Epstein, William M-The Masses Are the Ruling Classes _ Policy Romanticism, Democratic Populism, And American Social Welfare-Oxford University Press (2017)

The Masses Are the Ruling Classes

The Masses Are The Ruling Classes Policy Romanticism, Democratic Populism, and American Social Welfare

William M. Epstein

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Epstein, William M., 1944– author. Title: The masses are the ruling classes : policy romanticism, democratic populism, and American social welfare / William M. Epstein. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045875 (print) | LCCN 2017001944 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190467067 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190467074 (UPDF) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Social policy. | United States—Social conditions—21st century. | Populism—United States. | Public opinion—United States. | Social values—United States. Classification: LCC HN59.2 .E77 2017 (print) | LCC HN59.2 (ebook) | DDC 306.0973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045875 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Liz My love

In memoriam Lilian Epstein (1916–​2014) David Smail (1938–​2014)

CON TEN T S

Prefaceâ•…â•…ix Acknowledgmentsâ•…â•…xix SECTION I: Explaining Social Policy Making Introduction: The Ruling Massesâ•…â•… 3 1. Precursors to Policy Romanticismâ•…â•… 48 2 . Policy Romanticismâ•…â•… 65 3. An American Archetype: The Quest for the Authentic Self—╉Psychology, Pop Psychology, and Self-╉Helpâ•…â•… 87 4. Spiritualism, Religion, and Other Romantic Quests for the Authentic Selfâ•…â•… 112 SECTION II: Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare 5. Year Upâ•…â•… 137 6. Communities in Schoolsâ•…â•… 152 7. Generations of Hope Communitiesâ•…â•… 168 8. The Food Stamp Programâ•…â•… 177 9. Food Stamps and Public Welfareâ•…â•… 202 Conclusion: Social Adolescenceâ•…â•… 228 Referencesâ•…â•…233 Indexâ•…â•…247

PREFACE

Many, many years ago, when cars were drawn by horses and horses were drawn by artists, and beer was drawn by little people with furry feet, romanticism inspired a peaceful, gracious land. People accumulated social capital through unbidden generosities and spent it during times of travail, maintaining a moral balance that protected children, families, marriage, intellect, freedom, justice, and the mixed but still free market. It grew into the American way of life, perhaps not ideal, but still the best thing yet in civilization, ordained by a wise Providence as a light unto humanity with a destiny for progress—​t wo furry steps forward, one furry step back. Yet, somehow modernity has ruined the gifts of tradition, and the presiding romantic ethos of the United States is anything but kind, warm, generous, and supportive. It’s the wicked witch of the north, not Glinda. Formal philosophies of romanticism and the Romantic period are obviously instances of romanticism, although not among its more influential expressions. Social policy romanticism and social welfare romanticism have been far more influential and harmful than the poetic wanderings and philosophic musings of late-​18th-​and early-​19th-​century writers and thinkers with their passions for nature, order, transcendence, and meaning. Romanticism in social policy, that is, policy romanticism, is not a literary tradition but a cultural one embedded in the thoughts and choices of the American people. Some of the wisest and most inspiring analysts have noted the persistent irrational strain in American policy choices. Richard Hofstadter (1953) restricted anti-​intellectualism to recurrent but marginal political and social enthusiasms. Harold Bloom (1992) considered the pervasive superstition, emotionality, and sense of chosenness of the American religion but stopped short of attributing his analysis to general social preferences for the romantic. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton (1996) scoped out the terrain of excessive individualism, largely in American thought but only that, failing to go further into American policy making and further toward a more

general consideration of the pervasive influence of romantic thinking on policy making. Still and all, analysts such as Bloom, Hofstadter, Bellah et al., and notable others probably intended their observations to be taken broadly as commentary on American society. However, they prudently drew back from the difficulty of ever reaching conclusions that apply to the consistent dominance of any one influence over policy choice. Instead they contented themselves with deep scrutiny of limited sectors in the hope that it would imply more searching questions about American society and its policy choices. The wariness is quite understandable. It is difficult to measure the actual dominance of any influence in politics and society. The society cannot be divided into multiple sectors for prospective, randomized experimentation—​the definitive methodology for the isolation of cause. Moreover, the difficulties of coming up with a sampling frame for culture, let alone the impediments to instrument construction and measurement itself, are daunting. The problem of identifying the factors that determine decision making in the political and social realms remains generally intractable. In the end, then, the logic of broad arguments concerning social policy making is deprived of strong methodology. It must depend on the balance of evidence, which is a very unsatisfying retreat from rigor. Disconfirming evidence, inevitable bias in the choice of evidence, and, even worse, ambiguities in what the evidence means will persist to weaken arguments about political influence based on nonexperimental data. The exception occurs when large homogeneous factions compete over their policy preferences. The winner defines influence. However, this situation is rare in the United States. The overlap between traditional social and economic elites on the one side and less fortunate classes on the other is customarily very large (Page & Shapiro, 1992, among many others). Reported differences among groups are small. When differences do occur they appear to be issue-​specific rather than broadly ideological. The common broad consensus in the United States still poses a problem of whether elites lead or follow the masses, an unresolvable problem except when they differ on specific policies that set them at loggerheads, which again is rare. The limitations of method and thus its standing as truth undercuts the authority of even the best of the literature that attempts to identify the causes of social problems and recommend solutions. Stiglitz, Krugman, and the vast majority of the wisest and most astute, humane, and dedicated policy analysts in the social sciences and across the political spectrum who attend to issues of economic inequality, politics, and social problems often engage in a common fallacy. They confuse correlation with cause,

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especially when they abandon the narrow sophistication and authority of their expertise to write broadly as public intellectuals on pressing social issues. In this way, inequality and the elites that occur along with social problems are assumed to be their cause rather than a result of other factors such as embedded values in the culture. When analysts do find a convenient proximate cause, they usually fail to trace its roots back to ideologically uncomfortable precursors. Similarly, when the proximate cause is unacceptable ideologically, it is regressed to a more fitting cause. Yet, tests of cause in these areas are not feasible; for reasons of ethics, practicality, and cost, it is impossible to randomize society into control and experimental groups to address the genesis of social problems. The result is an ideological soup with infrequent rational guidance, if even this. Facing the intractable problems of testing causal influences over social decision making, the analysis of pervasive, dominating romanticism in American policy can at best reach only plausible conclusions. Like most political and social assertions with aspirations to general applicability, it comes in the end to rely on the balance of evidence, coherence, and reasonableness—​three very unsatisfying, amorphous, and far-​too-​pliant criteria. Thus hobbled, the present work elaborates an argument—​the analysis of a number of characteristic social welfare programs defines a romantic constellation of embedded social preferences that dominate general social decision making—​w ithout rational proof. Yet the same impairments of logic, proof, and evidence also frustrate historical analysis and the largest portion of the social sciences. Intellectual life moves along without certainty, but hopefully with challenges to reigning orthodoxy, which may in the end contend for a better society. The possibility has been long neglected, or imperfectly addressed through uncertain strategies such as opinion polling, that the masses of the American people dominate the choice of social policy and that their guiding, embedded preferences are romantic more than pragmatic. The reigning orthodoxy of policy analysis from the right, the left, the center, and the edges is tactfully ideological, holding the American people innocent of the problems they suffer. The left blames national problems on the 1% who have presumably usurped power and brainwashed the masses; the right blames the media, out-​of-​control big government, and an insidious liberal elite for national decline; the center is forever indicting the two extremes; and the edges of both sides invent conspiracies, usually of this world but occasionally from others. Although the book’s ideas are largely illustrated through the social services, the abiding influence of popular consent is intended generally. Given the enormous openness of American society and the fact of

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near-​universal suffrage, democratic consent would seem to be more plausible than the alternatives: that the nation is a victim of conspiracy, propaganda, usurpation, autonomous government, and imperfect pluralism. Yet its plausibility also entails the impolitic and unpleasant correlate that may explain its neglect: if the American people are largely responsible for social policy, then they are also responsible for the problems that beset the nation, notably enormous economic and social inequality. Even worse, if the masses rule policy choice, then the persistence of material and social deprivation that lies easily within the economic capacities of the nation to address suggests that Americans are by and large short-​sighted, self-​ centered, and mean-​spirited—​morally hyphenated more than ethnically hyphenated. Thus, arguments about who and what controls social policy making are invariably speculative except in the face of obvious tyranny and coercion (or as noted above in the case of persistent class rivalry). Yet it is still plausible to conjecture about the seeds of oppression: whether the tyrant usurped power from a freedom-​loving people or whether the desires of the people for order, stability, and direction created the tyrant. Were the German people Hitler’s first victims, or did Hitler represent the general will of the German people—​their anti-​Semitism, militarism, nationalism, depravity, and lust for dominance? Similar questions arise about Stalin in Russia, Tito in Yugoslavia, Peron in Argentina, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, Gadafi in Libya, the military in Egypt, and so forth. In the absence of frank tyranny, the question of control over social policy in the United States remains a tougher question. More than forty years of great and growing social and economic inequality in the United States failing to arouse a broad and angry reaction draws attention back to the possibility of mass influence over social policy making—​that popular attitudes rather than the conspiracies of elites and propaganda determine policy choices. It appears that those most affected, perhaps more than 50% of the population, accept large and growing inequality. Acceptance may have much to do with the extreme individualism at the core of American culture that engenders American policy making in both the public and private spheres. The notion is shared by both those who suffer and those who do not. The heroic self-​reliance and self-​creation of American culture, accompanied by a preference for the subjective and the gnostic, along with the assurance of both personal and national chosenness, complete a powerful, mutually reinforcing romanticism of social behavior. American pragmatism endures as a weak influence. The concept of policy romanticism borrows from analyses of the Romantic period as well as philosophy and literature in general. However,

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policy romanticism is in many respects distinct principally because it handles a political and social temperament as well as its expression in social institutions. In contrast with policy romanticism, romanticism is a philosophy, even an artistic mood as well as their realization in painting and literature and even a notion of reality itself. Perhaps the most telling distinction between the Romantic and romantic policy making lies in the distinction between elite, intellectual style and social influence. Romantic literature was a fashion in art, but romantic policy making has engendered enduring social institutions in the United States. The Romantic is ephemeral and episodic, but the romantic appears to be stolid, continuous, and enduring. The Romantic gave great pleasure; but the romantic in policy making has created many problems and much mischief. The United States has nurtured a better culture because of the Romantic, but the romantic has seriously limited its promise. Romantic philosophy seeks to justify a particular theory of reality; it does not profess to describe or measure the prevalence of its ideas in social attitudes, or draw out its implications for specific social policy. The Romantic philosophies stand up better as descriptions of the political and social assumptions of American society—​the rejection of the objective and the embrace of metaphysics and psychic reality—​than as explanations and justifications of the world. The American policy-​making process acts as if reality were will and self-​invention—​as though the United States were pursuing a Divinely directed march toward the ideal of civilization. The romantic dominance of American policy making is neither new nor undemocratic. It characterizes the nation and points to its greatest vulnerability:  an indifference toward its own citizens that threatens its future more than global warming, war, or environmental pollution. In fact, the toxicity of its embedded romanticism already harms more of its citizens than does any alien hostility or threat of nature. The tyranny of democracy may be more resistant to change than the rule of an autocrat, who can be removed by political action. The romantic national consensus has proven impervious to world war, devastating economic collapse, and the periodic demographic tumults of mass immigration. The immense growth in American wealth and thus its capacity to address material deprivation has not translated into the political will to address the nation’s social problems. Since the 1960s, the growth of income and wealth have coincided with even larger increases in inequality. The per capita gross domestic product doubled between 1970 and 2011, while the American Gini coefficient—​the principal measure of income inequality—​rose from .394 in 1970 to .469 in 2010. Among the 30 nations included in the Organization for Economic Cooperation

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and Development, only Turkey, Mexico, and Portugal suffered greater income inequality in 2005 (Central Intelligence Agency n.d.). According to Central Intelligence Agency data, inequality in the United States puts it in the company of Bulgaria, Uruguay, the Philippines, and Cameroon (ibid.). In comparison with other industrial nations, government transfers in the United States only weakly repair inequality; transfers in most other industrial nations have twice the effect (Babones, 2012). Between 1970 and 2010, the household income share of the lowest quintile fell from 4.1% to 3.3%, and the household income share of the wealthiest quintile rose from 43.0% to 50.2%. In 1970, the 10th percentile household income was $10,152 and the 95th percentile household income was $116,129 (in 2010 dollars); the ratio of 90th percentile household income to 10th percentile household income was 9.22. In 2010, the 10th percentile household income was $11,904 and the 95th percentile household income was $180,810 (in 2010 dollars); the ratio of 90th percentile household income to 10th percentile household income rose to 11.67. Although the real household income of the 10th percentile has risen by 17.2%, the real household income of the 95th percentile has risen fully 39.9%. The greatly increased inequality poses serious threats to more than half the nation, whose incomes have not kept up with costs or needs. Moreover, employment is increasingly precarious, with relatively few blue collar jobs that pay wages sufficient to raise children and to meet contemporary American expectations. Whether inequality is a problem of deprivation or a solution to the problem of motivation and character is largely an ideological point. Yet the nation seems content with its social and economic stratification, with only desultory reactions to extensive material need, especially in consideration of its capacity to address economic and social problems. There has been little protest against growing inequality, and American public policy has consistently tracked away from economic redistribution since the 1960s. The common explanation for the persistence of problems blames various political actors for pursuing narrow self-​interest, and often through illegal conspiracies. Only rare analyses seat growing inequality and persistent deprivations in the consent of the American people. The current work references social and economic conditions in America in passing. This has been done in profound detail by numerous analysts. They are cited and briefly discussed, but just this. The book’s purpose is to amplify the argument that American policy making is deeply representative and romantic rather than progressive and pragmatic. It details the degree to which social welfare programs and policies embody and express broadly popular, regnant American preferences. The dominance

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of democratic populism challenges alternative notions of American policy making, notably that the popular preferences of the nation have been suborned by a variety of illegitimate political forces or independent, “autonomous” factors, or that political pluralism has been seriously compromised.

SECTIONS AND CHAPTERS

The book is divided into two principal sections: the first, containing the Introduction and Chapters 1 through 4, explains social policy making as romantic. The Introduction argues against the possibilities that power in the United States has been usurped by illegitimate elites or an autonomous federal government, or that pluralism has been seriously compromised. American decision making is democratic but populist rather than elitist and defined by its embedded romantic notions in rejection of pragmatism. The Introduction lays out the proposition that policy making in the United States is determined by a broad democratic consensus. In spite of episodic pitfalls and threats to democratic processes, mass preferences prevail in policy making rather than the far more common assumption that conspiracies of illegitimate elites rule the nation. Democratic consent is formed more through an ecology of detached roles than through coherent and objective consideration. Chapter 1 identifies the Romantic precursors to policy romanticism. The standard concept of romanticism is explored as inner experience, imagination and inspiration, individualism and the will, the romantic quest, and the romantic mood. These characteristics constitute the essence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy. He is the quintessential American romantic. Chapter  2 sets policy romanticism within the context of American policy making and describes its core concepts of extreme individualism, gnostic thinking, and a sense of chosenness. The chapter argues that the core of these preferences defining social reality is more emotional, superstitious, and traditional than rational or even reasonable. In spite of recurrent bouts of progressive reform, democratic populism dominates both public and private policy. Chapter 3 points out that the pursuit of the authentic self in the different styles of American psychotherapy and in the self-​help literature is a pervasive expression of policy romanticism in American culture. The pursuit of the romantic self constitutes an archetype of American belief. Chapter 4 explores the quest for the authentic self in illuminations of the true self, in theories of organizational leadership, and in other sorts of Preface  [   x v   ]

personal quests for the authentic soul. The national investment in romantic quests sustains the preferences for social efficiency, superstition, and quick authenticity. These preferences supplant serious material attempts to repair inequality and begin to explain the minimalism and the underlying architecture of most social services. The five chapters that constitute the second section interpret a variety of characteristic American social welfare programs in the private sector (Year Up, Communities in Schools, and Generations of Hope Communities) and in the public sector (the federal food stamp program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). The chapters that discuss the private sector programs outline the programs, report their evaluated outcomes, and then reconsider the evidence of their success. The food stamp program (Chapter 8) is first described and then analyzed as a romantic expression of the culture, with the chapter finally returning to discussion of the forces that control social policy. Chapter 9 analyzes Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as part of the broader reforms of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act. After describing the reforms and the politics that created them, Chapter 9 interprets the changes as the broad triumph of emotion over reason. These values dominate the American cultural tradition. All five programs are popular institutions of culture that characteristically reaffirm its embedded romantic values rather than pragmatic provisions to address serious social problems. The Conclusion draws out the implications of policy romanticism for American social progress. Policy romanticism impedes the maturity of American society, and its growth toward decency. In one form or another, romanticism may be the oldest of humanity’s social perspectives. Myth, religion, and symbolism express the sublime realities at its core. The belief systems of culture may well inspire their formal expressions in art and philosophy more than the inventions of artists and thinkers compel mass acceptance. Art and philosophy may be elite inventions; romantic policy is broadly consensual and sanctioned by use. Romantic policy emerges from the lived experience with its social representations rather than from intellectual contrivances, no matter their consistency, coherence, or beauty. Those representations are essentially political and not at all rational while society abides many contradictions and self-​defeating choices, routinely defying the efforts of reason. A subculture of the pragmatic, encompassing the scientific, has always existed in the United States, with few threats to its persistence but also with little chance of its dominance. The pragmatic subculture provides the technological innovations, the specialized skills, and the managerial

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capabilities that account for the nation’s phenomenal wealth. It also carries along the supportive values of rational thought, free expression, functional individualism, and social tolerance. Yet pragmatism remains a decidedly minority voice with a weak but palpable influence on policy that survives within a pervasive romantic environment. Perhaps the two are mutually dependent, but this is not apparent. More plausibly, the romanticism of American life erects a formidable barrier to the maturation and promise of American civilization.

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ACKNOW LED GMEN T S

I am grateful for skilled, intelligent, hardworking research assistants, Kailyn Sylvern, Salina Bahk, Patricia Scherer, and Elizabeth A. Benston; for erudite, careful first readers, Ronald Farrell, Robert Dippner, Ralph Dippner, Brij Mohan, David Stoesz, Joanne Thompson, Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann, Carolyn Violi Grossmann, Joel Fischer, and Maurice Finocchiaro; for astute criticism at Oxford University Press from anonymous reviewers, the copyeditor Thomas Finnegan, and my editor, Dana Bliss; and for strategic advice from Jennifer Klear. As ever, my appreciation for the patient efforts of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas librarians.

SEC TION   I

Explaining Social Policy Making

Introduction The Ruling Masses

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harles Lindblom (1980), the eminent social scientist, was also eminently restrained in introducing analysis that could not be tested. He suggested, but only as intuitions, four factors that characterize American policy making:  limited rationality, political and social inequalities among groups, a special advantage for business, and a process of negotiating among players. He did not address the problem of political legitimacy by commenting on whether inequality and the privileges of business were democratically sanctioned or imposed through unfair, illegal, or anti-​democratic processes. He also observed that rational information concerning policy outcomes and policy making was rare and partisan analyses were plentiful, but he did not impute the disparity to political, financial, or technical factors. He did not offer an explanation of why or how the system developed. In contrast, the usual theorists of policy making are not as restrained as Lindblom and graduate their intuitions of political truth into full-​scale explanations of what determines American social policy. Yet their theories rarely make use if ever of the appropriate methods to test cause, or even offer an expansive coverage of more than a narrow range of policy. As a result, the analysis of policy and policy itself are typically ideological expressions rather than applications of social science. Yet it is nearly impossible to consider social policy making without at least an implicit assumption about its determining forces. The ideological nature of the assumptions is rarely acknowledged. By and large, contemporary explanations of social policy identify three types of actors that determine social policy: illegitimate elites, including

autonomous actors, which subvert democratic processes and intents; imperfect pluralism, which reduces the variety of political actors; and mass determination, that is, policy making, which is in fact democratic, reflecting popular preferences and emerging from sanctioned processes. The problem of adjudicating between the theories of policy making is probably intractable. Although proximate policy makers are easy to identify—​public officials, lobbyists, corporate leaders, and the socially prominent—​whether they carry a broad mandate and are fulfilling democratic preferences is much more difficult to test. The only reasonable test of the influence of various groups is to measure their self-​defined preferences and track which one prevails. However, the test is problematic first because it is difficult to assess self-​defined preferences—​opinion polls are notoriously unreliable—​and second because differences among stable groups are rarely large. It is much easier to attribute self-​interest to groups than to assume that those whose interests are maximized are in control; unfortunately, this latter process, although common, is still a poor approximation of live politics. It is also very difficult to assess the truth of prior claims about the effects of policy since most policies are best guesses deprived of experimental testing, which is customarily impossible. Keynes, as a prominent example, may be a more reasonable guide to fiscal policy than the suggestions of the free marketeers and the supply siders, but the attraction of Keynesian macroeconomics rests largely on its political appeal to a broad section of society more than on its long-​term rationality in achieving economic growth. The fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession of 2008 was probably compromised more by a general belief in balancing the budget than by the dominance of any narrow interest, including business. Indeed, the modest stimulus that finally emerged carried the support of the business sector to keep up demand but lacked the full backing of popular sentiment, which was also concerned about the inflationary threats of large sustained federal deficits. The modesty of the stimulus was broadly consensual—​a balancing between players who were well representative of American preferences—​however inadequate it may have been in handling the recession. The elites played through the policy game, but largely representing approved national constituencies. In typical fashion, the nation was more content with persistent unemployment than the threat of inflation; stated with less delicacy, the employed far outnumbered the unemployed. Still and all, conspiracies of illegitimate elites seem implausible, or perhaps only plausible as a common, recognized, and universal strategy in group competition. In the immensely open society of the United States, enduring elites of power and wealth customarily enjoy the consent of [ 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

the masses. Moreover, the United Sates is a hyperdemocracy with near-​ universal adult suffrage, entailing the default assumption that unpopular elites would be removed from power. Indeed, culture itself may be the most effective conspiracy, and Americans participate in the self-​deception through an ecology of detached roles, with every daily, freely chosen act endorsing social preferences and rules with little dissent.1 No matter how much they may complain about conditions, the fact that members of the society accept its tenets in their daily life suggests their deep consent for its operations. The exclusion of voters and the isolation of willing social participants are rare, although both apparently do occur. Yet the largest exclusion from voting seems to be voluntary. Many Americans do not vote. However, it is probably unjustified to interpret the low turnouts as boycotts against the American system. Indeed, many are passively expressing satisfaction. Money is obviously an important influence in the decision-​making process, but it may be neither the threat to democratic processes nor the usurpation of power that some contend (Kaiser, 2009; Lessig, 2011). Perhaps money buys votes and undermines the will of the people; then again, money may largely flow in proportion to popular interests. In this sense, Lindblom’s intuition of a special role for business in the United States signals the deference of the American public to a favored institution, rather than evidence that democracy has been corrupted. In the end, the argument seems most plausible that “mass preferences” prevail through social, economic, and political institutions that enjoy broad sanction. Indeed, embedded preferences largely build those institutions through daily usage rather than through any elegance of a national dialogue or otherwise reasoned consideration of options. The presence of social institutions has too often been confused as the conscious, planned materialization of an idea, which is not particularly surprising in light of the natural biases of intellectuals who favor the notion of reason, the formative power of ideas, and a national dialogue. SOCIAL PREFERENCES AND POLLING

