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Here is how little the Republicans care about the increasingly
harrowing situation of the poor: they can’t even be roused to blame
President Obama for it—because to do so they’d have to acknowledge that
it matters.
The news recently has been full of stories of mounting desperation in America. In
The New Yorker,
Ian Frazier reported that there are now more homeless people in New
York City than at any time since the concept of “modern homelessness”
arose in the 1970s. Nationwide, new Education Department data reveal
that the number of homeless schoolchildren has hit a record high of 1.2
million. Meanwhile, on November 1, the benefits of every food stamp
recipient in the country were cut by an average of 7 percent and already
overburdened food banks prepared to ration distributions or turn people
away. “It is too bad we have come to this in our country,” the head of
the Ohio Association of Foodbanks told the
Cleveland Plain Dealer.
In
a minimally functioning political system, there would be a debate about
potential solutions to these unfolding disasters. After all,
conservatives once claimed they had superior answers to the problems of
poverty. Richard Nixon lambasted welfare for encouraging family breakups
and penalizing work, but he sought to replace it with a guaranteed
minimum income. Poverty obsessed 1996 vice presidential candidate Jack
Kemp, who used to call himself a “bleeding-heart conservative.” George
W. Bush dubbed himself a “compassionate conservative” and made the
channeling of public funds to religious charities a signature issue.
There was much to criticize in conservative approaches to poverty, but
they at least emerged from a modest political consensus that the
suffering of the poor was real and that something should be done about
it.
Now, instead, we see on the right a combination of poverty
denialism and outright contempt. Fox News constantly regales its viewers
with tales of the lavish lifestyles of aid recipients. Between food
stamps and tax credits, Fox’s Charles Payne argued in March, “it gets a
little comfortable to be in poverty.” A recurring Fox segment called
“Entitlement Nation” begins with an animated grasping hand smashing
through a map of the United States. Recently, it featured a libertarian
think-tanker criticizing free school lunches on the grounds that poor
kids suffer from “obesity, and not the fact that they’re not getting
enough calories.”
Ideas about the indolence of the poor pervade
our politics. Arguing against accepting federal funding to expand
Medicaid access in his state, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wrote,
“Soon there will be more people riding in the cart than people pulling
the cart.” Two congressmen—Tennessee’s Stephen Fincher and North
Dakota’s Kevin Cramer—have cited II Thessalonians 3:10 in support of
food stamp cuts: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this
command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
“At least
before, they would carry on the pretense of offering a solution to
alleviate poverty,” says Congressman Keith Ellison. “Now they don’t seem
to be concerned about it at all.”
In some ways, all
this is familiar. When Texas Republican Louie Gohmert complains that
his constituents can scarcely buy groceries without getting stuck in
line behind people using their food stamp cards to indulge in crab legs,
he echoes Ronald Reagan describing a “strapping young buck” using food
stamps to buy a “T-bone steak.” It hardly excuses Reagan, though, to
point out that when he was demagoguing about “welfare queens,” welfare
existed. In the wake of welfare reform and the financial crisis, the
idea that the safety net is becoming a hammock, as Paul Ryan put it, is
more preposterous than ever. Among nondisabled parents, for example, the
majority of food stamp recipients are either working or recently out of
work. Before the cuts, they received enough to spend less than $1.50
per meal. These people are not living large.
It seems that to be a
contemporary Republican, one must simultaneously believe two things:
that Obama has immiserated the country and driven unemployment to
intolerable levels, and that the poor have it easy and there are plenty
of jobs out there for the taking. When the tension between these two
beliefs gets to be too great, Republicans will usually tilt toward the
latter.
This has left some proponents of a softer, more charitable
conservatism despondent. I asked Doug Wead, a Pentecostal minister and
former adviser to both Bushes
who is
widely
credited with coining the phrase “compassionate conservatism,” whether
he knows of any Republican politicians who are serious about fighting
poverty. He did not. “This discussion isn’t even going on in the
Republican Party right now, and that’s heartbreaking,” he says.
If
there’s a bright spot here, it is that Republican extremism could
create a pro-poor reaction, much like the backlash that has turned
reproductive rights into a winning issue for Democrats. For decades,
Democrats were on the defensive about welfare—Bill Clinton’s signature
achievement was “ending welfare as we know it.” Precisely because he did
so, though, he neutralized a lot of broad resentment toward social
programs. Americans have always hated the idea of people getting
something for nothing, but in a country where the ranks of the working
poor are swelling and food stamps subsidize the low wages paid by
behemoths like Walmart and McDonald’s, the notion of the indigent as
coddled idlers has little currency outside the right-wing bubble. Polls,
for example, consistently show majority opposition to cuts in food
stamps. In such an environment, the war against the poor could be used
against the GOP as effectively as the war on women was, at least if the
Democrats are prepared to defend them.
Michelle Goldberg is a
senior contributing writer at The Nation. She is the author of "The
Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World," and
"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism."
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