-tary associations” they called upon to address the problems of thedependent poor. This importation of previously distinct institutionalnorms and practices from both the market and the world of volun-tary associations into the public sphere obscured the different logicshistorically associated with each, incorporating tensions that lateremerged when policy-makers, state officials, and non-governmentalorganizations institutionalized the recommendations from The NewConsensus in the new poverty programs.

The Fruits of The New Consensus

Passage of the Family Support Act

The New Consensus was one of the six reports prepared inresponse to President Reagan’s 1986 call to reform AFDC. Otherreports included: Up From Dependency: A New National Public

Assistance Strategy Report prepared by the President’s DomesticPolicy Council Low Income Working Group (1986); Investing inPoor Families and Their Children: A Matter of Commitment (Heintz1986), produced by the American Public Welfare Association andthe National Council of State Human Service Administrators;Ladders Out of Poverty: A Report of the Project on the Welfare of Families (Meyer, Babbitt, and Flemming 1986); A New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance, areport of the Task Force on Poverty and Welfare (1986) submitted

to Governor Mario Cuomo; and Making America Work: ProductivePeople, Productive Policies (Clinton 1987) produced by theNational Governors’ Association chaired by Governor Bill Clinton.Here these six reports, including The New Consensus, are compared

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with reform legislation passed in 1988 and 1996 to assess theircongruence with changes in national welfare policy and discourse.

In 1987, national actors hoping to end the fifteen year dearth of reform legislation heralded a new consensus among policy-makers

and experts (Naples 1997). Points of similarity across the reportsindicate how the central themes of the debates and the set of imagin-able alternatives had shifted since the early 1970s. Using a languageof mutual responsibility and contract, all six reports recommendedchanging welfare programs to focus on preparing and movingmothers into employment, confirming the claims of consensus.Furthermore, all the reports voiced concerns about the increasingnumber of never married mothers who claimed public assistance andcalled for strengthening child support enforcement programs. These

similarities indicate that elite welfare discourse on both the right andthe left had shifted in ways consistent with the arguments promotedby the new conservative intellectuals.

However, despite their shared use of the contract metaphor tosignify mothers’ obligation to participate in work or work-preparation programs, the panels recommended different govern-ment obligations. In contrast to the report prepared by thePresident’s Low Income Working Group and the conservative NewConsensus, which proposed freezing or reducing government spend-

ing, the other reports recommended expanding government benefits,including raising and standardizing welfare benefits for familiesreceiving cash assistance and offering affordable health insurance,child care, and a new federal income subsidy to working parents.The reports also discussed changes in program administration,recommending increasing local level discretion, but only The NewConsensus suggested that the Congress consider revoking dueprocess protections. In contrast, the report prepared for GovernorCuomo specifically stated that the new work programs must be

administered in such a way as to “ensure the due process rights of recipients.”

These disagreements map neatly onto different policy logics. Inpromoting due process protections, nationally standardized benefitlevels, and supplements to low-wage work, the four reports preparedunder the direction of state politicians and welfare administratorsadhered to an entitlement logic of social provision that ensures par-ticipants’ right to self-determination within the new programs. Incontrast, the changes in public assistance programs proposed by the

president’s Low Income Working Group and The New Consensusare consistent with the new paternalist approach promoted by con-servatives, which presumes that recipients of public assistancerequire new forms of state regulation exercised outside of the




































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criminal justice system to prepare them for assuming the prerogativesassociated with citizenship.

Appearing numerous times in the public hearings leading up tothe enactment of the Family Support Act (Naples 1997), the writers

of The New Consensus contrasted their new normative interpret-ation of “the self-reliant citizen” with “the dependent underclassmother.” By shifting the locus of the problem from poverty to thebehavior of poor parents, the proponents of the new conservativeconsensus were able to drive the notion of entitlement to themargins of debate, focusing attention on how to change the repro-ductive behavior and labor market participation of poor men andwomen (Naples 1997; Oliker 1994; Weaver 2000).