Preference is best denoted by the free choice of an option and only weakly indicated through surveys of opinions and intentions, which are at least 1. The ecology of detached roles, explored later in the chapter, describes a mechanism by which social preferences graduate into social policy outside of any formal political process, let  alone rational scrutiny. Put another way, the ecology of detached roles summates the totality of the nearly infinite choices of individuals in a society. I n t roduct ion [ 5]

one, often unreliable, step removed from the actual behavior of choosing. Political scientists have attempted to assess mass influence by comparing polled opinions with implemented policy. However, the value of opinion surveys in assessing mass preferences is undercut by a series of intractable methodological problems including the impossibility of isolating public opinion from the factors creating it, which is to say, the claim that public opinion is routinely manipulated by illegitimate elites of one sort or another. The impressive commentaries in Navigating Public Opinion (2002), edited by Manza, Cook, and Page, are forthright in stating the pitfalls of polling. Page’s cautious concluding essay provides little warrant for the field. He notes that the presumably better statistical studies have “invariably found substantial covariation between opinion and policy”; yet he goes on to develop in some detail the conclusion that all such studies (including those in which I have participated [including Page & Shapiro 1983]) have very likely overestimated the extent of responsiveness. All have been prey to varying combinations of sampling and aggregation biases and specification errors, especially specification errors involving the omission of relevant variables and relationships that might have revealed the opinion-​policy relationship to be partly spurious or reciprocal. (Manza et al., 2002, p. 326)

Page’s critique covers his own work (e.g., Page & Shapiro 1983) as well as other major efforts (notably Erikson, MacKuen, & Stimson, 2002): “A major problem, the same problem that has plagued nearly all quantitative research in this area, is the omission of independent variables that may affect both opinion and policy and create a spurious relationship between the two” (Manza et al., 2002, p. 328). The problems outlined in Manza et  al. have been reprised over the decades and persist to undercut the authority and utility of opinion polling. First, it is not legitimate to infer causal relationships from observational (nonexperimental) data. The fallacy of inferring cause from correlational data bedevils much policy research. While a statistically significant correlation suggests a relation, it is not legitimate to assume that even a very strong relationship implies cause. For example it is a fallacy to conclude that the close relationship between height and weight implies cause in either direction. To the contrary both height and weight would seem to be the result of other factors such as genetic inheritance and nutrition. As another example, there is a very strong correlation between dying and being in bed. If cause was implied it would be prudent to sleep on the sofa. The contention that responses to polls imply the cause of social policy is a heroic surmise. [ 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Second, response falsification bedevils opinion polls. Researchers have found that respondents to surveys frequently misreport their attitudes on sensitive topics, including income (Moore, Stinson, & Welniak, 2000), sexual activity (Weiderman, 1997), voter turnout in presidential elections (Epstein, 2006), drug and alcohol use (Bongers, Van Oers, Van De Goor, & Garretsen, 1997). Because of routine falsification, it is nearly impossible to identify the reasons for reported opinions and their effects. In addition, people are often encouraged by the very process of polling to provide prosocial responses reflecting ceremonial values of citizenship rather than how they actually feel, that is, their determinative preferences. Furthermore, respondents often do not know how they feel but are obliged to choose a response. Customarily, people make decisions in groups—​families, peers, and so forth—​but opinion polling assumes that they are somewhat independent of these influences. Indeed, most people are quite ignorant of the topics they are commenting on. Third, free choice among options is the measure of preference. The fact that people may report displeasure with a particular policy does not imply that they are unwilling to accept the policy or oppose it. Implemented policy may not reflect top choices of many citizens, but it may reflect an adequate number of lower priorities to ensure the consent of the masses to governance. In this case, the masses will report antagonism to policy but in actuality comfortably abide it. Even more to the point, the live behavior of citizens—​protest or compliance—​provides a more accurate view of public opinion than their verbal responses to pollsters. Fourth, responses are often ambiguous even when they seem to be precise. For example, there is an immense support for “social security” routinely reported by disparate polls. But it is not clear whether Old Age Survivors, Disability, and Health Insurance is popular because of its inadequacies or in spite of them. For one, old age insurance basically provides benefits proportionate to contributions and thus replicates American stratification. Unsurprisingly, even though many people would like to be given more money, it is not clear whether support for the program endorses the inequalities in American stratification or represents a preference for greater sharing. Fifth, the representativeness of polls is customarily problematic. Participation rates of those actually reached by phone, for example, are often less than 50%, while the true denominator of participation—​the total phone numbers called—​often reduces the participation rate to single digits. Finally, the wording of questions, their position in the survey, length, and other design issues often impair the accuracy of polls and create biased responses. I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 7]

At the same time the customary assessment of implemented policy also has often been impaired by the hit-​and-​miss definitions of policy. The policy reference itself is often unclear, for example Social Security meaning specific programs or a sense of deserts or a symbol of citizenship, tradition, family, or ethnicity. As Page adds, the level of policy is often ignored while individual policies in a particular area may move in opposite directions but are still “scrunched into a single, liberal-​conservative … trend line” (Manza et al., 2002, p. 329). In the end, the study of public opinion has not provided grounds on which to either endorse or reject the influence of mass preferences over policy. Indeed, the current prevalence of alternative theories of policy influence seems uninhibited by any strong evidence of mass influence. For the past few decades, there seems to be declining general respect for the argument that opinion polls have demonstrated the influence of mass preferences. Within political science and the polling community itself, there is persistent skepticism about the accuracy of measuring public opinion by polling (Manza et al., 2002; Epstein, 2006; among many others). Voting is often indicative of preference, but because so many values and issues are packaged in elections it is often impossible to discern the values that prompt the vote. Uncoerced choices made in daily life are probably clearer indicators of the preferences of a society: patterns of family formation; popular culture; participation in sports, the arts, and social groups; patterns of housing; budget priorities in personal spending; choice of occupation; education; and of course behaviors that show satisfaction and dissatisfaction. What people say is usually far less meaningful than what people freely choose to do. It is understandable that policy criticism has largely ignored mass preference as the dominant factor in social policy making. To attribute the persistence of social problems to the masses is to criticize them, a very unwise strategy for those seeking popular support. The charge of illegitimacy, imperfect pluralism, or far more irrational factors creating scapegoats preserves the innocence of the governed. It also preserves many social scientists’ delusions of rationality and neutrality and obscures their accommodations with political power, their ambitions, and the difficulties of making a living. At worst the masses have been beguiled by conspiracies and lies, and the task for the reformer is to awaken them to their peril.2 2. The literature of conspiracy is immensely rich, and claims of conspiracy have achieved the status of inventive creativity in a longstanding but underappreciated genre of literary fiction. Steiger and Steiger (2013) summarize hundreds of largely recent claims of conspiracy, [ 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

The common logic of the argument begins either with a general perception that a problem exists or with attempts to alert the public to an unseen danger. It then goes on to identify the cause of the subversion of democratic processes and American values. Finally it seeks to rectify the problem by handling the people, organizations, or social conditions considered to cause the problem. The assumption running through the rhetoric of political competition holds the American public, the masses, as responsible for their own suffering or innocent of their problems. However, the rhetoric of political competition is quite different from the actual process of policy making, which in an open society like the United States begins with social preferences, which limit any pretense to planning in forethought. Stone (2011) states the process as a paradox: the solution to a social problem (which is embedded social preferences) precedes its emergence. A social system and its culture are in fact the sanctioned means to address social needs and anticipate problems. The process is grounded in custom and tradition rather than in the tests and tools of rationality. It is elaborated within an ecology of detached role organizations, which draw their power from the nearly infinite microadjustments of the population to the multitude of their choices, customarily reaching a deep consensus even in authoritarian cultures. Rational procedures are largely restricted to implementation, if even that, and the fantasies of participants. The masses, especially in a longstanding open democracy such as the United States, are not innocent of the rules of their culture. Social problems, especially in the United States, result from embedded social priorities favoring one portion of the population at the expense of others. The developmentally disabled, as one example, do not become poor because of their infirmity but because public and private social welfare provisions are inadequate to raise their income above poverty. The decision to ignore their need reflects the nation’s consensus on allocating national income and wealth, and not, especially in the United States, financial incapacity to do so. Similarly, inadequate provisions for foster children reflect their low political standing rather than a lack of national resources. With even greater reach, the enormous inequalities in the United States, which translate for large portions of the citizenry into inadequate schools, housing, food, income, health, and mental health services (among other deficits, including persistent high unemployment and poverty), are accepted ranging from a few that might be likely to the many that are speculative, paranoid, twisted, and frankly insane. However, all seem to share a common theme: the forces of evil are plotting to undermine legitimacy and goodness. After all, when the good guys get together in secret it is called defense, and justified often as security and prudence. I n t roduct ion [9]

social and economic conditions; American stratification enjoys the consent of the American people. There is little innocence in these decisions, but much subterfuge and self-​deception. ILLEGITIMATE ELITES

Democratic legitimacy rides on the determination of whether a group represents the desires of the American people and has their consent for its activities. Groups are labeled illegitimate because they are accused of undermining democratic preferences, more than because they have actually subverted the law through nefarious conspiracies that manipulate the masses. Yet very often elites—​such as business, the government, media, the military and so forth—​that are indicted as illegitimate by one political faction or another do, in fact, accurately represent American preferences, even when they appear to be pursuing narrow, “special” interests. American elites, notably the wealthy and the powerful, customarily win their status and wealth through legal and approved means, despite the condemnations of critics that the policies of the successful are imprudent. The wealthy and successful are also often widely envied and become sanctioned models of social contribution and correct behavior. The reality that corporate policies and actions are often unwise and contrary to the objective and ascribed interests of a just society is quite beside the point of their political legitimacy conferred by the collective, self-​defined subjectivities of American society. Holding social institutions like business responsible for their own birth ignores the consent built into their operations. The truer issue is the decency and wisdom of the population that embedded its goals, preferences, and customs as social institutions. From the Political Left

The most serious charge of illegitimacy from the American left, such as it is, including liberals and progressives, insists that the business sector is in cahoots with the military and numerous other antidemocratic forces that are often funded by a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people. The small, unrepresentative special interests of money and power supposedly undermine democratic procedures through lobbying, purchased and stolen elections, brainwashing through the media, control of technology, and a variety of illegal, often conspiratorial activities. The charges range from the most strident and extreme—​that 1% of the population controls the other 99% and that the military is seeking to control the world through [1 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

its activities on the island of Diego Garcia—​to a gentler critique of simple inequality, namely that business exerts a disproportionate influence through its wealth and access over other social institutions, including the media. 3 There is hardly a voice on the left that generates a critique of inequality starting with embedded mass preferences, that is, the culpability of the masses in their own predicament. The masses are customarily held to be trapped in their ignorance by inadequate schools and limited exposure to the truth rather than by their own willful ignorance. The disproportionate influence of business, simply observed by Lindblom, is more typically condemned by the critical lineages of the American left, one of which runs from the Marxists and becomes increasingly tamed as it passes on to Eugene Debs and the democratic socialists; the progressives, C. Wright Mills, Frances Fox Piven, and Richard Cloward; and subsequently to America’s procedural liberals, many of whom are represented among critics of the Great Recession. The criticism on the left has been ratcheted up considerably since the Great Recession of 2008. It blames American stratification as the cause of the nation’s social problems and just as often asserts that the stratification has taken place without the consent of the American people. The argument assumes that the American people do not support the current system. When it is obvious that the masses do seem to support unfortunate inequality, the left often falls back on the excuse that elites of power and wealth have imposed a “false consciousness” on the American people, who are pacified by fatty, sweet food; drugged by liquor and chemicals; kept ignorant by failed schools; distracted by mind-​numbing television, movies, and sensational journalism; and undercut by political conspiracies. Buying into the complaint of the Occupy Movement that 1% of the population benefits at the expense of the other 99%, Joseph Stiglitz (2012), a Nobelist in economics, amasses a state-​of-​the-​art argument documenting the pernicious effects of large social and economic inequalities. Along the way, he develops a theory of illegitimate social control: government shapes market forces and has failed to employ its capacity to address inequality. The failure of government to correct for market inequities reflects the illegitimate influence of the top 1% of the society. Even though market forces help shape the degree of inequality, government policies shape those market forces. Much of the inequality that exists today is a result of government policy, both what the government does and what it does not do. Government has the power to move money from the top to the bottom and the middle, or vice versa… .

3. See the extract from Freedland (2009) below. I n t r o d u c t i o n  [11]

We have a political system that gives inordinate power to those at the top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor, and to extract from the public what can only be called large “gifts.” (pp. 28, 31–​32)

However, Stiglitz does not address the possibility that the power of the top 1% is conferred by the consent of the society, that the concentration of apparent decision-​making authority reflects popular notions of how the economy and politics should be run. Stiglitz’s refutation of the irrationality of the political right is compelling—​he argues that facts do not sustain its claims for the virtues of a largely unregulated market—​ but an enormous portion of the society believes in those misconceptions, notably the benevolent efficiency of the marketplace and its gift of jobs and wealth that the American elite provide to the rest of society. The society embraces American stratification, demonstrating little affection for antipoverty measures or even measures to buoy up working-​class wages. Indeed, the cash value of antipoverty programs has decreased greatly for 40  years. In addition, membership in labor unions has fallen by about two thirds since its high in the 1950s (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015; Greenhouse, 2011) and there appears to be little political support for the progressive agenda, including greater public regulation of the market. Indeed, the American public seems to prefer passivity to activism, accepting their society as a legitimate reflection of their preferences. Their grumbling and growling does not grow into the bite of protest. Even more to the point, the public has had many opportunities to take the top 1% to task for their complicity in the Great Recession and the refusal through their presumed control of government to redistribute income and wealth to the rest of society. However, the public has refused to do so, instead nurturing a reactionary Tea Party movement and repeatedly endorsing conservative public officials with dramatic shifts to the right in the 2014 elections while still in the shadow of the Great Recession. Stiglitz assumes throughout that the light of reason—​an exhaustive presentation of objective facts—​w ill convert the public. Yet he may be misperceiving the preferences of the American public; his notion of their self-​interest—​g reater economic parity and political influence—​is perhaps not their notion. Stiglitz refuses to accept the American public’s definition of their priorities and self-​interests based on their own free electoral choices and, far more tellingly, what they abide in their personal lives and what they refuse to protest. It is a very difficult pill to swallow for the political left that the top 1% by and large enjoy their position with the consent of the American public. Even if the nation should perhaps be [12 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

more communal, concerned, and sharing, it does not appear to be that way or wish to move in that direction. Similar to Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, also a Nobel Prize economist, repeats the common complaint that public regulatory agencies refuse to regulate: “as history shows, the financial industry’s wealth and influence can all too easily turn those who are supposed to serve as watchdogs into lap dogs instead” (2013). But “history” has never settled which side enjoys the greater mandate of the people: regulatory oversight or business convenience. Business may well exert its influence and enjoy considerable wealth because of the support of the American people for its special role. Its political sway over regulatory agencies is most likely widely endorsed; for one, it is not at all clear that the American people are willing to sacrifice cheap energy for clean air. Polled enthusiasms to curtail corporate abuse quickly fade in the face of price and employment consequences of strict regulation. Moreover, the prosocial responses in opinion surveys for regulation have not been translated into a political willingness to endorse policies to share incomes or ensure full employment in the United States. For Krugman, “movement conservatism,” engendered by a few wealthy individuals, is the dark force undermining American society. Movement conservatism is a network of people and institutions that extends far beyond what is normally considered political life: in addition to the Republican Party and Republican politicians, movement conservatism includes media organizations, think tanks, publishing houses and more. People can and do make entire careers within this network, secure in the knowledge that political loyalty will be rewarded no matter what happens… . Money is the glue of movement conservatism, which is largely financed by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals and a number of major corporations, all of whom stand to gain from increased inequality, an end to progressive taxation, and a rollback of the welfare state—​i n short from a reversal of the New Deal. (2007, p. 10)

However, many on the political right will not benefit at all from diminished public provisions for income security. The Christian right, customarily associated with movement conservatism and many of the poor and marginal members of the working class who define themselves as conservative and vote that way, will lose greatly from reduced public services. Indeed, it is difficult to come to grips with the observation that the poorest states in the nation and large portions of their poorest citizens are the most conservative. Moreover, money is also the glue of liberal politics, with associated think tanks, foundations, unions, university constituencies, dedicated demographic groups, and even functionaries who are taken care of for their loyalties. In addition, many contributors to liberal I n t r o d u c t i o n  [13 ]

causes are among the wealthiest Americans: George Soros, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Warren Buffett to name just a few. It is quite noteworthy that the billions raised by both sides in the 2012 presidential elections (with one contributor, Sheldon Adelson, donating more than $100 million to Republicans) seemed to cancel each other out, if in fact there was any effect. Movement conservatism did not enjoy a financial edge, and it is quite difficult to assume that the often false, exaggerated commercials and robo-​calls purchased with the billions produced more than irritation. Despite its reactionary social agenda, movement conservatism may well enjoy the free support of a very large sector of society, which endorses much that is harsh and ill-​advised in America. It may shock the political left a bit to realize that American politics does not turn on their facts or assumed virtues; what liberals ascribe to people as their interests often differs substantially from what people actually define as their self-​interest. Reich (2005, 2011, 2012) and Noah (2012) make similar indictments of the illegitimacy of power and money in the United States but also similarly exaggerate the unpopularity of leadership and underplay the democratic consent built into their power. Rothkopf (2008) identifies an illegitimate “superclass” of financiers, and Smith (2012) lays charges against “the newly awakened power of business” (p. xiv); neither acknowledges as Lindblom did the special grant of privilege that Americans have given to business. To answer Smith’s question—​ “Who stole the American dream?”—​he might consider that Americans themselves are the thieves. Alan Krueger, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, repeats the liberal mantra that greater equality is good for just about everyone but stops short of explicitly indicting the wealthy, repeating the president’s line that “this isn’t about class warfare” (Krueger, 2012). Then what is it about, if not the illegitimate influence of wealth? Surely, he was not being impolitic by suggesting that the American people were foolish in sustaining large inequalities. Bowles (2012) argues that great inequality is foolish and costly, but he does not value social choices in the same way as the population while his estimates of cost are quite questionable. For all his sophisticated analyses and citations, his argument remains profoundly ideological. Thomas Frank (2004) makes a strong case that the conservative agenda is freely sustained by many Americans who will, perhaps knowingly, lose economically by its policies. The nation is probably not as far to the right as movement conservatism in desiring to repeal the social insurances, but it is most likely inhospitable to the progressive agenda and complacently accepts large inequalities of income and social standing. In contrast, Wilkinson and Pickett’s optimistic reading (2009) of the [14 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

growing receptivity for policies that pursue greater equality seems based on the warm reception to their book by sympathetic readers and on the demonstration that “the vast majority of the population benefits from greater equality” (p.  275). Moreover, Wilkinson and Pickett are largely addressing a European audience much to the left of American sensibilities, while they ignore the inertia of cultural resistance as a political force, that is, the degree to which greater equality upsets cherished social roles. Recalling Frank (2004), the benefits ascribed to citizenry may not be the decisive benefits that the population defines for itself. Despite Wilkinson and Pickett’s well-​reasoned and nearly exhaustive documentation of the benefits of greater equality, democratic Europe does not seem to have been convinced, and austerity policies that increase inequalities largely prevailed during the Great Recession in much of Europe. The wealthy and influential are also fingered for scorn by many others on the political left. Barlett and Steele (2012) try to expose how “a small number of people in power have deliberately put in place polices that have enriched themselves while cutting the ground out from underneath America’s greatest asset—​its middle class” (p. ix). Similarly attentive to conspiracy, Wedel (2009) identifies a “shadow elite” of wealth, neoconservatives, financiers, and business interests that are the new breed of players, who operate at the nexus of official and private power, [who] can not only co-​opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-​honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight. (pp. 7–​8)

The Great Recession stimulated a rash of books extending the longstanding complaints of the political left and even the populist right against wealth, power, and the insider’s game of lobbyists and purchased elections. Taibbi (2010) returns to financial conspiracies, “the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power” (front flap). Barlett and Steele (2012) “tell the story of how a small number of people in power have deliberately put in place policies that have enriched themselves while cutting ground out from underneath America’s greatest asset—​its middle class” (p. ix). Once again, the journalism ignores the special concession long granted to business by the American people.4 4. Additional examples to those previously cited are Scheer (2010), Lewis (2010), Prins (2009), and Stockman (2013). I n t r o d u c t i o n  [15 ]

In one form or another, they update the lineage of indictments against American establishments and the unfairness of American stratification. Yet almost all neglect the broad consent built into American system and the popular refusal to install pervasive structural changes. Corruption exists on both sides; President Kennedy’s stolen election involving Cook County’s generations of registered dead is little different from the second President Bush’s benefit of the Supreme Court’s partisan affections. A picaresque approach to elections seems embedded in the society and its notion of competition. A variety of largely liberal and progressive think tanks, foundations, many unions and political organizations reflect the assumptions of the political left. Animated by their critique of American politics and society, the Americans for Democratic Action, the National Organization for Women, the (Soros) Open Society Foundations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the AFL-​CIO, to name a few liberal organizations, presumably pursue reforms in political representation and election policy (notably voter registration), distribution of wealth, public regulation of business, and other related areas through political and social organizing, public information, and lobbying activities. However, many of these groups, and perhaps the largest of them, pursue procedural reforms more intensively than redistributive goals. That is, they usually do not threaten the socioeconomic stability of the nation as much as they press for greater inclusion in existing processes. NOW and its fierce antipathy to the presiding patriarchy are more concerned about the glass ceiling than low-​wage jobs for women or the income of poor mothers and their capacity to keep and raise their children. NOW apparently accepts the legitimacy of American stratification but simply assumes that diluting the patriarchy with women will soften the predations of elites, delivering to the nation a gentler, kinder ruling class. The agenda of reform looks much like American attitudes toward stratification, paying tribute to the general consent for things as they are. The American labor movement, traditionally a central component of the nation’s near left, is but rarely critical of capitalism or the American social system. In 2014, organized labor represented only 11.1% percent of wage and salaried workers in the United States, declining from 20.1% in 1983 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015) and “35% during the mid-​1950s” (Greenhouse, 2011). It has largely become divorced from its traditional base of industrial workers and low-​paid occupations, in 2014 representing only 6.6% of wage and salaried workers in the private sector (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). There has never been an effective labor party in American politics, which would seem to acknowledge the pervasive influence of American satisfaction, notably among working people, with the [1 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

legitimacy of the nation’s economic system and the position of workers in the economic and social hierarchy of the United States. It is probable that the increasingly hostile legislative climate vis-​à-​ vis labor organizing has impeded membership retention and growth. However, its own weak organizing strategies and skills, its episodic corruption, and its failures at both internal democracy and the development of leadership have certainly contributed to the decline of unions. In addition, the American labor movement during its most successful period—​ the first six decades of the 20th century—​expressed the economic and market values of a broad social vision of greater equality and fairness. Yet as the century proceeded and the nation began to disavow the progressivism of the 1930s, so too did organized labor. Reflecting the ideological shifts of its own members, organized labor became more centrist and more focused on the sectarian health of their separate industries. Organized labor has become syndicalist more than broadly political, an industrial adjunct more than a community institution, a grievance system for workers rather than a moral and social force in behalf of the poor and working people, a passive recipient of American values rather than an advocate of fairness. Even a more powerful factor, the nation’s stalwart attachment to romantic notions of individualism continues to thwart enrollment in unions. If economic self-​interest is ascribed to working people, then union decline is a tragedy. However, working people do not seem to see it that way, and union decline remains largely consensual rather than the effect of a conspiracy of business interests and their purchase of the American political system. With few exceptions, labor organizing campaigns have failed for decades; the American public often cross the picket lines, and unions may well worry privately that during strikes their own unemployed members will do the same. In short, the organizations of the American left seem to have made a tacit concession to American preferences in their operations, and even in their rhetoric. They often speak in the language of greater equality but act within dramas of American policy romanticism. The left’s strategy of reform even seems at odds with its voiced assumptions about power and wealth, or at least its complaints about regnant elites. If in fact the elite of business and wealth have the American public in thrall, a strategy of appealing to the American public would seem to be futile or more prayerful than political and practical—​simply hoping for a change of consciousness in the American public. Yet, through the very fact of activities that seek the public’s support, the left pays tribute to the possibility that its targets of illegitimacy are actually legitimized with considerable popular support. By implication, the fierce complaints of the left about collusion, conspiracy, and usurpation get reduced to a I n t r o d u c t i o n  [17]

more conventional recognition that the public is simply misled, and perhaps even willingly. Moreover, the longstanding failure to reduce material inequality in the United States despite the efforts of the left suggests a political equilibrium—​a stable, consistent standoff among competitive groups—​that has been established considerably to the right of center. The left is loath to consider that the equilibrium is consensual. 5 The French leftist Stephane Hessel, who inspired the Occupy Movement in the United States with his elegant essay Time for Outrage (2011), fumes that “the wealthy have installed their slaves in the highest spheres of the state” in violation of the spirit of the French Resistance, which stirred national policy after World War II (pages unnumbered). With attention fixed mostly on Europe, he called for a nonviolent revolution against the inequalities of the modern state. Yet there is little outrage at wealth and power in the American population, despite Robert Reich’s insistence that “it is unlikely that the plutocrats can retain their political clout forever” (2012, p. 48). Unless “forever” is meant to hedge a bet into the next millennium, American inequalities persist with the apparent consent of the American people and Reich’s bugaboos of “hefty campaign contributions and platoons of lobbyists and public relations spinners” are simply the agents of business’s special privilege granted by the American people (pp. 47–​48). The Occupy Movement in the United States seemed to be more an extension of summer camp with little political coherence, few points of agreement, and small, episodic turnouts. Even after the Great Recession, the indignation in the United States continues to come mainly from the right, notably channeled through the Tea Party movement with its defining affection for American stratification as morally legitimate and its complaints against big government, taxation, and liberal welfare. From the Political Right

The political left seems to draw authority from the objective logic and style of the social sciences. In contrast, the political right, perhaps in application of a defining American mood, prefers to stand on a more frankly emotional platform of traditional belief, sentimentality, and the inertial wisdom of received social institutions. The elites that the political right defines as illegitimate, usurping power that should be placed closer to the people (whoever they are), concentrate around complaining about 5.  American liberals are much like centrist European conservatives. Indeed, European conservatives in England and Germany as two examples advocate policies—​notably in employment, welfare, education, and health—​to the left of American liberals.

[1 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

a central government that has grown too large and too intrusive—​excessive regulatory power, misguided and counterproductive social welfare programs, and a propensity to breach citizen privacy. Making the political right’s case against big government—​which is customarily a variation on the conservative theme laid out in 1835 by Tocqueville (1997) in his Memoir on Pauperism—​Charles Murray (1984, 2012) argues against the modern welfare state and the small elite of liberal power and wealth that seduced the American public into following the European model of providing economic security for its citizens. The provision of an economic floor apparently deprived Europeans of the dignity and satisfaction of personal accomplishment. Moreover, the liberal welfare state poses a lethal threat to the grandness and continuation of what Murray (2012) calls the American project. For Murray, the American project, which justifies the nation’s exceptional standing among all other nations, rests with its moral virtues:  industriousness, neighborliness, personal responsibility, optimism, lack of class envy, and “our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class” (p. 305). For conservatives, the virtues of the nation emerge from respect for tradition that has nourished American exceptionalism. [Exceptionalism] has been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down: a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-​manage how people interact with one another. Discard the system that created the cultural capital and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away. (ibid.)

Like much that is socially sordid in the history of the American political right, Murray cannot let go of genetic explanations for social outcomes, even subsequent to the debacle of his genetic claims for the intellectual inferiority of blacks in The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). The portion of the new elite that he approves of is created by the mating among the intellectually gifted. The problems at the bottom of the social ladder seem to also be determined by class inbreeding. Advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach

I n t r o d u c t i o n  [19 ]

adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and to hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-​in male is not the married biological father. These same reasons explain why society’s attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don’t work and will never work. (Murray, 2012, p. 209)

Murray’s solution to the impending decline in the American project and thus American civilization rests in “a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class” to replace the welfare state and to replace the influence of liberals (p. 305). Typical for the American conservative, in this case blending the religious right with free marketeers, Murray sees the necessary change as moral—​an awakening that recalls the religious revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries—​and voluntary, that is, accomplished without government programs and displacing liberal government controls. Murray’s identification of illegitimate elites is somewhat subtle, more a call on a small elite of liberals and big government advocates to change their evil ways. He urges the elite to become voluntary mentors to the less capable, rather than indict them for manipulating social and political processes as well as mass opinion to maintain their power and wealth. Note, however, that Murray does not condemn the American population itself, or concede that big government programs such as the social insurances have been popular choices. After all, this concession would turn the masses, in his terms, into dupes and undercut the wisdom of democracy itself. Many conservative critics are far less subtle in their condemnations and thus more protective of the innocence of the American public. They make raucous claims that American democracy, its many achievements, and its promises have been subverted by a variety of liberals who through manipulations and conspiracies have gained illegitimate influence over American policy making. Their claims are enormously popular. Dennis Prager (2012), a talk show host and author, argues that the political left has prevailed because it has “succeeded in demonizing the right more than it has succeeded in any other area of life” (p.  81). The vehicle for this success is the left’s appeal to emotion and the ability of the media, controlled by the left, to “brainwash” the masses by manipulating emotion. The political left in the United States has slandered and libeled conservatives through the media with claims that they are racist, homophobic, sexist, antiscience, antiworker, anti-​education, and even Fascists and Nazis. The media have also perpetrated lies about social problems—​notably the deplorable quality and high cost of the American health care system—​that have pushed the nation to adopt unfortunate [ 2 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

policies such as national health insurance under President Obama. Conflating the democratic left with the totalitarian left, Prager insists that “from the far left, with its virtually unparalleled mass murders and totalitarianism to the democratic left, nearly every area of life that the left has influenced has been adversely affected” (p. 221), and again, with the complicity of the media. The faith of conservatives in American tradition is more nostalgic than historical, a complex of extreme individualism, faith in unregulated markets, the beneficence of American business, and an assurance of being correct often borne of spiritual revelation. Murray for one is sure that his claims and the conservative’s assumptions of the bounty of small government will be vindicated within a decade by “science,” although it apparently has not yet occurred. Unfortunately, science has not been so very kind to the liberals either, with many decades of questionable success in pursuing a variety of social welfare objectives. The typical attack on the media for undermining democracy and the will of the people—​characteristic of the right but often shared by the left—​is also typically insensitive to the commercial situation in which the media do business. Media are as compulsively attentive to the need for profit as any commercial enterprise. Profit is customarily a direct result of market share and thus the characteristics of the market, including the preferences of the audience. Media by and large gain their income from advertising and sales. Almost all media companies are fiercely competitive for audience; their “ideological” bent is a market strategy dependent on the preferences of customers (viewers, listeners, readers, internet users, and so forth). By its very nature, a market strategy that quickly adjusts to changing tastes is democratic and, in light of the vast choices offered by American media, hardly coercive. In fact, a serious criticism of American media holds them culpable for playing far too amiably to existing American tastes and failing to challenge popular ignorance and smugness. Neither Fox News nor MSNBC would exist for long if people stopped watching them. A  similar fate is ensured for movies without audiences and books without sales. In short, the media are immensely sensitive to consumer preferences and far less committed to attitude change, brainwashing, partisan sacrifices, and the rest of the heroic and antiheroic fantasies that see conspiracies in disagreeable broadcasts, books, movies, and the rest. Quite to the point, the quality and content of the media, including the daily drivel of network newscasts, is a fine-​g rained reflection of those who use the media, that is, the variety of audiences that compose the American people. Because media use among Americans is nearly universal, a summary of the quality and content of the media is probably an I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 21]

accurate reflection of American preferences. Television, as one example, may be the bane of American intellectual life, as many have argued, but largely because the nation does not seek intellectual uplift. Educational efforts on television end up on local access channels playing to insomniacs. With few exceptions, news journalism, a dying field, has reverted to food, comics, weather, gossip, crime, and sensationalism all delivered in short, punchy stories with few nuances and little context. Apart from specialized and academic fields and a handful of newspapers and magazines, elegant, high-​brow publications usually scratch along for want of a mass audience. To claim that such a fiercely competitive area of American commerce is controlled by conspiracy or coercion is ludicrous. Yet, the fact that the media reflect the general level of understanding, interest, analytic skill, and intelligence is quite sobering after more than one hundred years of free public education. For all its antagonism toward the media, the conservative movement has benefited considerably from radio, television, newspapers, newsletters, journals, magazines, websites, and the rest. The large audience that tunes in to Rush Limbaugh, host of “the most listened to radio talk show in America, broadcast on over 600 radio stations nationwide” (Limbaugh, n.d.), is a particularly telling commentary on American attitudes and not least because of his frequent racist and sexist comments. Although there is considerable debate over the actual size of his audience, ranging from a few million unique listeners per week to more than 30  million, few dispute the claim if any that he hosts the most-​listened-​to radio talk show. Limbaugh voices the common reactionary antagonism toward “Communists, Socialists, Environmentalist wackos, Feminazis, Liberal Democrats, Militant Vegetarians, Animal Rights extremists, Liberal Elitists” (1993, p.  xiii). He disapproves of multiculturalism, abortions and birth control, animal rights, environmentalism, public provisions for the needy, redistribution of wealth, the separation of church from public policy, and Democratic Party brokers, among other factors that he feels are undermining the nation. He is passionate about patriotism, American exceptionalism, self-​reliance, religion, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and other “institutions and traditions that make this country great” that are threatened by “the dominant media culture … that is constantly pounding us with doom and gloom scenarios, which often cast a spell over the national psyche” (pp. 306–​7). In short, Limbaugh espouses a rough form of democratic populism, promoting the nation’s exceptionalism, its marriage to extreme individualism, and the intuitive assurances that populate American folklore and street wisdom. These three defining elements of policy romanticism characterize a large segment, even a large majority, of the nation. It also begins to explain Limbaugh’s popularity. His posture of [ 2 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

the beleaguered liberator of the American soul seems to be false theater, even demagoguery. Still, he speaks in a representative voice, although raucously and with a constant appeal to implicit, self-​evident truths. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, inveighs against “arrogant corrupt elites … the union-​lobbyist-​bureaucrat machine that is running California into the ground, crippling its economy and cheating residents” (2009). Predictably, his evil lobbyists do not represent business. Yet Gingrich avoids the popularity of unions in a number of states, notably California, New York, and Michigan, and thus their legitimacy. He also assumes that government, even state government, is not accountable to citizens, in spite of the fiercely contended elections and very active citizenry in many states such as California and New York. Applauding American colonialism, Dinesh D’Souza (2002) argues that American exceptionalism and universalism—​ its morally superior culture and form of government, which should be exported to all nations—​is imperiled at home by leftist intellectuals (usually European) and multiculturalists. His bit of jingoism ignores the stunning political and social weakness of both groups in the United States—​hardly elite in any sense—​and the possibility that the nation’s promise is actually more circumscribed by romantic fantasies of intolerance and righteousness embedded in the culture. The left has long been an irrelevant sideline in American politics and society, and the European left even more so, while multiculturalism has most often been rejected by the very subcultures that would seem to benefit from it. Within the span of a few generations, the children of immigrants typically take on American values. When they feel marginalized, their customary complaint is that they are denied equal acceptance within American society rather than that their subcultural identities are suppressed. Indeed, D’Souza recognizes both the strangeness of multicultural relativism and its apparent rejection in the United States but still argues that it imperils American exceptionalism (pp. 174–​78). For D’Souza, Barack Obama remains the greatest threat to “the American era, 1945–​2016.” President Obama, “the most dangerous man in America,” has a “hidden agenda” drawn from “a Third World, anti-​ American ideology that goes by the name of anti-​colonialism” (pp. 215, 214). Anticolonialism seeks a global redistribution of power and wealth and thus the loss of the nation’s preeminence. Even as President Obama was obviously elected freely by the American people, D’Souza still holds them innocent of the deed, depriving the president, and by extension American liberalism, of the consent of the masses and thus legitimacy. I n t roduct ion [23]

How did we get Obama? Are the American people to blame for putting him in? I don’t think so. People didn’t know Obama, so they voted for him based on what he told them. He appealed to their hopes and aspirations, and they were noble hopes and aspirations. So the public was deceived. Obama was no ideological centrist, no unifier—​he never intended to be. He had a completely different agenda all along, one that he knew even most Democrats would not support. So Obama has, from the beginning, disguised his true ideology and his true agenda. Only an investigation of his background and an examination of his actions have helped us to ferret him out. (D’Souza, 2012, p. 216)

For all their complaints about each other, there is hardly a political faction that sets the problems of the United States in the freely chosen behaviors of the American people. Even when it is apparent that elections have not been rigged and the vast majority of the nation has come to agreement, leadership and the media are often indicted as illegitimate for biasing the national dialogue by withholding what the critic considers to be vital information, or by propagating what the critic considers to be lies. In this way, the charge that leadership and the media have been compromised by hidden forces, powerful interests, or their own ambitions still holds the masses innocent of culpability in bad decisions and antidemocratic intents. The Heritage Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., promotes “conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense” (Heritage Foundation, n.d.). The promotion of their conservative agenda relies on research whose characteristic logic is to draw causal implications from correlational data. As an example, the Heritage Foundation relying on data demonstrating that single-​ parent families are much poorer than two-​parent families—​the association of single-​parent families and poverty—​comes to the conclusion that the absence of married fathers in the home is the principal cause of child poverty. The same Heritage Foundation report also concludes that “the overwhelming majority of lower-​i ncome women who have children out of wedlock strongly desire to have children” since it gives their lives meaning. Thus the Foundation recommends steps to promote marriage. To develop this understanding, government and society should establish a broad campaign of public education in low-​i ncome areas. This campaign should be similar in scope to current efforts to convince youth of the importance of staying in school or to inform the public about the health risks of smoking. While the costs of such an effort would be small, its impact could be considerable. (Rector, 2012)

[ 2 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

However, the same correlation between single-​parent families and poverty could be interpreted in the reverse direction, namely that poverty causes single-​parent families. The solutions to this interpretation would be vastly more expensive and obviously unacceptable to conservatives who cast the problem as one of morally impaired character—​that out-​of-​wedlock childbearing is freely chosen—​rather than the result of economic and social conditions. Thus conservatives promote marriage by attempting to convince at-​r isk women to delay childbearing until they are wed. As long as the current social silence concerning the benefits of marriage and the harm of out-​of-​wedlock childbearing persists, marriage will continue to erode in low-​ income communities. To combat poverty, it is vital to strengthen marriage, and to strengthen marriage, it is vital that at-​r isk populations be given a clear factual understanding of the benefits of marriage and the costs and consequences of non-​marital childbearing. (Rector, 2009 np)

Yet childbearing may reflect opportunity. In this way, providing poor young women with good education and jobs would provide them alternative more attractive roles than single motherhood. But again, this would be quite costly. The political left commits the same fallacy of deriving cause from associational data, although often in the more sophisticated form of statistical modeling. As one example, the 2013 claims by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a prominent liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., assert that a variety of cash welfare programs promotes work (Sherman, Trisi, & Parrott, 2013). However, the research underlying this causal conclusion is largely based on associated factors interpreted through econometric modeling rather than on randomized controlled experiments. That randomized experiments are difficult to apply, theoretically ambiguous, impractical, and costly does not change the situation that scientifically credible information about the causes of welfare outcomes and the effects of welfare programs is more ideological than empirical and profoundly so. Perhaps the liberal argument, often data-​driven and pragmatic and less demagogic than the conservative alternatives, is also the more probable in consideration of the preponderance of evidence. Yet liberals’ research rarely provides an estimate of its likely accuracy. The conservative argument following Murray, which aspires to a future anticipated by Ayn Rand, William Shockley, and European feudalists, is shockingly repugnant to the conviviality of the Shire. However, Hobbits do not make American social welfare policy. The American population does it through vehicles of mass consent. I n t r oduc t ion [ 25]

Acting as though the debate over welfare were an open question to be won by the quality of argument, participants in the ideological conflict over the provision of public support to needy citizens has avoided a difficult consideration of national preference. A  large proportion of Americans—​perhaps more than half—​a re near poverty, in poverty, or living in economic peril, a few paychecks away from destitution, possibly because the nation refuses to share its wealth to provide adequate income security, jobs, or access to basic social institutions. This is a moral issue of whether the society should try to reduce income inequality through public provisions even in the face of possibly ambiguous outcomes. However, the nation does not try very hard, and notably in defiance of its ability to do so. Rather, it remains stalled watching its poorer citizens becoming poorer and reallocating its stingy and declining welfare provisions to working families.6 With few exceptions and usually including health coverage, every successive revision of public benefits over the past few decades has eroded public responsibility for the nation’s poorer populations. The inertia is planted in the certitude that social problems largely result from character defects—​sloth, impulsiveness, promiscuity—​rather than from the nation’s social and economic impairments. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that schadenfreude—​ a malicious pleasure in the misfortunes of others—​may be part of the American character. Similar to the Heritage Foundation but less strident, the American Enterprise Institute, founded in 1938 and also situated in Washington, D.C., is committed to rolling back the regulatory powers and scope of government and to a commensurate expansion of free enterprise. It promotes its small-​government, probusiness message through the typical outlets of think tanks: independent research, conferences, testimony in public hearings, a variety of publications, and the like. It is entirely funded through foundation grants, individual gifts, and its own sales and fees, taking no money from government. Not surprisingly, most of its money seems to come directly or indirectly from large business corporations. Although the American Enterprise Institute research is more sophisticated than the Heritage Foundation studies, the research is driven by its commitment to free enterprise, that is, corporate health and profit, and hostility to the liberal agenda more than by a neutral pragmatism. Yet the promotion of free enterprise and the characterization of liberalism as a threat to the nation’s 6.  Sherman, Trisi, and Parrott (2013), but also Schott, Pavetti, and Floyd’s report on TANF (2015), document the decline of cash benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the shift of funds in every state to social services, many of which subsidize state expenditures. [ 2 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

vitality and leading world role may well be closer to the American consensus, again recalling Lindblom’s intuition of business privilege.7 To many minds, the Tea Party movement is even more reactionary than the Heritage Foundation—​a knowing rejection of modernity and an expression of the American desire to climb into an imagined womb of the nation’s 18th-​century founding comforts. The core beliefs of the Tea Party Patriots include military might, the “sacredness” of gun ownership, smaller and less-​intrusive government, elimination of both annual deficits and Keynesian economics, the rhapsodized family of folklore, lower business taxes, recognition of the United States as an English speaking Christian nation, and other policies of nativism, free markets, and Divine favor (Tea Party Patriots, n.d.; Tea Party; n.d.). The jingoism and antileftist rhetoric would be quaintly anachronistic, even charming, if it were restricted to retirement homes for military veterans suffering from grandiose delusions, but the Tea Party counts many millions of members while many tens of millions more voters elected Tea Party candidates to the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, and governorships in 2010, 2012, and 2014. It seems that the Tea Party movement has benefited disproportionately from contributions by very wealthy conservative donors. However, it also seems equally true that the Americans have fed a large and persistent appetite for reactionary politics. The conservative charge that liberals have manipulated public policy and have gained illegitimate control of government is the mirror image of the charge by the political left that the business community has usurped democratic processes to control government for its own selfish goals at the expense of the nation. These claims are largely distinct from a broader indictment of government as an autonomous actor—​a force accountable only to itself rather than to liberals, business, the media, hidden conspiracies of elites, and so forth, serving its own ends by determining public policy without popular consent. Government itself as an autonomous actor has gained unique attention as a threat to American freedom.