Passed in 1988, the Family Support Act required all states to

create new institutions for administering work requirements withoutenacting new measures to ensure that the returns to work were suffi-cient to support a family. According to the new legislation, motherswith children as young as three, or younger at state option, wererequired to participate in work, education, or short-term training if child care could be guaranteed by the state. Unlike the FAP, theFamily Support Act authorized state discretion in the implemen-tation of the new work programs, including the authority to contractwith community based organizations for service provision. In con-

trast to the four reports calling for a federal commitment to raisingand standardizing assistance, benefit levels were unchanged and theCongress did not pursue raising the minimum wage or subsidizingreturns to low-wage work. Contrary to the recommendations out-lined in The New Consensus, however, Congress did not requirepoor parents to take jobs that worsened their financial condition,and did not eliminate poor citizens’ right to due process and otherprotections the Supreme Court associated with the Social SecurityAct of 1935, at least not yet. These final steps were to wait for the

enactment of PRWORA in 1996.

The Personal Responsibility and Work OpportunityReconciliation Act

The new institutions authorized by the Family Support Act wereintended to move poor parents from the welfare rolls into paidemployment, but progress was slow in most states, owing in part toa weak economy. Primed by the conservative campaign for welfarereform, public impatience with rising numbers of claimants made

welfare a popular object of campaign rhetoric (Weaver 2000). Thistime welfare reform discourse was mobilized by a Democratic presi-dential contender, Clinton, who promised to “end welfare as weknow it” (cited in Weaver 2000, 171). Clinton’s selection as the

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democratic presidential nominee in 1992 reflected the new hege-mony of the “workfare” approach to social provision within theDemocratic Party. Like Mead, candidate Clinton promoted a patern-alist welfare program that took its cues from market institutions

(Weaver 2000). He took the agenda one step further than the FamilySupport Act by championing the idea of time limits. Unlike futureRepublican proposals, however, the Clinton administration proposedlimiting the time that parents could receive assistance before beingmoved into a public job, not the time that they could receive cashpayments (Weaver 2000).

Eager to reclaim political credit for reforming welfare, a group of US House Republicans included welfare reform in their 1994Contract with America. Like The New Consensus, the Contract with

America valorized an “end of government that is too big, too intru-sive, and too easy with the public’s money,” and a government that“respects the values and shares the faith of the American family”(1994, 7). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, newpressure from increasingly powerful conservative Christian coalitions(Weaver 2000) threatened to destabilize the new consensus amongsocial conservatives and economic liberals. New entrants into thewelfare debates, these religious coalitions pushed conservative poli-ticians to use public policy to punish childbearing outside of mar-

riage. Unlike The New Consensus, which promoted regulatorypractices to prepare young (under eighteen) single mothers for citi-zenship, the program proposed in the Contract with America wouldprevent them from claiming public assistance unless they marriedthe biological father of their children or another man willing toadopt their children. Some conservative intellectuals who had sup-ported the New Consensus began to promote these new provisions.William Kristol, for example, urged politicians to use the law tosupport marriage and the family at those points where libertarian

goals and conservative family models came into conflict (1995).3The initiative risked alienating the more socially moderate

economic liberals and anti-abortion advocates, a weakness exploitedby the Clinton administration (Weaver 2000). Attacked by theDemocrats, House Republicans sought an alternative solution thatwould allow them to preserve the prior consensus without jeopardiz-ing support from the new conservative Christian coalitions.Eventually, they devised a compromise bill: in yet another moveaway from national standardization, they eliminated the age restric-

tion from the federal bill but allowed states to adopt a family cap ora teen mother exclusion and added a new market-like performancebonus for decreasing unmarried teen fertility without raising abor-tion rates.




































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The house-authored bill was eventually passed in a modified formin 1996. Program devolution went much further than granting statesauthority over who could enroll in the new public assistance pro-grams. PRWORA granted eligible states federal block grants to be

administered at their discretion. These changes produced a dramaticreduction in the citizenship rights of poor women. New statefreedom to discriminate on the basis of claimants’ age and maritalstatus was made possible by eliminating the federal entitlement topublic assistance associated with the Social Security Act of 1935.