7.  Indeed, in the competitive political pool of Washington contract research firms, the Brookings Institution, perhaps the largest among the so-​called think tanks and one that thrives on its government consultations, has been swimming closer to the right for decades. Ever sensitive to political currents, Brookings has engaged in cooperative projects with the American Enterprise Institute while hiring notably conservative researchers. Put another way, the conservative influence in Washington during the Obama years may reflect the possibility that a middle-​of-​t he-​road U.S. Senate and a conservative U.S. House of Representatives mirror national preferences more closely than the nation’s progressive president. I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 2 7]

Government and Other Autonomous Actors

The federal government, but often state and city government as well, is a typical villain for subverting democratic preferences and policy making. Accountable to nothing and to no one but its own sense of national need and proper policy, the federal government in particular is often blamed for undermining the intelligence, decency, and morality of the masses. The assumptions about the conspiratorial workings of the federal government and its rule of the American people are often an expression of common paranoia and belief in clairvoyance as a source of information about existence. The American appetite for conspiracy, occult forces, the play of the paranormal, otherworldly control, and the like is nearly infinite. Credulousness and fancy may contribute to the common rejection of objective coherence and pragmatism, and even to the appointment of emotionally satisfying scapegoats such as an autonomous federal government. The brilliant linguist Noam Chomsky developed a prolific sideline uncovering conspiracies of government and the press. In the manner of many on the right who complain about the controlled media from which they benefit, Chomsky’s principal vehicle of spreading his truth is in fact the media, notably books published by mainline presses. He might explain how he has escaped the censors of government control. Or is it that eloquent paranoia sells? The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable… . Among them are at least three: nuclear war, environmental disaster and the fact that the government of the world’s leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree. (Chomsky, 2006, p. 1, emphasis in original)

Chomsky (2006) points a sharp finger at the unfortunate intrusions of the United States into other nations, its support for tyrants, its failure to develop an effective response to environmental degradation, and many other things, but he cannot sustain the notion of popular rejection of these policies except by ascribing his own sense of self-​interest and moral worth to the American population. Indeed, much of what is unfortunate in both the nation’s environmental policy and international relations is more likely motored by the broad domestic demand for cheap energy than by a “hegemonic” madness to rule the world. Often repeating the charge that business controls government, he fails to deal with common support [ 2 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

that business enjoys, except by drawing analogs with Nazis and their propaganda techniques, which he claims were developed “from business doctrines and practices that were mostly pioneered in the Anglo-​A merican societies” (p. 210). Chomsky even goes on to suggest that the society itself is controlled through media propaganda. It is our view, that, among their other functions, the media serve and propagandize on behalf of the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-​ thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy. (Herman & Chomsky, 2002, p. xi)

However, Chomsky fails to acknowledge the many messages that counter the propaganda—​he is often referring to commercial advertising—​or the obvious limitations on the sales of advertised goods. He is also loath to acknowledge that his own leftist message attracts only a very small, commercially insignificant number of people. Of course, he does not consider his message to be propaganda, but rather civic education. Moreover, the media’s so-​called propaganda seems to be based on an affirmation of the population’s preferences with rare evidence that those preferences, except in the most trivial sense of preferring one brand of mouthwash to another, can be created or greatly modified. Similarly, Chomsky’s comments about the imperfections in the American electoral system are made as analogies with the gross vote rigging in the Third World, as though the occasional theft of an election the United States was characteristic of its most fundamental process for gaining the right to govern. In short, Chomsky insists that his dissatisfaction with American society and politics is shared by the American public, who are propagandized and manipulated by the demonic forces of business and hegemonic government power. He apparently does not appreciate the contradiction of claiming popular support for his preferences, but at the same time argues that popular preferences are successfully manipulated in precisely the opposite direction. An immensely prolific writer, Chomsky is just as repetitious. He reprises his basic themes in books that cover new events, but in all of them he neglects the likelihood that the population contests his view of power and the American system while rejecting his notion of their distorted beliefs (Chomsky, 2011, 2013). To ascribe the symmetry between the population and its government as the result of propaganda ignores the openness of the society and the limitations on the power of any single I n t r oduc t ion  [ 2 9 ]

message when it competes with alternatives. Chomsky does not even make the distinction between what common people are and what they could be. Rather, he simply insists that public opinion currently shares his preferences. The old left had a founding conviction in the goodness of the People that American analysts and social leaders largely sustain out of self-​interest, if not self-​protection. Chomsky and modern democracy itself enter a crisis of faith if in fact the deficiencies of American governments are largely copied over from the deficiencies of the American people. The theories of government conspiracy are eloquent in pointing to instances of inappropriate government secrecy but typically ignore the nearly constant openness of government—​the Freedom of Information Act, the huge number of readily available annals and archives of government decision making, the respect for First Amendment rights, the large amount of publicly created information from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor—​and the many instances when penalty for undue secrecy greatly exceeds the value of the secret to the agency. Despite the necessity for discretion in almost all public organizations, the American federal government is closely accountable to popular preferences, which might explain its numerous reported failures. The fact that many refuse to seat those failures within the population itself is perhaps part of the scapegoating process of self-​absolution. Most other theories of autonomous forces that control American policy lack Chomsky’s verbal skills but still ignore the role of popular preferences. According to military sources that David Vine quotes in Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (2009), “the military’s goal is to be able to ‘run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015’ ” (Freedland, 2009, p. 25). In Vine’s persuasive telling, it is from the expansionist instincts of the military services, rather than the conscious decisions of civilian policymakers, that the imperialist project draws much of its energy. It is the military brass’s reflexive empire-​building that builds an empire. (p. 26)

Other warnings about the military preempting democratic decision making are less fanciful. Steven Weinberg (2004) worries about the U.S. military’s strategic decisions precipitating nuclear war perhaps by mistake. Rachel Maddow (2012) worries about the disproportionate amount of resources allocated to the military and its decision-​making process concerning national security, which seems immune from democratic scrutiny as the military “drifts away from its people in this country” (p. 242). However, the military is an immensely popular American institution that has long enjoyed widespread trust and admiration. The [ 3 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

question of whether the trust is misplaced is separate from the question of legitimacy. The military’s large role in national defense may be imprudent, but it is apparently performed with the support of the American people. In addition to the military, the Supreme Court of the United States and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank often fall under criticism of acting without popular consent. Yet both were designed to be somewhat independent of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, accountable largely through the president’s power of appointment and the Senate’s role in consent. Still, attentive to popular consent, both the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve Bank respond to contemporary political preferences. Toobin’s comments (2012) about the Supreme Court during President Obama’s first term suggest its sensitivity to popular opinion might just as well relate to the Federal Reserve’s actions during the Great Recession and more generally to public policy making. The conservative ascendency at the Court owes much to Republican victories in presidential elections and to well-​f unded sponsors but also to the power of ideas. The great conservative project of the previous generation has been originalism—​interpreting the constitution supposedly as its framers understood it… . But in pressing originalism with such intensity and such success, conservatives have proven, perhaps unintentionally, that the Constitution does indeed live—​that it responds to and changes with the politics of the day. (p. 17, emphasis added)

Even the quintessentially autonomous arms of government remain sensitive to popular preferences. Nonetheless, notions of government conspiracies to subvert popular preferences recur with the regularity of the seasons. They take inspiration from the variety of actual cover-​ups and scandals such as Watergate, Irangate, Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction, the 2013 National Security Agency data mining, among others, and numerous examples of corrupt legislators and government officials that actually do subvert accountability and the law. As one example, Belzer and Wayne (2012) claim that government and the media have conspired to hide the truth about numerous assassinations—​President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Vincent Foster, Marilyn Monroe, and others. Apparently the conspirators are bent on destroying the American way of life. They dedicate their book To all those who defend the increasingly rare proposition that this country belongs to The People (not corporations, military contractors or “the best politicians that money can buy”) and it’s still up to The People to determine how it should be governed. (Belzer &Wayne, 2012, p. v) I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 31]

In an afterward of glowing support for the authors’ fearless whistle blowing and in his own intrepid detective work, Jesse Ventura, the former prime-​time wrestler and governor of Minnesota, expands on the theme of government in the pockets of business, bankers, and other special interests (Belzer & Wayne, 2012; Ventura & Russell, 2011). A question recurs: if Belzer, Wayne, Ventura, and Russell are correct about the predatory, self-​protective and violent actions of government and the hidden forces of evil that control it, why haven’t they been silenced or “disappeared” by those same forces? Yet neither Belzer and Wayne nor the pop-​journalism industry, which thrives on propagating spectacular and often violent conspiracies of government autonomy, has been able to demonstrate a consistent pattern of abuse, or to document the power of the alleged conspiratorial forces to determine American policy making. In fact, the exposure and prosecution of numerous government scandals marks broad public support for the enforcement of customary values. Conspiracies that stay hidden remain conveniently beyond verification and keep the conspiracy hunter in business. Theories of autonomous forces that usurp the power of the people to determine policy often cross the line into the absurd and the occult. The point is not the meander into fantasyland but rather the large audience that pays to go on the journey. Jim Marrs bested Madame Blavatsky at the game of the surreal; his writing is more accessible. “Madame,” whose Theosophy Marrs credits as one of the founding principles of Nazism, offered communication with the dead and insight into the control of human destiny. Going one better, Marrs reveals the conspiracies that threaten the United States and the world as we know it. You see, Hitler probably escaped at the end of World War II; only his double was killed in the Fuehrerbunker. Thousands of Nazi scientists and ideologues emigrated to the United States through the Paperclip program, with the intention of establishing the Fourth Reich in America. They pursued their nefarious goals through numerous conspiracies of business and government, employing mind control, drug pacification, “Nazi wonder weapons,” and other advanced technologies. The Fourth Reich has already infiltrated major institutions of America: beware (Marrs, 2008). In his “underground bestseller,” which is published by the very-​above-​ ground HarperCollins, Marrs deals with the secrets of government, hidden history, and clandestine religion; the secrets of wealth, power, and control; the secrets rarely recorded in the history books and never mentioned in the mass media… . The book also deals with conspiracy, an [ 3 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

activity long decried by the major media despite the fact that the American judicial system regularly convicts people for criminal conspiracy. (2000, p. 3)

Marrs reports that the conspirators, conspiracies, and secret societies—​ Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Rockefellers, Morgans, Rothschilds, Skull and Bones, Illuminati, Masons, Knights Templar, Merovingians, and others—​stay hidden or at least neglected because of the “corporate owned mass media.” One almost wonders whether Marrs tricked HarperCollins, the quintessential corporate media giant, into publishing his book. Has perhaps he employed the Nazi techniques of electronic mind control that he shared with the world in 2008? He followed up in 2010 with insight into The Trillion Dollar Conspiracy: How the New World Order, Man-​Made Diseases, and Zombie Banks Are Destroying America. All his revelations are journalism (Marrs’s claim). Yet his conspiracies and wowing revelations are no more improbable than the metaphysical entities that underpin popular American belief and the common justifications for national preferences and policies—​the spirit, the soul, the afterlife, divine intention and revelation, American exceptionalism, self-​reliance, and on and on. In the absence of prudent skepticism and willingness to find the genesis of social problems in their own actions, the American people have created the popular genre of journalism fantastique in which Marrs thrives. Sussman (2012) warns of the successful conspiracy between radical environmentalists and the “leftwing media” (that is, the left-​w ing’s control of the media in spite of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the National Review, and Regnery Publishers) and the dangers they pose to American democracy. Eco-​t yranny and the “global warming scam” are apparently vehicles of communism and socialism (Bell, 2011). Forbes columnist Larry Bell (2011) places the blame for the “global warming hoax” on “those people and institutions we rely upon for important information [who] knowingly violate our trust” (p. xi). Yet more likely than conspiracy, the best judgments of independent scientists sustain the coincidence of human activity and global warming (Cook et al., 2016). The population itself may acknowledge the plausibility of the human contribution to global warming. However, a lifestyle predicated on inexpensive access to nonrenewable, carbon-​based energy seems to be a higher priority than restraining economic appetites and severely limiting carbon emissions while addressing subsequent problems of income fairness. Rather than a conspiracy, it seems that the failures of energy and environmental policy reflect embedded cultural preferences. I n t r oduc t ion [ 33]

Other Illegitimate Elites and Conspiracies for Our Time and Beyond The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. (Assange et al., 2012, p. 1)

This warning comes from Julian Assange, the would-​be messiah from Wikileaks, currently avoiding extradition to the United States for compromising national security. Less hysterical but equally worried about the use of information to control people, Baker (2008) warns about the growing power of quantitative researchers—​“the Numerati”—​who intrude into citizens’ privacy. Others have detailed similar concerns about the loss of individual freedom via the use of data, the loss of privacy, and the manipulation of people for commercial, political, and social ends, which presumably cut against their interests if not actually their stated preferences (O’Harrow, 2005; McChesney 2013). Schmidt and Cohen (2013) do not fret over political tyranny but rather over the social consequences of “connectivity.” Attempts to contain the spread of connectivity or curtail people’s access will always fail over a long enough period of time—​information, like water, will always find a way through… . The vast majority of the world will be net beneficiaries of connectivity… . But despite these almost universal benefits, the connected experience will not be uniform. A digital caste system will endure well into the future, and people’s experience will be greatly determined by where they fall in this structure. (p. 254)

The warnings of tyranny through technology may be accurate, but the American people do not seem disturbed enough, judging by their commercial and social footprints, to insist on stringent privacy laws. Indeed, many welcome the use of their personal data as an efficiency device. Moreover, perennial notions of political conspiracies by actors on every point of the political spectrum if true may cancel out the effects of any one and return decision-​making power to the population. Schmidt and Cohen’s calm rejoinder to the paranoia surrounding the use of commercial and personal data may even be correct in noting the uncontainable nature of new information, the improbability of political and social control, and the emergence of technology castes. However, the United States has lived comfortably with its class system for centuries and will probably be as hospitable toward new digital castes as it has been to low social [ 3 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

and economic mobility and its many enduring inequalities of education, income, race, ethnicity, sex, and so forth. The paranormal and other improbable autonomous actors in national policy and influences on individual behavior draw attention not because they are palpable explanations but importantly because they persist and are popular. In addition to autonomous actors, the United States also nourishes theories based on alien abduction; extraterrestrials; the direct, undeniable, irresistible influence of factors (global warming, crowding, disease, psychological predisposition) to which humans react as automatons; predestination; and the teleology of God’s plan or the Devil’s nastiness. The Weekly World News may have grown into commercial kitsch, but for many years and along with many kindred tabloids, the genre of the improbable continues as a primary source of reality for many. The Encyclopedia of Alien Encounters (Baker 2000) reports that With regard to the alien presence on Earth, the central conspiracy theory can be summarized as follows. Some time in the late 1940s or early 1950s the United States government (and possibly other world governments also) entered into a secret treaty with hostile Grays, whereby the aliens were allowed to abduct and experiment upon certain human beings in return for selected items of alien technology. A number of underground bases were constructed for the aliens’ use, and a worldwide network of subterranean tunnels was established for secret transportation. However, the aliens quickly reneged on their part of the agreement and began unauthorized abductions of large numbers of people without informing their human hosts… . (p. 53)

IMPERFECT PLURALISM

Presumably the United States is a pluralistic society that welcomes the civic participation of all citizens who conform to its laws. To the extent to which the nation improperly excludes particular groups from participation in social decision making—​either by denying them access to its elections or more informally by preventing their exercise of legal influence in the society—​it compromises the legitimacy of elites and the policies they select for the nation. Imperfect pluralism was undoubtedly the condition in the United States that prevailed at least until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, notably the Voting Rights Act. In the early republic, women, Native Americans, and blacks were excluded from voting, as were most white men who did not have sufficient wealth. American apartheid, notably in the South but also in other parts of the nation, continued to exclude blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Yet after achievement of near-​universal adult I n t r oduc t ion [ 3 5]

suffrage in the United States in recent decades, voter suppression remains a persistent charge and a potential threat to democratic pluralism, and by extension to the legitimacy of the nation’s leadership. The concern with imperfect pluralism rests on two grounds:  first, election fraud, including voter suppression (formal exclusion of certain groups by actions of government, including the failure to count their votes); and second, informal acts of the society that discourage participation. Although the problem largely concerns electoral participation, it also runs over into participation in the informal social structures through which national preferences are formed and determine social policy. The problem has largely been raised by the political left in protection of the rights of minorities and the poor. Voter suppression appears to be a minor problem in the contemporary United States, at most affecting a swing of perhaps 1.2% favoring the Republican candidate in a few states in the 2012 presidential election (Silver, 2012). Summarizing a variety of academic studies of voter suppression, Silver concludes that “although the effects seem to be small, and although their precise magnitude is uncertain, the position that they don’t have any effect at all is hard to defend” (ibid.). He adds the observation that even though “the direct effects of these [voter suppression laws] are likely to be negative for Democrats it would not take much in terms of increased voter engagement—​and increased voter conscientiousness about their registration status—​to mitigate them” (ibid.). Consequently, voter suppression does not seem to seriously compromise American pluralism. Similarly, election fraud seems to be only an episodic problem in contemporary America, although it has been systematically employed by both Democrats and Republicans to win elections; as examples, the 1960 Presidential vote in Cook County, Illinois, for Kennedy and the 1948 senate vote for Lyndon Johnson in Texas. Still and all, voter suppression laws, in contrast with election fraud, appear to be popular, raising the troubling prospect that a large portion of the nation, perhaps even a majority, would like to limit the franchise by discouraging poor and unpopular minorities from participation. Though avoiding any explicit endorsement of this motive, the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated a core provision in the Voting Rights Act that placed the election procedures of selected jurisdictions under the supervision of the courts and the U.S. Justice Department (Stevens, 2013). The decision at least signals a declining sensitivity to American inequality and perhaps even approval of a popular mood. Voter suppression seems to be a minor limitation on American pluralism, but voter participation has long been low, customarily below 60% of eligible votes even in presidential elections and often under 20% [ 3 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

of eligible voters in primaries and local elections. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that low-​income racial and ethnic minorities and the poor in general turn out for elections in far smaller proportion than wealthier groups. The evidence is also clear that in a number of elections voters have been illegally barred from the polls or discouraged from registering to vote (Wang, 2012). However, it is not clear at all that the electoral process has been so severely compromised that election results are consistently unrepresentative of popular preferences. A disproportionate number of those who do not vote are poor or among ethnic and racial minorities, but it is improbable that they share a strong ideological preference. Many poor people are black and Hispanic and presumably prefer liberal candidates, although this assumption is frequently belied. Yet a majority of the poor are white, and many of the poor seem to have been voting against their economic interests for hundreds of years. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that the poorest sections of the nation—​the South and the mountain West—​are also the most reliably conservative (Frank, 2004).8 The strong conservative preferences of poor whites would seem to cut against their ascribed self-​interest, but it may not cut against their actual preferences. Indeed, in spite of the worst recession since the Great Depression, which endured for years with serious social and economic consequences, enormous unemployment, and increases in already large economic inequalities, the most forceful political reaction came from the right—​the Tea Party movement—​w ith only a weak, disorganized show of interest on the left in the Occupy Movement. Although the proportion of blacks who voted in 2012 increased since 2008, the proportion of whites, Hispanics, and Asians actually declined during the same period (Wheaton, 2013). Apparently the American poor and lower-​paid workers were not activated by their deteriorating circumstances to seek relief through the electoral system. Rather than rioting, as in England, Greece, and Spain, the many millions of Americans harmed by the recession seem to have abided their lot and hunkered down hoping for better times. Yet voter suppression and systematic election fraud may have more insidious effects than simply reducing the number of oppositional votes. They may discourage people from voting, and by extension increase the alienation of excluded groups from participation in the social policy 8. Mississippi is even more of a puzzle. It is consistently the poorest state in the nation, and almost 40% of its citizens are African Americans, who turn out for elections at the same rate as whites. Yet the state returns conservative Republicans to office with mind-​numbing regularity. This implies that either no more than about 10% of whites are willing to vote for a more liberal Democratic candidate or that a large number of blacks vote Republican. I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 3 7]

making generally. The point is that the society is not so concerned with legitimacy as to take strong steps—​such as imposing penalties for not voting, strict adherence to the National Voter Registration Act, election day and mail-​in registration—​to ensure that a supermajority turns out for all elections and to protect the legitimacy of democratic representation, notably in national elections. Yet the force of Wang’s argument (2012 passim), although probably not intended, is to document the lack of interest of both parties in pressing for increased turnout and the weak effects of citizen efforts. The conclusion seems inevitable that American citizens are largely satisfied with their systems of representation. Voter suppression and fraud may not be a major or systematic threat to American pluralism, and low voter participation does not seem to imply that the American consensus is systematically misrepresented in the nation’s policy-​making process. Still and all, in a parliamentary system, minorities would probably be better represented in national legislative bodies. In the nation’s federal system, the dispersal of minority voices is lost or greatly diluted among the majorities of the separate states and their winner-​take-​a ll elections. Many may freely decide to skip elections; the low turnout in general but especially of poorer groups, notably minorities, remains troubling for the vitality of a democracy. MASS PREFERENCES

The dominance of mass preferences is perhaps the most neglected explanation for policy choice in the United States, but not surprisingly since it implies a deep criticism of the American people to the extent to which inadequate social provisions reflect longstanding popular preferences. To deny the decisive influence of mass preferences is to hold the American people innocent of creating their own problems. In a perversion of Emersonian self-​determination, the dominance of mass preference implies that the American people are indeed self-​reliant, but also mean-​ spirited and ungenerous. In this sense, social conditions, such as great social and economic inequality, persist with popular consent and are not imposed by treachery, deceit, conspiracy, treason, or other betrayals of a naïve but loving nation. The determinative influence of persistent mass preference is probably true, at least by default, in the absence of more compelling evidence of control by illegitimate elites or of imperfect representation of the population. Business has a privileged position in America because Americans want it this way. American priorities work out to a highly stratified society. Social welfare and the protection of dependent and otherwise poor populations [ 3 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

is a low priority. The marketplace is trusted more than government. By and large, American elites occupy their positions with the consent of the culture. The media are commercial market entities and extraordinarily sensitive to their very broad markets. They would not survive long pursuing unpopular political themes. The charge that the media propagandize the nation is itself propaganda that ignores the degree to which the media promote existing values by playing to the tastes of their audience. American society is largely consensual. It entails little coercion and tolerates an extraordinary degree of freedom, and notably freedom of expression. The scope of opinion displayed through all media is breathtaking broadly, but American preferences bunch up within a narrow range that is politically to the right of center. Rather than simply the explanation left standing when others fall, the prevalence of true representative democracy in the United States is also a position that is reasonable on its own merits, especially in a society as open the United States. That some disapprove of the choices provides no warrant to deny that they exist. Quite logically, those who succeed tend to support the proposition that mass preferences prevail in determining social policy, at least to the extent to which they legitimize their social and economic positions. Their success was won in loyalty to vaunted, traditional American values of hard work, initiative, honesty, self-​reliance, patriotism, and so forth. Yet the political rhetoric of the successful often develops into a rhetoric of usurpation, arguing that they earned their social and economic positions in spite of threats to the sanctity of the national will and of democratic processes. The illegitimate actions of narrow interests have suborned policy making and the media. In fact, the successful have neither purchased government nor corrupted democratic decision making with their financial resources and social access. Conspiracies probably exist, but they are universal strategies of competition and probably ineffectual as they cancel each other’s influence. Bob Perry, a wealthy Republican and the major donor to the “Swift Boat” ads that may have sunk John Kerry’s run for the presidency in 2004, states a common position of the successful: “government is not owned by anyone, least of all wealthy contributors… . The direction of government taken by either Republicans or Democrats invariably reflects public opinion, which always includes the ‘average voters’ ” (Yardley, 2013, para. 18). In spite of the prevailing belief in the usurpation of legitimate authority, some critics of the current system and its policy choices do in fact concede the overarching role of national preferences in determining social choices. Eberstadt (2012), notwithstanding his digs about the role of government in fostering dependency, states that entitlement I n t roduct ion [ 39]

programs, notably the public social insurances, are popular. Frank (2004) documents conservative hostility to public social welfare and to public intrusions into the market among many poorer people who benefit directly from liberalism. Bellah et al. (1996) trace the stunted provisions of the American welfare state back to a broad preference for extreme individualism. A national consensus is sometimes conceded and often summarized as national character—​as in Bellah et al.’s thoughtful Habits of the Heart (1996) and Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America (2012), both of which give central play to individualism—​which engenders the collective will. However, the consensus is less frequently apportioned to particular influences, that is, whether popular preferences are freely chosen or imposed (Kagan, 2013, as another example). What is more, the national consensus is defined through often questionable opinion polling (as noted above), which typically reports only small differences in national values (Page & Shapiro, 1992; Epstein, 2004; Dimaggio, Evans, & Bryson, 1996). Presumably, the collective will and its implications for enduring civic traits assume legitimacy, or the authors would not be able to refer to an American point of view or American policy but would be obliged to address the preferences of an oligarchy, autonomous government, or some other imposing force. Still and all, the theme of illegitimate control dominates analyses of American policy making. THE ECOLOGY OF DETACHED ROLES: THE VEHICLE OF MASS PREFERENCE

At the same time that little attention is given to the dominant influence of a collective will in American social policy making, far too much emphasis is placed on the role of a quasi-​rational, open dialogue in informing the collective will. It would seem to be the natural intellectual bias of writers and thinkers to assume that their ideas are important influences on policy. Yet ironically, what they commonly write about is how democratic processes have been compromised by illegitimate elites of one sort or another. Presumably, then, the belief in a national dialogue to inform the wisdom of democracy, if not a contradiction, exists as an attempt to stir the slumbering masses into action. A process very different from reasoned discussion better explains how policy and social institutions emerge legitimately from the innumerable daily choices—​the micro decisions—​that express a people’s preferences. The process is unguided, let alone coerced, by planned central decision making; indeed, it defies orchestration except as a consensual culture [ 4 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

socializes the population. Every choice a person makes gives priority to one particular role rather than another. In its broader sense, a role refers to an activity or the use of some entity, for instance parenting, as well as the materials chosen for its performance. In turn, this micro boost for a role gives a micro endorsement to the hierarchy of role organizations dependent on that choice. Role organizations are competitive with each other and form even broader associations with similar roles to enhance their political, social, and economic positions. The process is immensely democratic and profoundly nonrational, dependent on preferences and the relatively free interplay of role organizations. Individuals need not be formal members of role organizations; in fact, they rarely are. Consent and legitimacy are conferred on this process by use, and by extension a role organization gains power to the extent to which the population performs the roles that an organization depends on. In the end, the American policy-​ making system that produces hierarchies of status, power, and money—​ the nation’s socioeconomic stratification—​is legitimized democratically by the deep, daily, uncoerced participation of the American people as they live their lives. Political elections are important check points but relatively powerless to modify social preferences, the bedrocks of choice. The following examples of consumer purchases, lobbying, and social welfare among others illustrate how the ecology of detached role organizations, preceding the legislative process and preempting a quasi-​rational national dialogue, creates and legitimizes social policy. Simply by purchasing beefsteak for his family’s dinner in fulfilling one of the obligations of his parental role, a shopper endorses beefsteak over its protein alternatives: other meats such as lamb and chicken, as well as nonmeat sources of protein such as fish, beans, tofu, eggs, and so forth. The purchase of beef boosts the importance of all the organizations and specialized suppliers dependent on its production, distribution, and sales—​ranches, slaughter houses, and so forth. To the extent of the purchase, it diminishes the importance of organizations dependent on other meats—​chicken farms, lamb farms, vegetable sources of protein, and so forth—​but it also diminishes the importance of all alternative uses of that money, thus raising the prominence in the culture of food relative to recreation, medical care, and so forth. The purchase of beefsteak also raises the political and social influences of the formal organizations that represent meat in their public claims for special legislation, favorable zoning regulations, and so forth. In its small way, the single purchase represents a statement of priorities that is never formally articulated by the purchasers but that serves to endorse the broader social and political influence of the organizations dependent on the purchase and the sector of the economy (e.g., food) in which the I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 41]

purchase is made. Moreover, as the choice of beefsteak becomes more prevalent, its visibility and importance grow within the culture, and it becomes increasingly referenced by the art forms of the culture with cows, steers, and bulls gaining greater prominence as subjects of painting, themes in music, and even as points of concern for news coverage. The purchasers did not formally join any beef organization; nor did they compose a country-​and-​western song to cows. Yet they stated a preference for the hierarchy of all organizations and sectors dependent on beef, which in turn defines and legitimizes their economic, social, and political influence. In this sense, the role of family provider becomes detached from the actor, but its influence is reattached to a competitive hierarchy of role organizations. Quite to the point, the purchasers were free to buy other items; they were not coerced but perhaps exposed to a nearly uncountable number of advertisements and claims for other uses of his money. What gave meaning to the process was the freely executed preference for beefsteak. Furthermore, the purchaser probably had little information about nutrition, environmental effects of cattle production, and so forth. Whatever national dialogue takes place on these matters competed for attention with time he spent viewing entertainment, at work, interacting with family and friends, sleeping, recreation, and so forth. In fact, even the citizens most attuned to developing information can only absorb a limited amount, and become expert in even less. Thus competitive role organizations, legitimized in the first instance by the use of citizens, in turn absorb information through professional, formal activities of analysis and diffusion that they employ to reinforce their roles and diminish the roles of competitors. The hierarchy of beefsteak organizations is unlikely to publicize the heart attack dangers of beef; however, organizations that produce vegetable protein, fish, and chicken will certainly take advantage of research that demonstrates the tie between animal fat and heart disease to increase preferences for their products. Thus again, social policy decisions are returned quite democratically to the population itself for its consent, which is expressed very powerfully as use. Universally available information is crucial but not the conduct of a national dialogue. Put another way, if there is a dialogue, it is a partisan discussion among factions that is constantly adjudicated by the preferences of the population. Except for occasional and temporary successes at censoring information, the process is nearly impossible to control. For every expression of a dedicated portion of the media, there is another dedicated to an alternative point of view that can find a sufficient audience to justify the cost of operations. Of course, there are some points of view—​Nazism and revolutionary communism, as two examples—​that [ 4 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

are underrepresented in the media, not because of censoring but rather because of their miniscule attractiveness to the population. Perhaps the nation needs exposure to a wider range of information, but this is a question of education more than a question of democratic consent and legitimacy. Roles are often performed outside of the market, although it is rare for a role to avoid some purchase of goods. Still, people have wide choices in allocating their time, deciding whether and how to develop families and participate in other formal and informal groups, expressing their feelings, and so on to describe every conceivable role in the human repertoire. The choice of listening to music rather than reading a book has obvious commercial implications that ascend to influence through detached role organizations. However, the population’s reallocation of time from books to music as one alternative—​perhaps suggesting a preference for the sensuous over the objective—​may also mark changing tastes, sensibilities, and styles. In turn, the change has broader implications for the fundamental social ethos of the nation, perhaps reemphasis of the romantic and depreciation of the pragmatic as an approach to life. This simple example illuminates the far more complex processes that establish the core philosophic and ethical institutions of a society and that determine its choices, that is, its live, active, definitive policies. The cacophony of complaints from the political right to the political left about the undue influence of lobbyists and so-​called special interests is mostly grumbling that ignores the degree to which lobbyists and their sponsors are legitimate representatives of American preferences. Money flows freely to both major parties, and for all their complaints, Democrats often raise more money than Republicans (Beckel, 2014). The organizations and sectors with the greatest influence and most effective lobbies also enjoy the most central positions in American concerns. The real estate lobby represents homeowners, about 70% of the population. The business lobbies, notably the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chambers of Commerce, are perhaps despised by liberals, but business has always enjoyed special privileges, mainly because Americans much prefer private-​sector jobs over public-​sector jobs and interpret American wealth as the product of free enterprise rather than government control. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) may be the most influential of all Washington lobbies, but with 40 million members and the support of the adult children of those members, it is hardly a narrow special interest. Importantly, the AARP’s policy position is largely to maintain Social Security rather than to use it as a vehicle of redistribution, a moderate policy position that probably reflects popular preferences. Apart from the AARP, the typical formal interest organization that I n t roduct ion [43]

supports lobbying activities has relatively few members, but they almost invariably draw their legitimacy from their actual use by the population, that is, the degree to which they fulfill the role expectations of members of the society. There is little coercion but much influence that grows or diminishes proportionate to the population’s choice or roles. Public policy typically reflects the implicit values of private decisions. The serious inadequacies of public child welfare programs, notably foster care, reflect the private priorities of citizens. Few people come forward as foster parents, parental participation in school is desultory, little money is given to charities for children, and in many families discretionary income for vacations, recreation, and the like exceeds investments in their children. Indeed, family spending is roughly suggestive of the power of national organizations, as adult and retirement organizations are far more influential than those dedicated to public education and child health, and with commercial organizations more prominent than social welfare organizations. Yet few citizens are formal members of these organizations, while all of the organizations depend on the decisions of citizens for their power and legitimacy. Similarly, the longstanding insufficiency of public welfare provisions to raise the poor, especially those outside of the labor force, out of poverty generally reflects the private behaviors of citizens. Little is contributed to charities to relieve poverty, because the poor are seen as lazy, conniving, and stubbornly irresponsible. By and large, services for the poor provide counseling under the implicit assumption that their behavior is deviant and needs to be corrected. Few recreational, cultural, or religious organizations make efforts to include the poor. Even friendships tend to be formed within social and economic classes. In the competition for audience share, the media play back popular attitudes, generally ignoring poverty and extolling an extreme version of individualism. Movies, popular music, novels, and so forth endorse the private priorities that diminish the claims of poorer Americans. Once again, the private citizen’s influence on public legislation is profound but informal, exercised through the activities of daily life and without formal participation in public policy making. The defining goal of democratic decision making is to ensure that private preferences are converted into public policy. It would seem that the process is a formal one that concentrates on the selection of representative legislators and consensus administrators. Yet, to the contrary, the power in the process is exercised informally, that is, as a decentralized function of the society, largely through the expression of choices as members of a society test their options and finally come to make characteristic personal choices. Public policy becomes the final step in the sorting-​through process that an open society ratifies profoundly by its private choices, its “habits of the heart.” [ 4 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

The charge of illegitimacy is predicated on the reverse direction, choices imposed centrally by an oligarchy of the powerful, usually through the cooptation of government and its police powers. In this scenario, powerful sectarian interests defy the will of the people through a variety of corrupt practices—​purchase of legislators and executives, distortions of voting, propaganda, and so forth. The essential condition for an ecology of detached roles to operate democratically is that information be universally public and that the micro choices of citizens be uncoerced. However, these two conditions of democratic governance do not negate the possibility that the gentle deceits of daily life will become the harsh boundaries of social intolerance. Indeed, it is likely that many authoritarian societies persist with the consent of the people to muffle dissent, to control information, and to sacrifice much personal freedom for the goals of safety and security. Even autocratic governments may reflect popular preferences and invoke them quite reasonably as sources of legitimacy. The ecology of detached roles is facilitated in an open society, but it probably also comes to explain how all but the most repressive, coerced societies operate. The ecology of competing role organizations creates an ecology of symbols that constitute the essence of commercial advertising, branding, and argumentation. Still, it would seem that role dominance leads to successful symbols and not the other way around; first the cultural appetite, then the choice from the menu. Yet, this is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, assertion to test rationally, especially since reinforced behaviors become reinforcing influences; are preferences determined by powerful elites, or do elites operate within the tolerances of the culture, that is, with the consent of the masses? Mass consent is the more neglected, yet perhaps the more reasonable, alternative; but only this—​reasonableness—​in the absence of definitive tests. CONCLUSION: THE RULING MASSES ARE THE RULING CLASSES

An impenetrable ambiguity impedes the discovery of who and what consistently determine American social policy. Yet mass decision making in a society as open and as enfranchised as the United States seems the logical default position. It is surely more plausible than the host of conspiracy theories and the tortured logic that terminates its search for decisive political influence at ideologically convenient points. Still, alternatives to mass decision making are understandable as they hold the masses innocent of cruel, unfair, and improvident decisions. The common investigation into American decision making discovers illegitimate forces—​elites in I n t roduct ion [45]

the sense of having power—​that distort the preferences of the American people and usurp their power. The political right typically vilifies liberals, autonomous big government, and the media as enemies of the people. The political left condemns the influence of business and, again, the media. Each claims that illegitimate influence works through conspiracies, lobbying, and impaired elections. Reigning American elites are by and large legitimate. Social elites embody popular ideals and rise to prominence through competition within highly sanctioned institutions of the culture, notably business, the professions, and academia. Political elites are chosen through routinely fair elections and are appointed by those officials or rise through merit within government and the military. Decision making in both the private and the public sectors is democratic in the sense of being representative and uncoerced, but it is not routinely fair or even decent. However, the values of mass preference that determine the legitimacy of social policy—​the substance of policy rather than the processes of policy making—​represent a romantic consensus and not a pragmatic one. Democratic populism, instead of meritocracy—​ a form of democratic elitism that assumes the most capable in a democracy will rise to leadership—​dominates American decision making. In fact, the American people are not generous and warm but rather censorious, stinting on even basic provisions of food, clothing, and shelter for the most deserving of their fellow citizens. Much of American life is quite unfair, especially in consideration of the nation’s capacity to handle its problems. Decision making is less thoughtful and pragmatic than subjective, emotional, and unreasoned. The nation has failed to create a democracy of meritorious elites whose wise decisions represent a popular consensus. Democratic populism has typically been more influential than democratic elitism and is becoming increasingly so. Inspired by notions of contributory merit—​power and more material rewards gained in proportion to contributions—​meritocracy is heir to American progressivism and its attachment to pragmatic objectivity. In contrast, democratic populism embodies the legacy of romanticism: the implicit, inspired, clairvoyant sense of the traditional and thus the natural wisdom of the masses. Both American streams usually reject the extremes of autocracy—​d ictatorship in service to an equality of outcome on the left and dictatorship in service to a racial, commercial, or traditional elite on the right—​a nd accept procedures of popular governance. However, in the United States the ideological positions have come to face off politically on a point to the right of center that defines embedded national preferences. Democratic elitism has shrunk into American liberalism, more committed to procedural reforms than [ 4 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

substantive policies of material redistribution, while democratic populism has remained reactionary. The major differences between liberals and conservatives in the United States are clashes of style rather than substance and represent different constituencies more than differing social visions and political philosophies. Both deny a progressive social agenda. Both largely have stakes in the current system, given some billions this way or that. The margins of liberalism and conservatism in the United States are wildly different, but by distorting embedded preferences their enthusiasms quickly fade back into the mainstream. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Tea Party tried the conservative patience in the same way that progressives, socialists, and communists have tried the liberal patience. Meritocracy predicated on pragmatism is a persistent but minor influence in the process. Democratic populism predicated on policy romanticism is decisive. There is no inherent logic that democracy leads to decency, and in fact in the United States it has not, despite the nation’s wealth. Memory and history, that is, social preferences and reality, are not at all the same and need not be. The United States has all the language and excuses in place to become a truly predatory nation; it just lacks a sufficient cultural and racial homogeneity to agree on the scapegoats, although the poor are emerging as a popular candidate for deep scorn. Then again, the nation has all the mechanisms in place to achieve a decent culture. The impediment to civilized progress is not erected by democracy—​the mechanism of decision making—​but by the content, the nation’s core commitment to policy romanticism.

I n t r o d u c t i o n  [ 47]

CH A P TER  1

Precursors to Policy Romanticism

R

ichard Hofstadter assumed that the anti-╉ intellectual meanders in American history and thought—╉ the instances of democratic populism—╉ were episodic mob enthusiasms, the occasional distorted leadership of illegitimate elites, or collective and rare imps of the perverse. These are alibis that in the long run guarded the innocence of the masses and by extension the virtues of democracy and the American destiny. Hofstadter neglected the more disturbing view that democratic populism and its expression as policy romanticism were dominant influences in social choices. For more than half a century, Hofstadter’s treatise (1953) on anti-╉ intellectualism in American history and thought persists as a pillar of American liberalism, perhaps even stating a credo of the nation’s political center. It identified a threat to the American promise, but only that. Anti-╉i ntellectualism captured a portion of the enduring American mood, but Hofstadter restricted it to the margins of American politics, granting it only an occasional but usually pernicious influence over American policy making. His case in point was McCarthyism during the 1950s. He viewed anti-╉intellectualism as a cyclical reprisal of simplistic patriotism and faith in a shared national sensibility that, like the nation’s pietistic religions, was accessible, was self-╉evident, and required little book learning, higher thought, or an educated elite to interpret individual experience. Optimistic about the inevitability of American civic decency and the core goodness of the American people, Hofstadter argued that right thinking, if not rationality itself—╉the Enlightenment mood—╉inevitably triumphed over mean-╉spirited ignorance. Indeed, the first thought of his conclusion trumpeted the intellectual’s newfound respectability.

Anti-​i ntellectualism in various forms continues to pervade American life, but at the same time intellectual has taken on a new and more positive meaning and intellectuals have come to enjoy more acceptance, and in some ways, a more satisfactory position. This new acceptance sits awkwardly on their shoulders. Being used to rejection, and having over the years forged a strong traditional response to society based on the expectation that rejection would continue, many of them have come to feel that alienation is the only appropriate and honorable stance for them to take. What they have come to fear is not so much rejection or overt hostility, with which they have learned to cope and which they have almost come to regard as their proper fate, but the loss of alienation. (1953, p. 393)

Quite to the point, anti-​intellectualism as a persistent but minor subtheme of American history—​“pervading” but not dominating American society—​maintained faith in the virtues of the American people, that is, in the coincidence of American democracy with American decency and thus the reality of social progress. Hofstadter characterized the public as “nonintellectual … infused with enough ambivalence about intellect and intellectual to be swayed now this way and now that on current cultural issues. It has an ingrained distrust of eggheads, but also a genuine yearning for enlightenment and culture” (p. 19). In this way, the nation was open-​minded to a variety of perspectives, and the selection of social policy hinged on a national debate of evidence and reason more than a reactionary passion. But for the demons of mass passion epitomized by McCarthyism, democracy came along with open decision making. Prescriptions for reform thus sat on the logic that expanding the political franchise and access to public education would achieve the good society. and that the good society in these terms was what citizens had in mind and wished to install. Contrary to Hofstadter and the common perception of both the intellectual community and the masses, the American consensus—​a romanticism of politics and policy making—​seems quite antagonistic to objectivity and pragmatism, let alone the application of rationality itself. Hofstadter attended only to extreme expressions of antagonism to reason such as McCarthyism’s “sorties against intellectuals” (p. 3). The antagonism toward higher learning is an expression of an underlying mistrust of reason and an embedded belief that the sublime, the unknown, the transcendental constitutes the true reality. However, the United States is profoundly romantic and not simply anti-​intellectual. Anti-​intellectualism is only one strain, but a central one, in a broader concept of American attitudes profitably summarized as policy romanticism. Policy romanticism may well be decisive and broadly shared rather than marginal and episodic. It may be the distinguishing characteristic Pr e c u r sor s to P ol ic y Rom a n t ic i s m [49 ]

that explains the core of enduring American social policy both public and private. American social welfare taken expansively to cover public and private provisions in health, education, social services, industry and business, and other domestic policies and perhaps even foreign policy, may emerge less out of reasoned processes of evidence and national discussion than out of an embedded romanticism. Asserting the openness of the national dialog is probably accurate, but the malleability of American preferences probably is not. Rather than amenable to evidence, American choices seem consistently in line with the nation’s romantic hopes and its romantic processes. Democracy in America has channeled mass preferences that are antagonistic toward Enlightenment goals. It prefers a mystical assurance of the nation’s chosenness and the supremacy of intuitive beliefs. The spirit of science—​ rationality and openness—​has been cheapened into its technological applications. Moreover, challenges to the status quo, from the right but also notably from the left, are also typically romantic and often pointedly anti-​ intellectual, in particular the lockstep obedience of the American Communist Party to Stalinism, its mindless demand for cadre obedience, and for that matter the romanticism of basic Marxist ideology. Hofstadter’s limited conclusions may have emerged from attention to extreme expressions of mob action and his apparent attempt to isolate them from the core American experience. He seemed reluctant to consider the pervasive anti-​intellectualism of American society, the embedded expression of romanticism in enduring American choices. In the same way, the Tea Party phenomenon with all of its accompanying prominence of intellectual primitivism and the stolid mysticism of the Occupy Movement draw attention away from the more common acceptance of the general principles that the extreme expressions exaggerate. Liberal intellectuals derided the inaccuracies and ideological vacuity of many national administrations since Nixon’s—​in particular, Carter’s, Reagan’s, and the second Bush’s. But the point seems lost that the tenets of those administrations were romantic and that they legitimately represented the consent of the American people to be governed by romantic principles. Americans have largely decided on what they want; the national debate is entertainment rather than reason. The ceremonies of American democracy ratify American choices. Policies that endure in an open society are consensual and thus politically legitimate. The people have spoken, but more importantly the people have expressed their preferences through their daily choices. Personal behavior toward the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, the failed, and so forth in the private sector parallels public policy. Private [ 5 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

charities are woefully inadequate; the citizen largely ignores the needy; housing patterns reflect a desire for isolation from need; and other freely chosen individual actions express the general principle expressed clearly in both public and private social policy that people are largely responsible for themselves. The devotion to extreme individualism, verging on cruel indifference to need, is freely chosen rather than imposed on a generous and kindly people by forces beyond their control. Similarly, although individuals may be ignorant, information in the United States is hardly restricted. A  citizen’s obliviousness is a freely chosen condition, perhaps even the expected condition of the individual in an immensely complex society. It is less of a concern at least from the perspective of democratic representation than the smooth functioning of political and social role organizations in an immensely open, informed society that protects the heterogeneity of its intellectual community and its access to the masses. The fact that institutionalized choices typically sit on only a narrow band in the vast array of policy options is not a rebuke to democratic decision making but rather an indictment of the intelligence and decency of the populace. The nation’s preference for the sublime and the subjective over the objective and pragmatic is made freely. The conservative is frequently painted with a romantic brush by liberals, but liberals are not much distant from the same influences. Indeed, romanticism in the United States draws a line that isolates American liberalism as well as American conservatism from the pragmatism at the heart of the nation’s progressive political tradition. American public policy is bracketed between modern liberals and conservatives but is rarely influenced by progressive preferences. Progressives seek greater economic and social equality through the intervention of government. Liberals largely seek procedural equality, and conservatives largely feel it has already been substantially achieved. American liberalism and conservatism are relatively low-​cost approaches to social problems, in contrast with the large public expenditures in job creation, education, income support, and public regulation entailed by the progressive agenda. The nation fancies itself as enlightened, as a beacon of truth and decency to the rest of the world. In fact, it is marooned increasingly in a protective romanticism that grows from the enduring preferences of the American people rather than an invidious triumph of conspiratorial evil. Its heroic conception of individualism, self-​reliance, and self-​help refreshes the most fanciful of Emerson, Whitman, and 19th-​century continental philosophy, including postmodernism predicated on the obligation of people to invent themselves and thus to accept responsibility for their situations. The notion of small government persists, despite its large size, even while public policy largely shuns social responsibility for P r e c u r s o r s t o P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 5 1]

personal failure, extending the romance of democratic populism and the tepid compromise between American liberals and conservatives. THE ROMANTIC BACKDROP TO POLICY ROMANTICISM

Policy romanticism in the United States is shaped in part by 19th-​ century literary and philosophic romanticism and its recurrence in the 20th as postmodernism. Yet rather than simply the inventions of poets and political theorists, policy romanticism refers to a series of embedded social preferences that engender political choices. Policy romanticism or cultural romanticism probably predated their expression in art and philosophy as social characteristics that provided inspiration to those who formalized their characteristics. The abiding similarities between policy romanticism and romantic thought generally relate to the primacy of human subjectivity, the triumph of the individual will, and the belief in a transcendent spiritual reality that influences and perhaps dominates the material world; the romantic reality, the truth of its propositions, rests on faith, emotion, personal intuition, imagination, and other constructs of psychic life. Romantic theory, a jumble of hypothetical constructs (MacCorquodale & Meehl, 1948), is metaphysical rather than utilitarian, pragmatic, or scientific. Whether or not a particular metaphysical system has a widespread influence in the culture at large (as Platonism and Hegelianism, for instance, have had) depends on whether the metaphysician’s own configuration of biases happens to correspond to the configurations of his contemporaries… . Whatever else metaphysics may be, it is certainly a cultural product. (Jones, 1961, pp. 139–​4 0)