Other authors have identified how these measures produced a pri-vatization of care, forcing poor mothers to rely on family networksfor support (Brush 2000; Mink 1999; Oliker 1995). But thePRWORA also advanced the marketization and communitization of

welfare agencies along the lines proposed by The New Consensus.Government agencies were re-organized to function both like marketactors and like private charity organizations. Reforming welfareoffices to make them more like “entrepreneurially oriented employ-ment and training centers” (Weaver 2000, 127), politicians elimi-nated bureaucratic rules and practices. They authorized states tocontract with both religious organizations and for-profit firms toadminister the new welfare programs. Like the welfare reform dis-course promoted by The New Consensus, the PRWORA negated the

boundaries between the institutions of the state, the market, and thecommunity, requiring claimants, state officials, and local welfareworkers to negotiate the tensions among their different logics.

Conclusion

In a recent review of welfare state scholarship, Orloff (2005)emphasizes that social programs are both regulatory and distributive.Yet understanding the political significance of this dual character

within the contemporary period requires a cultural analysis of welfare state politics. Before conservatives could effect reform in themid-1980s and 1990s, they had to overcome the split between socialconservatives and economic liberals which surfaced in the politicalstruggles over the Nixon Administration’s FAP. They bridged thisdivision by re-articulating the two policy logics to produce a newhybrid policy regime. To succeed in a post-civil rights era, conserva-tive reformers also had to develop a complex re-articulation of raceand citizenship that incorporated class distinctions among blacks

and recoded class in behavioral rather than economic or structuralterms. By narrowing the object of poverty policy to this new beha-viorally defined “underclass,” they succeeded in discrediting struc-tural explanations of poverty and the entitlement logic of social

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provision which had anchored the earlier welfare expansions.Furthermore, by characterizing members of the new underclass aslacking in the “the skills” now considered prerequisite for citizen-ship, Mead and the other writers of The New Consensus were able

to harmonize social conservative desires to regulate behavior andeconomic liberals’ libertarian goals by mapping them onto differentgroups. According to the new policy regime, individuals who wereeconomically self-sufficient would be free to pursue their desiresthrough the market, while those who sought assistance from thestate would be required to work or participate in work-related activi-ties to claim cash benefits. By revoking entitlement andre-introducing state and local agency discretion, they also allowedofficials to adopt new measures to regulate the reproductive and

family care decisions of poor parents. Now stripped of essentializingracial categories, the new discursive synthesis was also able toattract support from black social conservatives who were concernedabout the rise in single-parent households among the minority poor.

Despite their success in re-aligning these two policy logics, sometensions remained and became incorporated in the new policyregime. Economic liberals and their business supporters wanted tomove poor mothers into market employment, but this weakened thepossibility of re-establishing the hegemony of the patriarchal nuclear

family model desired by social conservatives. Noting the dramaticexpansion in the number of mothers entering the labor market, thewriters of The New Consensus and federal policy-makers bowed tothe increasing demand for women’s labor and promoted a changein the normative identity of the citizen mother from caregiver toprovider. They were unable, however, to resolve how the newworking-mother-citizen should balance the demands of the marketand domestic work, remaining silent on this issue. Conservativereformers resolved their differences about the character of the new

welfare institutions by taking a synthetic approach promoting bothmarketization and communitization of state bureaucracies interact-ing with the poor. By importing previously distinct institutionalnorms and practices from both the market and the world of volun-tary associations, they incorporated new tensions in the network of governance institutions that would come to plague both officials andparents seeking assistance.

NOTES

Victoria Mayer is an Assistant Professor at Colby College. She holds aPh.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her




































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dissertation is entitled “Contracting Citizenship: Shifting Public/PrivateBoundaries in the Context of Welfare Reform.”

She can be contacted at the Department of Sociology. Colby College,4716 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, ME 04901-8840, USA. Email:

[email protected]. See Mink (1995) and Roberts (1999) on the imbrication of racial andreproductive politics in US social policy.

2. I reviewed reports published by the Institute for Research on Povertyat the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Brookings Institute, the Ethicsand Public Policy Center, and the American Enterprise Institute.

3. See also Murray (1993) The Coming White Underclass.

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