The philosophic issue of the truth of romantic propositions is quite separate from the fact of the nation’s acceptance of romantic tenets. American society and culture have adopted romantic tenets without much respect for their epistemological standing as truth. Invariably, distortions of objective reality and untestable propositions of ineffable entities—​the tenets of policy romanticism institutionalized in both public and private policy—​justify the social preferences of democratic populism. Romantic metaphysics creates entities that are the equivalent of material entities (if not their actual substance) but that are immaterial. Presumably, they still affect the material world, although their influence cannot be tested through sensory processes. Romantic entities and propositions concern the world but are not amenable to empirical methods of testing; they are inborn, without leaving a biological footprint. [ 5 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

They cannot be falsified or reduced to material propositions. They cannot be apprehended through the senses. They exist in a realm that is spiritual, mystical, and subjective. Their existence is an issue of faith, belief, and otherworldly experience. They are ineffable and sublime, but decidedly not metaphoric in any sense: “Magical idealism as true and real rather than … allegorical or symbolic” (Riasanovsky, 1995, p. 81). Romanticism is about a special inherited reality, tellingly important for its believers, and not simply an allegory or a grandiose symbol of the real. Its common and perhaps defining element is the ascendance of emotion over reason. Organicism

With a core of the sublime and the untestable, it is not at all surprising that the actual propositions of different romantic systems are wildly inconsistent, even antagonistic. Still, romantic systems seem by and large to share a number of themes in addition to a reliance on emotion and a depreciation of the intellect. Riasanovsky (1995) concludes that “organicism was probably the most important single concept in the structure of romantic thought” (p. 91). The notion of a “unified organic world” sustains the many pantheistic constructions—​the artist, the thinker, and the sentient human becoming one with nature and the sublime—​and abiding religious, often Christian, conviction in much of romanticism. It carries over to a variety of claims for a universal experience, even a legacy of human existence, for example Jung’s collective unconscious, Mazlow’s hierarchy of human needs, and Freud’s incest taboo, that evolutionary psychology is committed to discover. Organicism often coincides with politically conservative preferences for order and tradition, even nationalism and ethnocentrism, that limit the individual within a greater common identity. At the same time, romanticism cherishes human imagination, rapture, euphoria, and epiphany and thus an exaggerated sense of individual capacity, capable for Nietzsche of heroic overcoming and for Fichte of self-​invention (“the self-​positing ego”). Yet even though both heroic individualism as an expression of will and organic assumptions claim a special reality and ecstatic insight, neither construction leads to testable propositions about objective reality. They remain expressions of mood that lay claim to emotional fulfillment. As such they are political entities, meta-​ideologies that precede the myths of socialization, individual identity, and policy choice. Romantic conceptions of life usually impose assumptions of organic relatedness on the world:  “God and nature as one,” “living nature as Pr ecu r sor s to Pol ic y Rom a n t icism [ 53]

exhibiting fundamental organic types” (Richards, 2002, pp.  515–​16). Romanticism often sets nature as the world spirit or world mind—​often synonymous with God—​conferring a superior wisdom and force that guides progress. These organic forms are archetypes, “essential patterns or rational ideals … existing in the mind of God … as acts of the Divine will manifested in nature” as laws. They are “perceived by the mind and not the senses,” revealing the hidden teleological structure of the world, its march of progress (pp. 527, 517). As a consequence, nature as an all-​ pervasive organic whole is value-​laden. Jones echoes back the cultural attractiveness of metaphysics when he interprets romanticism as “assertions about the nature of reality” that are actually “covert value judgments” (1961, p. 143). In this way, the romantic pursuit of inner truths about existence with the assurance that they exist is the assertion that the elements of Jones’s romantic syndrome (continuity, intuition and the rest) ought to exist, as virtues. In this sense too, Darwin’s natural selection is not simply the device of evolution but a moral force that converts survival into a moral triumph, and man’s emergence as God’s noblest work becomes evidence of the moral unfolding of biology and history. It is a small step to cultural chosenness, Divine favor anointing particular national aggregations of God’s most impressive creation that are confident they are evolutionary improvements of will, spirit, character, and biology. Pantheism of one form or another, the core of early Romanticism, exists among many romantic inclinations to explore the natural order, however conceived, for evidence of an underlying moral purpose to the universe. The romantic imagination has been ever successful in these explorations, discovering virtue in a glowing effusion of nature, not least of which is expressed in ever-​recurrent Darwinian justifications of imagined tradition and often too as some form of God’s will. After all, tradition by its very nature has survived to become embedded realities of thought. The later Romantics found “refuge in various forms of conservatism and religious orthodoxy” (Riasanovsky, 1995, p. 5). However, the myth of nature’s moral purpose also affects reformers and liberals such as they are. Many romantics were enthusiastic about the French Revolution and social change generally. Their reform efforts often expressed an appreciation for rural virtue, as in orphan trains, home gardens, camping, idealized small towns along with a variety of back-​to-​nature movements, ecology reform movements (also including a variety of psychotherapies), nutrition regiments, and physical therapies that draw on invisible life forces (auras, animal magnetism, crystals, and the like). Indeed much quackery is romantic naturalism, the attempt to bring man back into sync with God and the cosmos. Yet the romantic preference either for change or for tradition [ 5 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

remains grounded in untestable assertions about reality. It is mood rather than historical and political propositions. Romantic thought, by functioning for the useful and satisfying other than the real, has been the vehicle of both radical idealism and conservative thought. Pantheism “equates God with the world (the world as God and God as the world),” thus unifying the traditionally religious with the mysticism of nature (1995, p. 71). The tenacity of the attachment to pantheism and romantic thinking generally is proportionate to the desire to reject reality in favor of a more pliant, useful, and comforting mysticism that simplifies the daunting complexity of life and reduces the terror of ignorance and uncertainty. Romanticism is the triumph of a subjective reality—​the narcissistic will—​over the discomforts of the world that depart from human wishes and needs. Inner Experience as Self-​c ertifying and Def initive

Romanticism is a polar contrast with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Following Jones’s romantic syndrome (1961), romantic metaphysics poses a disordered, imprecise, and dynamic world that values change rather than one that is static and amenable to rational discovery and precise understanding. Romantic dynamism is powered by the will, an inchoate striving without limit or end, and is often defined as an expression of an indivisible will. Schopenhauer’s will is perhaps the quintessential romantic construct; reality as the will can be known only as an intuition, “an immediate, direct feeling of a veridical insight into the essence of ourselves as ‘willing subjects’ of the universal drive that manifests itself in us and in all other things” (Jones, 1961, p. 141). Following Schopenhauer, the will [is] a nonrational force, a blind striving power whose operations are without ultimate purpose or design. [Thus] Nature in all its aspects … takes on the character of an endless … meaningless struggle for existence in which all is stress, conflict and tension. (Schopenhauer, 1967, p. 328)

The “soft focus” of romanticism, in contrast to the material precision of science, looks inward to clarify the otherworldly reality of the unconscious, which is the true reality of existence. Romantic conceptions typically assert otherworldly, nonmaterial, ethereal explanations for reality, whose truth is knowable only through inner experience. Looking inward for meaning, romantic systems reject objective coherence and the plausibility of a material world—​perhaps the most important legacy of the Enlightenment. The romantic impulse is spontaneous, a signal from the Pr e c u r sor s to P ol ic y Rom a n t ic i s m [ 5 5]

otherworld and the unconscious. Self-​discovery is transcendent and ennobling and the vehicle through which romanticism debases objectivity. The Romantic Syndrome … above all prized monism and continuity; to the romantic mind there was no doubt that the other way, which Kant called faith and which he described as “intuition” or “feeling,” was vastly superior to discursive conceptualized experience. In fact, where Kant limited knowledge to make a place for something else, and characteristically left the two side by side, the Romantic Syndrome replaced knowledge by feeling. (Jones, 1961, p. 168)

Romanticism’s antagonism to reason, let  alone rational explanation, embraces the internal, the introjective, and the introspective. Creativity, spontaneity, and inspiration as final sources of truth displace disciplined, objective coherent and material science. Implicit aesthetic judgment, substituting organic assumptions for science, marks a “path into the deep structure of reality” that is inaccessible to Enlightenment thought (Richards, 2002, p. xvii). In fact, the limitations of science and objectivity sustain the resurrection of the romantic. Imagination and Inspiration

Imagination and inspiration are characteristics of the romantic soul and mind that confer abilities to perceive the reality beyond the capacities of science and “purely logical rationalizing.” They are present in every human, at least in rudimentary form although not wholly controllable by the will. Strong in childhood—​“ intimations of immortality”—​they may be dulled by experience or the wrong kind of education. Imagination penetrates the vulgar world by merging itself with sublime reality. Inspiration as imagination is animated by “more than human, by preternatural forces disclosing truth about man and his world” that is more true than the materialist testing of science: “The universe willed, so to speak, at least in part, its essential nature and its purposes to man” (Bernbaum, 1948, p. 327). Imagination and insight are the portals to a mystical union with eternal verities. Each is “a feeling, a sensitivity, an intuition, immediate and intense, by which the ego apprehends the character of something outside of itself ” (p. 323). They integrate “every emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience,” elevating “the senses to their full powers and fruition” in grasping “the knowledge of an actual reality” that is the sublime truth of organic unity (ibid.). Only through imagination and insight is it possible to see “things as they truly are, not in meaningless separateness but in relationship to one another and ultimately to a universal Oneness” (p. 324). [ 5 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

The imaginative process is a “higher pleasure,” mysterious, intermittent, but also “overpoweringly impressive, convincing and delightful” (p. 325). With a kinship to psychotic hallucination, the romantic imagination intuits a specific content and structure of the infinite and absolute, which it then perceives as true through intuition. As commands of an inchoate will, imagination, intuition, and inspiration constitute an extreme form of individualism. Individualism and the Will

One step better than Ptolemy, romanticism displaces the Earth as the center of the universe and substitutes the individual. Through the devices of the human will and its attachments to spirit and mind, the underlying organicism of reality created by supernatural forces, and an enviable use of insight and imagination to fathom the sublime reality underneath the husk of the material world, the individual is divorced from the institutional, structural influences of society. People self-​create—​they posit themselves—​and thus they are responsible for their situations in life. A strong will, the appropriate use of insight and imagination to explore his natural endowment, and the reality of his sublime situation endorse man as “master of his fate … captain of his soul.” The individual as self-​inventing and heroic through the exercise of will is part and parcel of the rejection of social influences in determining social outcomes. Acting through an organic reality and embodying the spiritual legacy of humanity, the individual is expressed collectively through tradition. In this way, preferences for social institutions and continuity rather than change, experimentation, and the plausibility of self-​reliance often construct an alliance between romanticism and political conservatism. In the many instances in which romantic thinking inspires violent revolution and radical change, its justifications lie in untestable assertions about the prowess of the individual, often the intellectual, and the role of insight and imagination to discern ineluctable ideas that propel change. Assertions about the nature of the revolutionary situation also return to the individual’s insight rather than to empirical tests of historical facts. Will dominates, and thus heroic individualism becomes more plausible than the constraints of society. Notably, the romantic construction of the individual reflects the moral imperatives of the world. The heroic individualism of romanticism moralizes the basic human endowment of will and insight in discovering the sublime truths of existence and furthering the human quest. Social adaptation and even society itself as an affront to nature are often cast as impediments to human beings’ quest for meaning. P r e c u r s o r s t o P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 5 7]

Customarily the quest entails personal adjustment in its conservative expression and revolution in its radical expression, rather than pragmatic social reform. Indeed, radical political movements customarily start with the development of heroic cadres who through insight and will presumably become capable of transforming society (Laqueur, 1977). The Romantic Quest

The essential romantic quest, as both a personal journey and the notion of social progress, seeks a moral order or moral lesson in nature and the natural order, and one that usually sustains the correctness of the searcher’s preferences. Conveniently, the romantic quest usually begins with the assurance of being fruitful, although the intuition to search and the intuition of what will be found are both created in the mind of the explorer. The romantic quest assumes a sublime reality that lies underneath common experience and either acts with it or explains it. In this regard, the unconscious in human motives closely parallels Kant’s noumena. The romantic quest seeks to reveal the unconscious—​notably defying Kant’s insight that things beyond the senses cannot be known even while he assumed that noumena caused phenomena. In turn, the unconscious is frequently revealed through introspection à la Freud and his early disciples, such as Jung, or some other process of rational induction that lies at the heart of psychotherapy, counseling, mentoring, and the like. The romantic’s quest for social progress is ensured as an archetype based in the virtues of nature and man’s selection as a Divine image: “Man, the vanguard of evolution” (Bernbaum, p. 307) carries over to the United States as the vanguard of human civilization. In contrast, progress in its pragmatic sense is not foreordained by the chosenness of man and the exceptionalism of the United States but becomes a measurable question of meeting specific criteria of improvement. The romantic is assured in faith; the pragmatist is bedeviled by the ambiguities of consequences. The Romantic Mood

The romantic mood is narcissistic and pietistic, substituting feeling for intellect and ecstatic revelation for reason. Baeck’s characterization of the romantic mood (1958) was preparatory to his criticism of romantic religion, which abided atrocities in spite of its claims on virtue. In its context of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, the essay is also broadly condemnatory of romanticism in society and politics. [ 5 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Everything dissolves into feeling; everything becomes mere mood; everything becomes subjective… . Feeling becomes valid as such… . The romantic becomes enraptured and ecstatic for the sake of ecstasy and rapture; this state becomes for him an end in itself… . (p. 190)

The romantic mood is not confined to the artist languishing in self-​pity for the inattention of the world to one’s brilliance. It also impels the righteous to political and social acts—​missions of conversion and control justified by ecstatic insights. The romantic mood is the bridge between extreme individualism and its active expression in social policy. It animates the quest for communion and oneness with the eternal, the Divine, and the transcendent. The romantic individual’s rapture certifies specialness and superiority, even redemption. As a group phenomenon it institutionalizes the true belief of pietistic religion and romantic social policy—​ chosenness as the vehicle of social rights and American democracy as the illuminated path. When the romantic imagination’s ecstasy of release—​its novel inspiration, its creative innovation—​is realized in social policy, it is usually for purposes of restraint. Yet a romantic intuition becomes social policy precisely when it coincides with broad preferences. Freudian practice and psychotherapy in general became widely accepted not because of its clinical value—​it has little if any—​but rather for the demotic justification to loosen the restraints on an ethos of individualism (Rieff, 1966). Psychoanalysis affirmed popular romantic notions—​the unconscious, mind, ineffable individualism, organicism, and so forth—​through ceremonies of clinical practice, notably the deep exploration of the unconscious in a quest for the authentic self. Freud invented the liturgy of broad social pietism that conferred academic and scientific authority on culturally ascendant myths and superstitions. Yet “the triumph of the therapeutic” acting on the popularity of those myths and superstitions—​broad preferences—​came to impose the demand for conformity to regnant social values through psychotherapeutic social services (ibid.). Those social services are no more effective in realizing their goals than psychoanalysis itself.1 Their reason for being is social ceremony—​a ffirmation of popular values—​rather than clinical effectiveness. 1. The small critical tradition in psychotherapy is principally defined by its attention to the absence of clinically credible (scientific) evidence of the field’s effectiveness: Wootton (1959), Zilbergeld (1983), Gross (1978), Eisner (2000), Macmillan (1997), Dineen (1996), Moloney (2013), and Epstein (2006), among a few others. Therapy fails even under optimal clinical conditions when delivered by presumably the most adept practitioners. More commonly, in general community conditions, it may be actually harmful (Masson, 1988; Gross, 1978; Zilbergeld, 1983). Pr e c u r sor s to P ol ic y Rom a n t ic i s m [ 59 ]

Through similar processes, romantic revelations of the chosen become institutionalized as the raptures of personal and social change that become mundane tyrannies as symbols of the ideal. The paradox of individual expressiveness at the heart of the romanticism of cultural intolerance is resolved predictably through revelations of demons and saints. The exquisite elevation of exclusiveness that favors some and denigrates others is exercised as social policy when it is broadly shared. An extreme individualism is transposed by an embedded social and economic stratification into moral judgments about the obvious lack of initiative in those who fail and the obvious elevated wills of those who succeed. The romantic mood becomes the only reality, following Baeck, devoid of ethical purpose, reason, and intellect. When romanticism turns toward this world, it always arrives eventually at the idea of dominion and authority which, in turn, wants subordinates. [Religious] missions, too, are in the end a demand for universal obedience; here, too, the concept of man is discarded in favor of the concept of the obedient subordinate. (Baeck, 1958, p. 288) EMERSON, THE MODEL AMERICAN ROMANTIC

The enduring popularity of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the United States surely speaks to his justification, or at least promotion, of the nation’s sense of itself more than any literary or intellectual brilliance. An imaginative phrase maker, yet often impenetrably gushing, repetitious, euphuistic, and imprecise to the point of ecstatic babble, he is the template of the American romantic. He is also the quintessential professional spiritualist making a living by writing, preaching, and consulting about the Divine, the World Mind, and not coincidentally the capacity of the immortal human soul to achieve transcendent greatness through self-​invention, will, and literary stardom. Transcendentalism is constantly repeated in the innumerable guises of religion, self-​help, literature, drama, and the other established forms of the American culture. Emerson shapes the elements of the romantic to the American context. While it reads with a rapturous self-​absorption, as though twisted grammar and an idiosyncratic language were proof positive of awesome communion with the eternal and the sublime, it repeats with all of its dead ends and ineffability the romantic pitfalls of reigning American thought. Emerson is a manual of America’s metalogic, the mood that explains its social policy choices better than economics and the accidents of time, place, and history. Its core tenets—​extreme individualism, the spiritual life, will, transcendence of the mundane, and the beneficence of [ 6 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Nature—​a lso constitute its core fallacies: the confusion of luck with virtue, style with substance, and fantasy with reality. Kant famously undercut metaphysics with the observation that human knowledge of the world was limited by the senses and therefore knowledge of true reality—​the thing in itself—​w as impossible. This gave no pause to Emerson and the romantics, who then went on to insist on nonmaterial sources of true knowledge such as imagination, insight, soul, spirit, and a variety of inborn capacities transmuted from otherworldly, divine origins that customarily elevate the creative mind above common humanity. In spite of the impossibility of metaphysics, Emerson bravely kept on creating his own. At least one view of Emerson and the romantics in general seems inescapable: they escaped from the fear of the unknown and unknowable reality through the door of imaginative invention, boldly going where others had trodden and calling it creative genius. Ayn Rand was no more extreme in touting individualism nor more subjective and mystical in her “objectivism” than Emerson’s sense of self-​ reliance and self-​evident truth. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment… . A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within … (Emerson, 1993, p. 23)

Emerson conveniently relies on the self-​evident to answer the question of how he knows his insights are true rather than defiantly commonsensical. The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose… . We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. (p. 147) [As people] “come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word.” (p. 15)

The self-​evident value of the inner landscape thus encourages Emerson to rhapsodize about deep self-​discovery and its natural affinity with the human condition, prefiguring Freud, Jung, their disciples, and later generations of psychotherapists, ontologists, faith healers, mystics, and evangelists. Indeed, he discourages hard questions about objective truth: P r e c u r s o r s t o P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 61]

When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. (p. 34)

Then again, objective fact is not Emerson’s intent. Instead, loyal to the romantic tradition, Emerson is attempting a sublime truth of being that is more real than the material world and precedes it. Emerson’s metaphysics—​ his romanticism—​ consecrates with universalist blessing American assumptions about individualism, the source of truth, and social relations. It starts with the independent will, that is, self-​ creation and thus the responsibility of each person for himself or herself. Characteristic of romantic thought, introspection in one form or another is the avenue to the truth that the world is interconnected through every person’s soul or spirit, collectively assembled by a divine force, Nature, or a universal spirit. Right and wrong are converted into universal propositions that are, again, discoverable through introspective activities such as reflection, prayer, and the more mystical experiences of insight, epiphany, and the like. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. (p. 1) Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. (p. 141, emphasis in original) Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff…  . Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. (p. 53)

Emerson’s individualism admits few constraints of society or biology. It is a fundamental force of the spiritual life that perfuses mundane materiality. Its extreme self-​reliance prefigures American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has broken free of the conventional forces that limit nations and invented itself. Because self-​invention is heroic and draws on divine inspiration and the universal in human experience, the nation’s exceptionalism enjoys the sanction of the eternal and the divine. Americans are special because they deserve to be special; they have earned it all by acts of self-​creation and a unique knowledge of existence that transcends material proof. American romanticism is a bulletproof investment in faith.

[ 6 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Yet the power of Emerson lies in the conversion of his metaphysical heroics into social policy by a population that acts in appreciation of his dicta, converting faith into social policy. Emerson’s very uppercrusty asceticism and speculative idealism has been transformed into social obligations by popular action. American social welfare programs are droplets of Emersonian enthusiasm, just as oblivious to the world in which people actually live as Emerson himself and just as encouraged to invent a moral state of affairs scripted by their own contrived will more than their reason or compassion. To insist on “the perfect compensation of the universe” as a fact of at least moral deserts and then to find broad social and cultural agreement provides testimony for the human ability to transcend reality. Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first is in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly in the circumstances, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul. (p. 54) The absolute balance of give and take, the doctrine that everything has its price—​a nd if that price is not paid, not that thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get anything without its price—​is not less sublime in the columns of a ledger than the budgets of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature… . The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor… . Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. (pp. 61, 62)

Perhaps Emerson was writing metaphorically about absolute balance and other propositions about the world, although this interpretation seems a stretch in light of his appreciation of continental idealism and the fact that his words appear to be quite literal without the merest bit of humor or satire. Yet, American culture parallels Emerson’s view of the American experience at face value, translating through American social welfare and much else in the culture the conviction that people create themselves into the obligation that they do so. Emerson’s work represents less the release of individualism from prior restraints, Puritanism in his case, and more the restraint of the romantic’s vision of organic interrelatedness. He had clear prescriptions for individualism and nonconformity that were inspired by a universal, interpenetrating natural philosophy. Like much of the European romantic tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries, he was a reactionary whose demons resided in modernity, notably industrialization. His thought was

Pr e c u r sor s to P ol ic y Rom a n t ic i s m  [ 6 3]

nourished by an edenic, imagined freedom, a state of nature that affirmed the Transcendentalist’s quest. His work anticipates the postmodernist enthusiasms of the 20th century in the United States rather than pragmatism. Emerson was not a pragmatic man; he was intensely spiritual and embodied the presiding American spirit far more than the technician, the scientist, or the businessperson. In this, he both prefigured and inspired policy romanticism.

[ 6 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

CH A P TER   2

Policy Romanticism

P

olicy romanticism pursues impossible goals that engender usually ineffective or at least misleading means. Its elements are culturally sanctioned in the terms of the romantic fallacies of oneness, will, natural philosophy, spiritual growth, and the many other metaphysical constructions that lie beyond objective testing. The romantic process is not simply superstitious, counterfactual, or otherworldly but also resistant, if actually hostile, to objective coherence. The core of the romantic imprimatur is self-​ certification, the look inward for truth to the emotional, traditional, sublime, and imagined rather than outward for empirical validation. In its most profound sense the romantic (as well as the Romantic) is distinguished from the pragmatic (or the Enlightened) by a rejection of objective authority, that is, the logic of scientific discovery. The culture of the soul expanded to national spirit is incompatible with the culture of scientific objectivity. Socially embedded metaphysics is cultural myth, but not myth in its trivial sense of fictional tales that entertain. Rather, it serves as fable, that is, the symbolic justification of social policies and institutions—​ compromises among factional differences that become the moral lessons of a culture and reconciliations of aspirations with reality. In this way, romantic social welfare programs, and thus romantic social policies, endure because they affirm a culture’s defining values, its traditions, and its acceptance of a particular social order. Apart from any actual ability to achieve specific social goals (that is, their production functions), social services fulfill powerful roles as ceremonies of cultural myth. Policy romanticism in the United States—​extreme individualism, gnostic knowing, and a sense of chosenness that is often addressed as national exceptionalism—​shares the core elements of romanticism but customarily without the embellishments of artistic and psychological

narcissism, while obviously attending more to social conditions than to the dimensions of imagination, insight, and creativity. It profoundly rejects the elements of pragmatism—​the commitment to test received truths through the disciplined coherent methods of objective science, a metaphoric sense of tradition, and loosely held, tentative knowledge about the world—​and usually the aims of the progressive tradition in the United States as well, including its often rosy view that optimal democratic processes would produce a culture of decency. Policy romanticism in the United States defines the relationship of the individual to the society and thus is realized powerfully in the nation’s social services. American policy romanticism emphasizes an extreme individualism and thus an extreme notion of personal responsibility; truths, arrived at through gnostic processes, that emphasize the immediate truth of transcendent or spiritual knowledge; and a sense of national chosenness—​the assurance that the American way is unique, virtuous, and blessed. HEROIC INDIVIDUALISM

The discovery of how and why the American culture came to be typified by an extreme, even heroic, notion of individualism is a very difficult, perhaps even impossible, task. The fact of its dominance is less challenging. In contrast to a radical or heroic individualism, a more functional individualism confers the sense of justice by which a person is judged by his or her own actions. It leads to a definition of personal responsibility proportionate to an individual’s realistic capacity, expectations of citizenship that are attainable. Functional individualism is grounded in an objective sense of the world. It is a pragmatic expression of people in society. Bellah et al. (1996) identify common elements of individualism that are “basic to American identity” (p. 142): We believe in the dignity, indeed the sacredness of the individual. Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious. Our highest and noblest aspirations, not only for ourselves, but for those we care about, for our society and for the world, are closely linked to our individualism. (ibid.)

These elements of customary individualism are consistent with stated preferences. However, they are not at all consistent with the decisions that are made to ensure the individual’s sacred dignity. Bellah et al. are defining a Weberian ideal type rather than a set of preferences that determine American choices or can be inferred from those choices. In actuality, the [ 6 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

sacredness of individual choice is realized as neglect (the freedom to be hungry, sick, and impoverished) more often than the provision of support to ensure personal choice—​Berlin’s sense of positive liberty (1990). These values, expressed in the oratory of national festivals and holidays more than in the concrete choices of legislation and social behavior, also fail to explain American foreign policy, which has long sustained regimes with precisely opposite actions in suppressing free expression, thought, choice, and self-​determination. Bellah et al.’s analysis is more philosophic than historic even though their examples are drawn from past American events. They are commenting on philosophic traditions of individualism—​biblical, civic, utilitarian, and expressive—​instead of deriving the elements of individualism from consistent social and political choices of the population. Their identification of contradictions between the traditions has in fact been resolved by the American people’s preference for heroic individualism. In contrast to functional individualism, heroic individualism, similar to Bellah et al.’s modern individualism but even more focused on the self as “the main form of reality,” is romantic, a profound rejection of the real justified by a metaphysics of the person and dominated by emotion rather than reason (1996, p. 143). Its core is the romantic will, the Rand-​like assurance that the individual can dominate existence and thus is responsible for it, and the Emersonian emphasis on self-​reliance and even self-​invention as defining American traits. Its justification lies in an imagined role of the person in society depicted through a folk tradition of heroic overcoming. Psychic reality—​feeling, emotion, the sublime, imagination—​and psychic truth of heroic individualism are tested more through clairvoyance, epiphany, and belief than through coherent, objective methods. Ayn Rand scripts Roark, the protagonist of the Fountainhead, in the extreme individualism of romanticism. [He] does not suffer, because he does not believe in suffering. Defeat or disappointment are merely a part of the battle. Nothing can really touch him. He is concerned only with what he does. Not how he feels. How he feels is entirely a matter of his own, which cannot be influenced by anything and anyone on the outside. His feeling is a steady unruffled flame, deep and hidden, a profound joy of living and of knowing his power, a joy that is not even conscious of being joy, because it is so steady, natural and unchangeable… . He will be himself at any cost—​the only thing he really wants of life. And, deep inside of him, he knows that he has the ability to win the right to be himself. Consequently, his life is clear, simple, satisfying and joyous—​even if very hard outwardly. (1962, p. 698, from her notes) P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 67]

Extreme individualism naturally entails a heroic degree of personal responsibility, which has come to define American social welfare. The romantic self of unfettered will inspires social welfare programs—​ ineffective psychotherapy and underfunded public provisions—​to pursue goals of self-​reliance and independence from public support. Yet the programs fail to provide the resources to achieve these goals and ignore the many situations—​notably concerning poor children without families and the totally and permanently disabled—​in which these goals are impossible. Heroic individualism in America comfortably rests on the irony that many of the most fortunate are those who have received the lion’s share of investments in their development and are among the biggest boosters of self-​reliance. Thus success in the United States is often predicated on dependency rather than self-​invention, a contradiction that is sustained by a population that has rejected generous sharing. Heroic individualism is a statement of the nation’s institutionalized policy of neglect, and contrary to Bellah et al., its persistence provides evidence that, in fact, the self as the main form of reality can be sustained in a modern culture. Social welfare in the public and private sectors emerges from the American people themselves, the masses, through the ecology of detached roles, the process by which the institutionalized preferences of Americans enact the heroic assumptions of individualism. Coincidental with dramatic increases in the nation’s wealth since the early 1970s and consequently its capacity to handle material deprivation, the intensity of heroic individualism inferred from substantial declines in public assistance programs seems perversely to be increasing. While the real per capita gross domestic product doubled from about $24,000 in 1970 to about $48,000 in 2011, real benefits in AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and then TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) were cut by about 36% over the same period (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012; Floyd & Schott, 2013; Committee on Ways and Means, 2008). It is worth noting that two thirds of TANF recipients are minor children. Moreover, 2013 data indicate that “families receiving SNAP and TANF benefits still fall below 75% of the poverty line in 48 states and Washington, DC” (Floyd & Schott, 2013 p. 6). In fact, the real value of SNAP (Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program) has decreased since 1996, with another reduction occurring by dint of the 2013 sequestration. The American poverty line is notably stingy and has not increased as the nation becomes wealthier. It was initially designed to mirror subsistence living, but no relief program or combination of relief programs provides benefits to bring recipients above subsistence. In addition to the official poverty line, the Census Bureau also reports an alternative [ 6 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

poverty standard that reflects the recommendations of a 1995 National Research Council report (Citro & Michael, 1995). Yet the alternative measure, which is still not reflected in legislated programs, even though nuanced and automatically adjusted by economic changes in the nation, is also set at subsistence levels. Neither the original absolute measure of poverty nor the alternative measure accepts a standard of poverty that embodies a generous level of relief that the nation can afford or an understanding of poverty as social integration. Quite explicitly, the report states that the “focus of our work is on economic deprivation, narrowly defined” (p. 19). It rejects the broader view stated by Townsend and summarized in the report: Townsend observes that people are “social beings expected to perform socially demanding roles as workers, citizens, parents, partners, neighbors, and friends.” He argues that economic poverty should be defined as the lack of sufficient income for people “to play the roles, participate in the relationships, and follow the customary behavior which is expected of them by virtue of their membership of society.” (Citro & Michael, 1995, p. 23)

The narrowness of the National Research Council report and the inadequacies of American welfare generally assume that the poor are morally deficient. Providing them any sort of generosity constitutes a moral hazard that would undermine their desire to work and would reward licentiousness, laziness, and other ascribed character flaws. Indeed, the condemnatory attitude toward the poor marked by Tocqueville in the early 18th century, continuing to the present and held up even during tough economic times, remains an expression of extreme individualism dominating the American ethos. It is arrived at through implicit assumptions of character that bar the improvident from the civic communion of the chosen who do not rely on charity or public relief. The large declines in the welfare rolls since 1996 were principally due to a combination of a buoyant jobs market in the 1990s and state diversion programs that discouraged applications. Yet need has largely remained persistently high even after government transfers. In 2009, the overall U.S. poverty rate was 14.3%. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that without government transfers the poverty rate would have been 23.7%, with the social insurances accounting for a 7.5% reduction in poverty, the earned income tax credit accounting for 1.6% reduction, and all means-​ tested transfers (mostly SNAP and TANF) accounting for less than 3.0% reduction. The 2012 child poverty rate in the United States was 23%, but still 12.2% after considering all government transfers (National KIDS COUNT, 2014). Pol ic y Rom a n t ic i sm [6 9 ]

Apparently, government transfers largely benefit social insurance recipients. However, the assumption that all social insurance recipients raised out of poverty by the transfers would be poor without them is obviously false, ignoring intrafamilial subsidies as well as increased work effort and lifetime savings. Prior to social security, large transfers occurred within families between working generations and those who were retired or disabled. Moreover, social insurance benefits in the main replicate American stratification, with wealthier groups receiving proportionately larger benefits. The social insurances provide little sharing among income groups. They are intergenerational welfare programs contributed by working populations to the retired, the disabled, and survivors that presumably provide security although at the price of progressive fairness. [In 2012] The United States has a post-​t ransfer poverty rate of 11.3%, which ranks 32nd out of the 34 … [OECD nations in the study]. Tax and transfer programs in the United States reduce poverty by 10.9%, which ranks the country 28th in the amount of poverty reduced by transfers. (Bruenig, 2012)

Bruenig (2012) points to the superior power of income transfers to stem poverty rather than to personal social services, but this is the precisely the point that the United States seems to have rejected. The United States more than almost all other modern industrial nations assumes that poverty is a reflection of personal deviance—​the refusal of people to take responsibility for themselves—​rather than a consequence of the nation’s economic and social malfunctions. Even in the face of large increases in need during the 2008 Great Recession, eighteen states, including Michigan and Rhode Island, cut their public assistance rolls and “nationally, the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years” (DeParle, 2009, para. 1). The states largely govern the conditions of TANF and presumably more quickly respond to the will of the people than does the federal government. Yet they made little effort to shore up basic provisions for those most affected by the economic deprivations created by the Great Recession. Furthermore, benefits and surrogate care for the most deserving populations—​poor children without parents and the totally and permanently disabled—​are provided below the American poverty line, while care is customarily meager, inattentive, and threadbare. For example, Hitting the MARC: Establishing Foster Care Minimum Adequate Rates for Children revealed that 49 states provided substandard reimbursement rates for foster families in 2007. Moreover, states would need to raise their average reimbursement rates by 36% to reach even minimally acceptable [ 7 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

standards of care. (Children’s Rights, National Foster Parent Association, & University of Maryland, 2007). Similarly, DeVooght and Blazey (2013) report that all states provided foster care subsidies below the federal poverty for a single individual, while only a handful met their standards of minimal sufficiency. Many if not most foster parents are motivated by the opportunity to enhance their income more than by humane concern to provide children without parents a homelike environment. As a result, foster children rarely benefit fully from the public subsidies paid to foster parents. Foster care and child welfare generally have long been failed programs, neither handling the many social and emotional problems of the children, nor providing a homelike environment. The Supplemental Security Income program provides cash support for aged, blind, and permanently and totally disabled (e.g., schizophrenics, developmentally disabled, physically disabled, and so forth, who account for more than 80% of all SSI recipients) who are poor. In 2014, single recipients received a maximum of $721 per month and an average of $533 per month from SSI (Social Security Administration, 2015, table 1). In addition they received SNAP and perhaps a small (national monthly mean about $125) additional subsidy from some state programs (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2015). The maximum benefit from all three sources probably reached about $850 per month. In 2014, however, the average SSI payment to single individuals amounted to only about $533 (reflecting the offset for SNAP and other income) plus about $200 in SNAP payments (Social Security Administration, 2015, table 11). In all, recipients customarily received about $10,000 per year, about 80% of the 2014 poverty line for a single individual of $12,071 and inadequate to afford independent living. The amount is insufficient to maintain a private residence. As a result, many recipients end up living in deplorable group homes, even worse than the housing conditions for foster children. As explanations for the inadequacies of care for foster children and the grievously disabled, heroic individualism might reasonably be augmented with the unconcern of Americans toward their most deserving fellow citizens. On its part, the private sector’s many philanthropies and charities pay only minimal attention to the poor and then usually through services that presume the moral deviancy of those in need. Psychotherapy, mentoring, and counseling are the preferred interventions, with hardly any material support and even less advocacy for increased public provisions. The Center on Philanthropy’s report (2007) that 30% of the annual national pool of philanthropy goes to the poor is grossly overstated. It would be surprising if even 5% of charitable and philanthropic donations reached P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 7 1]

poor people (Epstein, 2010, pp. 180–​83). Not surprisingly, both the private sector and the public sector end up with congruent policies in the open and uncoerced American democracy. An embedded preference for extreme individualism together with a goodly dose of indifference, if not cruelty, lies at the heart of the inadequacies of the American welfare state. The compromise over benefit levels has obviously been dominated by the preference for an extreme view of personal responsibility rather than social responsibility. Against all reason, and with an economy that provides few decent jobs for working-​class people, the assumption of the individual’s duty to overcome barriers prevails, and often among those most damaged by it. The nation is largely blind to structural impediments. GNOSTIC KNOWING

Gnostic knowing is the vehicle of belief in heroic individualism. Initially referring to the Gnostic Scriptures, it more broadly refers to mystical revelation—​an immediate epiphany of spiritual, religious, and always inner truth, implying a variety of psychic structures. Convinced that the only answers were to be found within, the gnostic engaged on an intensely private interior journey. Whoever comes to experience his own nature—​ human nature—​as itself the “source of all things,” the primary reality, will receive enlightenment. Realizing the essential self, the divine within, the gnostic laughed in joy at being released from external constraints to celebrate his identification with the divine being… . (Pagels, 1979, p. 144)

The rejection of reason and an attachment to gnostic ways of knowing define policy romanticism. Supremely subjective, they supplant pragmatic reason, let alone rationality, as the abiding justification to the democratic masses for their lived preferences. America’s profound religiousness and its social policies emanate from the same sources of unreason, magical thinking, reliance on the unseeable structures of psychic reality, antagonism to the intellect, and profound belief in the spiritual sources of truth, that is, gnostic knowing. According to a Pew Research Center (2012) survey, fully 80% of Americans report that they “never doubt the existence of God”; 37% report weekly religious attendance, and another 33% state that they attend monthly or yearly. More than 80% state a religious affiliation (ibid.). Only 20% report no religious affiliation. However, even unaffiliated Americans are still quite religious. About 30% of those who state they are [ 7 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

unaffiliated with any religion report at least yearly attendance at a religious service. Strikingly, about 70% of the unaffiliated “believe in God or a universal spirit,” 41% pray at least monthly, and 55% think of themselves as religious or spiritual (ibid.). The same study reports sizable percentages of Americans with claims to specific extrasensory, paranormal experiences and beliefs: 30% believe that there is “spiritual energy in physical things like mountains, trees, crystals”; 25% believe in astrology, 25% in reincarnation, 28% in yoga as spiritual practice; 30% report mystical experiences; 31% have “been in touch with someone who has died”; 19% have seen ghosts; 15% have consulted psychics. Harold Bloom (1992) ties the quintessential characteristics of American religion specifically to the preference for gnostic knowing and ultimately to religious obsession as a social affliction, notably the problem of extreme individualism. No other Western nation … matches our obsession with religion. The vast majority of us believe in some version of God, and nearly all of that majority actually do believe that God loves her or him, on a personal and individual basis… . Fundamentalism, as I have shown, is viciously anti-​i ntellectual, but so, alas, is most American religion, of whatever camp… . The societal consequences of debasing the [early scriptural] self into selfishness, and the believer’s freedom from others into the bondage of others, are to be seen everywhere, in our inner cities and in our agrarian wastelands. (pp. 257–​58)

The centuries-​old gnostic tradition in the United States of “the evidence of things not seen,” the romantic certitude that imagination is proof, and clairvoyance as the source of worldly insights have manufactured the nearly inexhaustible supply of the nation’s antiscientific inventiveness, its affection for the paranormal, its “synchronistic” explanations of the unknown, and its quick recourse to conspiracy as a favored explanation for social policy. It is not the fear of death itself that explains stiff religious conformity as Bloom and others claim, but rather personal ignorance, insignificance, and thus fear of the unknown. And, as religious faith takes a turn into the cruel and the selfish, fear of the unknown as an explanation yields to the observation of the society’s historic episodes of cruelty. The destructive attitudes do not reside necessarily in religion but in the believer, whose free agency may be guided by less-​serene and less-​loving influences than the indwelling Christ. It is easier to justify the benefits of science and technology than to demonstrate its displacement of pseudoscience. Paradoxically but quite materially all the same, gnostic knowing usually in defiance of available Pol ic y Rom a n t ic i sm [ 7 3]

scientific facts accounts for a stunning proportion of American choices. Martin Gardner (1983) is probably wrong that the correspondence principle that “an assertion or belief is true if it corresponds with some aspect of the actual world” “has always been taken for granted by every ordinary person who has not studied philosophy” (p. 32). His own extraordinary scholarship documenting the practice of antiscience in the American marketplace and society testifies to a stunning consistency to do just the opposite: deny reality in favor of psychic evidence. Tradition and its epistemology of common sense—​Immanuel Kant’s defiance without reason—​dominate policy making. In spite of good evidence, including direct personal experience of ineffectiveness, Americans still persist in engaging in useless practices and purchasing worthless products and services, even some that may be harmful. The belief in an afterlife and salvation are common, but tragically so too are harmful beliefs such as the radical reliance of Christian Science, alternative medical practices, and faith healing: “Many children have died because their parents believed that prayer (not antibiotics) cured bacterial meningitis; or that prayer (not insulin) cured diabetic coma; or that prayer (not radiation or chemotherapy) cured lung masses” (Offit, 2013, p. 241). The nearly endless arrays of untested diets are largely untested and some anti-​obesity treatments like Fen-​Phen have proven to be toxic. Americans persist in using biofeedback, sleep learning, and other fringe techniques for learning; evidence of their ineffectiveness from the National Academies of Science seems only to have discouraged the U.S. Army from their use. Extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, seers, psychics, and other expressions of parapsychology remain popular, and their supply is perennially restocked with other magical novelties (Gardner, 1981). Science is an insubstantial bulwark against the revealed truths of the Bible, notably creationism, which enjoys important institutional support, for example the Texas Association of School Boards’ insistence that it be taught alongside evolution. There is little scientifically credible evidence that any form of psychotherapy—​a quintessentially standard cultural practice—​is effective in attaining its goals of cure, prevention, and rehabilitation (see note in Chapter 1). Even more to the point, the same can be said for most personal social services, persisting as ceremonial reaffirmation of cultural values more than as interventions that achieve the tangible goals appearing to justify them in the first place (Epstein, 2010). It is all too easy to dismiss many of these fancies as entertainment, but they are quite serious in their promises and people attend to them with sincere hopes for cure, contact with the dearly departed and the never arrived (the extraterrestrial), [ 74 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

remission, palliation, comfort, psychic ease, and other comforting fantasies. In fact, the material realizations of gnostic knowing are often little more than psychic travel agencies booking passage for the archetypical pursuit of authenticity, which never comes unmoored from the fiction of the inner self (the subject of the next chapter). Alternative medicine is alternative not because of its strangeness but because of its rejection of science in favor of more pliable methods for testing effectiveness. It is immensely popular (Eisenberg et al. 1993). In addition to its enticements for physical relief, it often promises transcendent psychic experiences in pursuit of a more luminous existence for the sufferer. The fascination and the pervasive acceptance of alternative medical procedures—​yoga, traditional Chinese medicine, herbal treatments, acupuncture, massage, homeopathy, chiropractic, vitamin therapy, nutritional supplements, home remedies for cancer (e.g., shark cartilage, coffee enemas), faith healing, and distant healing, to name just a very few among innumerable treatments—​lies not only in their reliance on the placebo effect, often for pain relief, but also in their reliance on undocumentable internal entities such as auras and qi to explain their effects, if any, and to tempt belief (Bausell, 2007). Gardner’s comparison of the prevalence of pseudoscience in the 19th and 20th centuries is no brief for progress. He asks “whether Americans today are more or less gullible than their forebears”: My own opinion is that the gullibility of the public today makes citizens of the nineteenth century look like hard-​nosed skeptics. A larger fraction of Americans now go to college, science has made astounding stride, popular books and magazines about science abound, and big newspapers have first-​class science editors. The result? Almost every newspaper runs a daily horoscope, and astrology books, like books about crank and sometimes harmful diets, far outsell books on reputable science. (1997, p. 179)

Perhaps the issue is less one of gullibility, suggesting naïve innocence, than of stolid true-​belief and the comforts of gnostic self-​certification, which bring to mind an intransigent tradition of deliberate blindness. As one romantic invention is debunked, others proliferate in a rebuke to the vainglory of social progress. There is no great mystery in leading the willing. The value of all these meanders from reason are founded on gnostic knowledge—​emotions, needs, intuitions, beliefs, feeling, epiphanies, clairvoyance, and psychic reality—​rather than in any correspondence with the actual world, unless the actual world also includes the imagined world, that is, psychic reality. In other words, truth has diverse Pol ic y Rom a n t ic i sm [ 75]

meanings. Truth for pragmatists abides science. Truth for policy romantics is emotionally negotiable and as a social collective becomes a political force. Indeed, American society is enamored of a malleable political truth that restricts pragmatic truth to an intellectual minority and to the provinces of science and technology from which the nation greatly benefits. Yet the society remains largely romantic, willfully turning its collective back on the discomforts of testing personal prejudice against the “actual world.” It is worth speculating that the immense wealth of the nation has indulged its romantic propensities; a stern necessity would bring America back to a practical embrace of reality. However, the romantic has always perfused America, and often with tragic social consequences. The metaphysics of romanticism features the perception of a sublime reality, more powerful and prior to the world of the senses, that both encourages and expresses distrust if not actually denigration of formal learning. Its common expression in American religion as Divine revelation and a favored relationship with a personal God certifies gnostic knowing—​spiritual, psychic, and paranormal sources of worldly truths. Religious pietism is often inseparable from romantic naturalism—​a oneness with the Divine, all permeating forces of nature—​and graduates into a truer source of wisdom than disciplined, objective investigation, providing a gnostic comfort that reality is not the exclusive preserve of educated elites. From this perspective, the dominance of gnostic knowing in American society and the prevalent antagonism to intellect and disciplined, coherent learning is not merely an episodic style but rather a deeply embedded, reactionary social institution that thwarts the progressive possibilities of the nation. It puts the lie to the prideful picture of American democracy as an open dialogue of reason that precedes judicious social choices. The romanticism of the common man and of the manifest virtues of American democracy—​that is, democracy as pietistic faith—​denigrates disciplined objectivity in favor of self-​validation and the inner light of truth, relying on intuitions of a sublime reality rather than tested, objective evidence. Democracy as faith is quite different from the justification of democracy that emerges from realization of shared peril in the face of ignorance. Shared peril justifies universal suffrage, which invites all at risk to participate in social decision making. In contrast, the romance of democracy insists on its sublime virtues of transcendent knowledge and Divine election as the one true road to social tranquility, to political harmony, to wealth, and perhaps even to a salvation that blurs the ethereal into the civic.

[ 7 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

CHOSENNESS

Hostility to reason—​science, pragmatism, intellectualism—​flourishes behind the assurance of chosenness, a willing suspension of disbelief sustained by gnostic reassurance. Chosenness as a sense of being favored by the mystical forces of gnostic belief better captures the national mood than the more customary reference to American exceptionalism. Still, they are largely interchangeable. American exceptionalism far exceeds the usual, benign ethnocentricity of citizens taking a special, exceptional pleasure in their society and culture. American exceptionalism builds on heroic individualism and a disposition to anoint national convenience with the unseen and the unseeable in becoming assured of God’s favor, evolutionary purpose, and the historical imperative to lead mankind into a future of grace and plenty. Indeed, the nation’s pietistic religious preferences for theologies of eternal personal salvation naturally expand into its sense of national chosenness—​a communion of the elect bound to each other by a sense of civic exceptionalism verging on civic narcissism. American culture as the apotheosis of civilization becomes the universal template of the correct, the productive, the beneficent, and the necessary. American democracy becomes the one true path exported to other nations as a fervid, near-​religious mission of civic and political conversion. Through the certitudes of cultural superiority, Divine favor, and historical imperative—​sustained by gnostic insight—​a n extreme sense of personal responsibility, the essence of heroic individualism, permeates domestic social policy. Institutionalized belief in heroic individualism constructs private lives and enacts public policy as acts of cultural patriotism. Conformity with the tenets of American exceptionalism and more generally the underlying order of policy romanticism maintains the communion of the chosen. Social services that take on the mission of correcting deviant behavior and that provide for the recipient in proportion to their marketable virtues as well as many recreational and educational services—​which is to say, most public and private social services, including Social Security and cash welfare programs—​a ffirm their loyalty to a nostalgic American tradition by isolating the recalcitrant and unreformed, or by reinforcing the faith of the chosen, or by welcoming the stray back into the flock. Indeed, the many social services whose ceremonial roles far outpace their substantive contributions to the welfare of recipients are civic sacraments of the nation’s exceptionalism. Yet the point of social services is often maintenance of civic values—​the underlying order of policy romanticism that defines democratic populism—​rather than achieving

P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 7 7]

their specific, measurable treatment goals of cure, prevention, and rehabilitation, or providing a greater equality of material welfare. Many social services, notably those that pursue their mission through psychotherapy, counseling, and mentoring, are designed as quests for civic salvation: pursuit of an authentic soul or self that embodies the tenets of policy romanticism. Heroic individualism is customarily expressed by social services agencies as the goals of work, independence (usually from public welfare), and emphasis on personal responsibility. On a nation of democratic populists, the irony seems lost that its most successful members are hardly independent self-​inventions but customarily the passive recipients of great investments in their future; of loving, supportive families; of indulgent communities; of protective, similarly advantaged peer groups; and of great good fortune. In truth, the national pride in its chosenness may depend on persistent confusion of providence with virtue, an easy task of gnostic dexterity. THE HARM OF POLICY ROMANTICISM

Controlled experimentation, the hallmark of rigorous science, and even less demanding methods are often impossible, impractical, or too costly to implement. Uncertainty and its consequent ambiguities are inevitable. However, the romantic policies and beliefs that clarify the ambiguities of uncertainty without addressing underlying problems are not inevitable, but unfortunate. Policy romanticism emerges from refusal to confess the reality of ignorance, and even cultural denial of its presence. Policy romanticism is obstinacy and denial, a mystical retreat into the spectral proofs and the inner eyes of a gauzy sentimentality. Policy romanticism pays an enormous price to maintain unreasoned, let alone untested, cultural preferences. The triumph of the political over the ethical is the constant pitfall of democratic populism. In the short run, problems do not get fixed as attention and resources are allocated to maintain the fantasies of embedded belief, in particular a sense of the individual that is both unrealistic and hypocritical. Over more time, the romantic impulse in society stultifies social progress by subverting reason to serve an imagined past and pursue an impossible future. Worse, in the long run, it risks the imposition of history’s most predatory political regimes, which assume power through mob enthusiasms encouraged by an imagined tradition that condones the perpetration of redemptive horrors. Water mains may still get repaired; public transit may run smoothly; garbage may be picked up. Yet any improvement in social relations that displaces popular stratifications or challenges mythic certitudes is doomed. Fear [ 7 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

of the unknown emerges as the denial of common access to resources, justification of inequalities, and by and by reactionary scapegoating—​a ll well represented in American history. Indeed, in the 20th century policy romanticism ran amok throughout the world, its lessons dying away along with its victims. “The desire to yield to illusion, justifiable in art, here characterizes the entire relation to the world,” Baeck wrote (1958, p. 191): Romanticism therefore lacks any strong ethical impulse, any will to conquer life ethically. It has an antipathy against any practical idea which might dominate life, demanding free, creative obedience for its commandments and showing a clearly determined way to the goals of action. Romanticism would like to “recover from purpose.” (p. 192)

Baeck refers here to the purpose of ethical conduct rather than the purpose of political expression in affirming cultural belief. It is this latter purpose, “outside the sphere of good and evil” but central to the sphere of power, that constructs meaning only from the broad social mood. Romantic policy making rejects evidence external to feeling and accepts ethics and morality simply as a summary of prevailing desire. What is it in a culture that adores romantic contrivances such as Emerson’s self-​reliance, self-​invention, extreme individualism, and the natural order of his spiritualism? Much of the evil that people do to each other is envenomed by romantic illusions—​the American “volk” as chosenness, superiority and the nation’s manifest destiny, genetic determinism, bigotry, and most pointedly its cruel refusal to attend to basic deprivations—​that create convenient natural rights for expropriation, inequality, and dominance arrogated by national purpose. The direct perception of a sublime reality behind the world of the senses has seemingly encouraged a distrust, if not actually a denigration, of formal learning. This, of course, also has religious implications—​ among them, the direct relationship between each person and God—​that sanction the certitude of a naïve will. It also carries over into the nation’s distrust of intellectuals, formal knowledge, and even education itself, and superstitious faith in the value of insights of the heart and intuitions of the soul. The nation’s religious pietism, evident in its major churches and dominant theologies, is also evident in its widespread political populism and folk forms. More fundamentally, it is embedded in personal relations and manners, defining how people adjust to each other as well as their mutual expectations. The American ideal of the common person and his or her special insight into a natural order and a sublime specialness of citizenship, blessed by Pol ic y Rom a n t ic i sm [ 79 ]

God and approved through Darwinian selection, is drawn from the same well as pietistic religion. Because both have their “source in the self, then location of aesthetic and moral values within nature would not seem so surprising” (Richards, 2002, p. 512). In this way, truth sanctioned by God and nature is imposed on reality from desires within the individual, rather than drawn from disciplined observations of an objective world. The world becomes an obedient affirmation of inner needs and preferences—​ a psychic cushion for a sorrowing soul and a narcotic of self-​deception. This distortion of reason and perception has been the vehicle of some of the most depraved excesses of the West: centuries of religious persecution, the atrocities of fascism and communism, slavery, and a host of discriminatory bigotries. The same involuted logic of ascendant romanticism justifies the unfortunate choices of democratic populism in the United States, in particular its complacent acceptance of wildly unequal social and economic stratification and its smug self-​assurance that frank need is the just penalty for impaired character. The destructiveness of romanticism lies not in its ideas per se but in its displacement of materialism with untested and untestable imagination, intuition, and epiphany. Thus its uncontestable observations about “limits to what can be ascertained,” referring to the limits of scientific investigation (but avoiding Kant’s dismissal of metaphysics), is converted by romantic argument into support for avenues of knowing reality that supplant objective coherence, science, and pragmatic social policy making. These alternative methods of inquiry invariably depend on some form of introspection for the individual and cultural conformity for social policy making, that is, subjective validation rather than objective testing. In this way, romantic policy making rejects the necessity of ignorance, substituting for or extending the limits of science with sublime assurances and insights. This displacement of the rational and coherent is quite similar to the functions of religion and superstition in offering cultural and personal satisfaction as equivalent or superior to the ambiguities and uncertainties of materialism and science. Curiously, the Romantics’ comfort with fuzzy consciousness may well grow out of the ambiguities and anxieties of facing ignorance and the necessity of uncertainty, that is, the inevitability of not knowing. “The evidence of things not seen” is not simply the brilliance of true conjecture but rather the certitude that imagination and intuition are sufficient testimony (Bernbaum, 1948, p. 308). Similarly the self-​evident virtues of tradition, received values, progress, and change become equivalent to imagination and intuition as the things not seen—​the spectral proofs that propel romantic policy making. Because rationality is customarily both failed goal and a failed process of social policy, it might seem that the romantic is the inevitable default [ 8 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

position of social welfare decision making and social policy in general. Yet erroneous ideas, ineffective social welfare services, and bad habits are not necessarily romantic. The romantic emerges in the wake of a receding pragmatism, with its disciplined inquisitiveness and willingness to experiment. The pragmatic suggests a weak attachment to social arrangements, notably social services and social welfare institutions, in light of their ability to achieve their goals. The commitment to pragmatism implies the commitment to measure the production functions of social welfare programs against their goals in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Yet the outcomes of many programs are nearly impossible to evaluate since rational methods of evaluation are nearly impossible to apply or so costly and complex that they defy prudent investment. Still, the difficulties of evaluation do not constitute a warrant for romantic enthusiasms to remain untroubled in situations that should undercut confidence, let alone certitude. The reality of social need is rarely without deep ambiguities, and romantic dogmatism is rarely justified if ever by its precepts and commitments. In this way, understanding the persistence of enduring but ineffective social arrangements looks to the nature of strong belief—​ its institutional concomitants and ceremonial functions in expressing and proselytizing social values. In an open society, institutionalized social values—​in this case longstanding social welfare programs—​are windows into a culture’s deepest meaning. A social institution implies broad acceptance even when the political decision making appears to be coercive. In an open society such as the United States, its social institutions, especially in light of the almost uninterrupted espousal of a set of consistent social values relating to social welfare, outline the startling consistency of its culture, the defining characteristics of what it means to be American. The United States rarely accepted its own philosophic invention of pragmatism. Rather, institutionalized popular belief remains persistently romantic, having experienced over the centuries little threat to its ways of thinking and policy enthusiasms. The nation has domesticated science into technology, and pragmatism into academic social science, enfeebled expressions of rationality that are obedient to culture and shy of political challenge. Prevalent political theory and practice becomes either romantic or pragmatic to the extent to which an uncoerced people are either romantic or pragmatic. There is nothing in conservative or progressive thinking, or the murk of contemporary American liberalism, that encourages or prevents romanticism or pragmatism; indeed, there is little in any political theory that is apodictic and imperative. The differences between Burke and Locke and their descendent ideological camps—​conservative and traditionalist on the one side, Enlightened and modernist on the P o l i c y R o m a n t i c i s m  [ 8 1]

other—​defy easy resolution by empirical proof. Indeed, it would seem impossible to arrive at criteria to resolve those differences since each side’s commitments to fundamental assumptions about the world and human values are rarely negotiable. The embedded popularity of policy romanticism in the United States is quite separate from the conundrum of why it is so. THE PRAGMATIC ALTERNATIVE: A MERITOCRACY OF GREATER EQUALITY

The imprecision of most ideas does not mean that they are romantic. Indeed, if romanticism were merely the equivalent of the heartfelt and the vague, there would be little that is not romantic. However, romanticism hypostatizes the metaphoric; it makes concrete that which is too amorphous to be taken literally or specified in limited terms. The romantic process transforms an emotional insistence into an obliging psychic reality of comforting illusions. Romanticism begins with the conviction of knowing drawn from the sublime that transcends mere material reality; it certifies itself with insights tested by imagination and the inertia of tradition, imposing no standard other than satisfaction. It is insistent, needy, petulant, and both pitiful and horrifying in its rages. The romantic I is settled in its psychic reality; it competes with the pragmatic I, which is tentative, curious, and questioning of objective reality. Pragmatism is also a worldview, or at least an attitude toward the world. It begins with acknowledged ignorance but goes on to assess the world with objectively coherent methods that are walled off from the emotions. On the platform of objective coherence alone, pragmatism is incompatible with policy romanticism since gnostic knowing is incapable of objective knowledge. Pragmatism is also incompatible with the mysticism of chosenness and heroic individualism. Both precepts affirm a national mood of near-​religious fervor that is an end in itself, largely unconnected from its consequences. Neither one leads to testable propositions of its value, that is, its contributions to desirable outcomes. Rather, chosenness and heroic individualism are imperatives of faith embedded in the social interactions, policies, and institutions of democratic populism. Pragmatism is a close descendent of the Enlightenment’s hopes for a rational science of society and human behavior. It values democracy as a process that nourishes coherent objective learning—​sophisticated methods of trial and error often discussed as “democratic experimentalism” (Ansell, 2011, p. 4). Presumably, democracy is the best form of governance

[ 8 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

to ensure that a society better achieves its goals by taking cognizance of the effects of its policies and holds on to policies only so long as they are effective means to social progress. Pragmatic political philosophy argues that the process of social learning should entail the logic of science, even when its application is imperfect:  “Pragmatism is usefully described as a philosophy of evolutionary learning. It emphasizes the ability of both individuals and communities to improve their knowledge and problem-​ solving capacity over time through continuous inquiry, reflection, deliberation, and experimentation” (p. 5). The nature of democracy—​r ule by popular mandate—​poses a challenge for pragmatism since democratic decision making does not necessarily lead to humanitarian policies. In fact, racism and other expressions of prejudice that persist in the United States seem broadly consensual, as does the enormous degree of social and economic inequality. Democratic decisions need only be the consequences of majority preferences. Yet the pragmatic alternative to democratic populism entails an ethical core and a process of finding out about the world and its own institutional activities. The democratic goals of pragmatism draw inspiration from universal values in rejecting mere utilitarian social policy, which realizes only popular sovereignty. A  meritocracy of greater equality is the pragmatic alternative to the democratic populism that dominates decision making in the United States. Nonetheless, the pragmatic alternative is stumped by policy romanticism. It is precisely “volitional pragmatism” that policy romanticism denies by its convictions of truth. Volitional pragmatism holds that we will know how we wish the future to unfold when we have contemplated that future, and in the course of serious dialogue with others equally situated, manage to fix our belief about what seems better, at this time, to do. From there we must justify our settled beliefs to others. (Bromley, 2006, pp. 216–​17)

Policy romanticism and democratic populism have already assured themselves of the outlines of the future and do not engage in serious dialogue—​objectively coherent evidence—​concerning consequences. The tenets of policy romanticism are the ends rather than the means to various social goals. Romanticism is neither evolutionary nor volitional; it is static. Pragmatism requires an openness to difference and common agreement on the value of objective consideration of consequences that romanticism denies—​t he effects of social structures on human behavior rather than a mysticism of character that animates romantic social welfare policy.

Pol ic y Rom a n t ic i sm [ 83]

The beliefs of policy romanticism and processes of democratic populism are necessarily reactionary in their insistence on an imagined tradition of epic individual heroism and national exceptionalism. The psychic reality of an imposed tradition houses a collective soul—​suggested by Jung’s collective unconscious but also by Emerson’s universalism—​that is the womb of its citizens’ authentic selves. In contrast, pragmatism is necessarily progressive in light of its objectivity and methodological attention to resolving social problems and thus social change—​the commitment to improving social welfare rather than the commitment to sentimental tradition. Policy romanticism and pragmatism are distinguished by even greater communal differences. Policy romanticism thrives in a community of believers, fearful of change, bound together in preservation of established belief. Romantic cultural preservation nurtures an imagination of self-​ evident truth that collapses into itself. Superstition expressed in art forms and as Divine inspiration intensifies communal belief. Even when avoiding fanaticism and hysteria, policy romanticism and democratic populism are tempted by cultishness and are long marked by gender, race, and ethnic bigotry, and now by hostility toward class—​the poor, the nearly poor, the dependent, the economically vulnerable. Even though idealizing extreme individualism, policy romanticism and democratic populism impose narrow boundaries around behavior and thought, reducing individual freedom to neglect and to a religious mantra of conformity with group demands. In contrast, the pragmatic community is skeptical of tradition and authority. It institutionalizes functional individual freedoms rather than an imagined heroic individualism in protection of challenges to reigning belief; it nurtures criticism and skeptical inquiry as the source of social progress; and most important, it enacts civil rights to protect political minorities from misguided mass enthusiasms. The scientific community and pragmatic democracy are elaborations of the same principles of merit, fairness, and equality; both are animated by the possibilities of progressive civilization. In rejection of psychic certification, science and pragmatism test imagination against its assertions and therefore depend on the free flow of ideas. Both science and pragmatism flourish with the broadest possible social sanction to develop their priorities and the broadest possible participation of skill and intelligence in pursuing them. To these ends, science and pragmatic democracy, in order to increase the quality of consent and the ability of citizens to contribute to the society, require nearly universal access to core social utilities: education, employment, social welfare

[ 8 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

services including physical and mental health, the full range of protective public regulatory activities, and so forth. Indeed, science, the scientific community, and the form of democracy entailed by pragmatism may be indivisible. The contributions of science to technological innovation as the engine of material progress and the communal values that sustain it are themselves engendered by the social conditions of a pragmatic democracy that creates a meritocracy of greater equality. Yet in the end, pragmatic democracy and its goals are the illusion of the United States; policy romanticism and democratic populism are the reality that sustain the nation’s enormous inequalities. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Intellectual periods change in American social thought. The nation’s intelligentsia goes through various fervors, but the underlying cultural attachment to the romantic seems largely unaffected, and notably in regard to social welfare. Indeed, intellectual history is not cultural history, even though cultural history may explain much about intellectual life. Memory and history are distinct in the same way that romanticism in its conflict with objective reality elevates the subjective to determinative truth. If the romantic were merely a personal urge and style, all would be well as individuals explore their feelings, relationships, and transcendent meaning as sentient human beings. Unfortunately, the romantic as social policy vitiates objective social reality and takes permission from social preference to ignore an independent moral standard. The romantic psyche becomes social morality. History as objective reality is readily at hand in the United States, and pragmatism enjoys persistent, although minority, support. Yet both have been weak restraints on the nation’s romanticism. Ever attentive to mass preferences, large portions of the intellectual and artistic communities, in emulation of Emerson and Jonathan Edwards, constantly refresh and affirm the nation’s highly individualistic, antirational, fervid sense of specialness that saturates social policy making.1 These preferences notably engender the obligation, implicit in social welfare programs and

1. Jonathan Edwards (1703–​1758) was probably the most influential Puritan theologian. Associated with the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, he preached a gospel of personal responsibility, individualism, and salvation. He was renowned for his revivalist sermons such as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and religious commentary. Among many others, see Holmes (2000) and Hatch and Stout (1988).

P ol ic y R om a n t ic i s m  [ 8 5 ]

social policies generally, for citizens to locate personal identity within the assumptions of American identity. This constant theme of a directed pursuit of the authentic self takes on both heroic and religious intensity in emphasizing personal responsibility over social responsibility. The American pilgrimage for authenticity explains the relatively minimal public provisions, considering the nation’s wealth, for its citizens, and the nation’s callousness in the face of patent suffering and need. In perhaps an unwitting act of sublime patriotism, the needy participate in the nation’s romantic illusions.

[ 8 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

CH A P TER   3

An American Archetype The Quest for the Authentic Self—​Psychology, Pop Psychology, and Self-​Help

P

olicy romanticism defines the worldview of democratic populism, the dominant political influence in the United States. Policy romanticism is promulgated by pervasive, consistent, embedded social institutions that both guide and express deep American preferences. American social institutions realized popular preferences for heroic individualism over more communal sharing. They are accepted as a priori cultural forms through gnostic processes of belief that largely reject more disciplined and objective logic. American social belief sustains a sense of chosenness, the certitude that American society and its institutions are blessed by the Divine or at least enjoy the favor of the natural order, having progressed through both social evolution and perhaps even Darwinian competition as the epitome of human civilization. Will, spirit and epiphany, heroic individualism, gnostic methods of knowing, and the certitude of chosenness combine as an obligation, nearing the intensity of a cultural archetype, for the individual to pursue an authentic self. Islam imposes an obligatory hadj to Mecca; American society requires the quest for a personal and special redemptive reality. Social services and notably the personal social services offer quests for authenticity more often than they do material relief. Better said, the limited amount of material relief of the American welfare state largely represents the political concessions of policy romanticism to pragmatism and more progressive constituencies. Judged by benefit levels and eligibility, the pragmatic in social welfare has not gained much ground against the romantic.

C. G. Jung provided a language that with some modifications maps the terrain of the romantic in at least American policy making and society, although this was surely not his intent. Rather, Jung’s analytic psychology, developed through the self-​evident proofs of insight and intuition, defined a sublime inner reality of human existence that corrected the unfortunate (for him) materialism of the modern era by restoring the soul to human existence. Jung justified “psychic reality” as more important and less limited in explaining human life than material empiricism and natural science. Although Jungian psychology has failed as psychotherapy, it closely parallels the romantic dynamics of democratic populism. It is what Americans believe, and the society acts as if Jung’s constructions were adequate justifications for the nation’s social choices. American policy romanticism is a psychic reality that largely rejects empiricism, scientific logic, and pragmatism; it moves on the tracks of tradition greased by spiritualistic, mystical, surreal, intuitive, untestable assumptions of human existence. Jung was not seeking a sublime metaphor of human existence, a series of evocative notions for poets and novelists, or a hypothetical construct that has predictive value even without being a material entity. Rather, he insisted that “psychic reality” was a philosophically consistent notion and not a contradiction. He resolved its apparent paradox by accepting criteria of reality that need not be material; he proclaimed the spiritual to be as logically reasonable as the material, each with unique, separate standards of proof. If I change my concept of reality in such a way as to admit that all psychic happenings are real—​a nd no other use of the concept is valid—​t his puts an end to the conflict of matter and mind as contradictory explanatory principles. (1962, p. 190)

Still, Jung frequently blurred the two in his arguments. His definition of reality is an instance of the more general problem of proof and utility that besets romantic philosophy including postmodernism: the exquisite inner state as the abiding certification of truth that, not coincidentally, comes along with an exquisite aversion to mapping out the terrain of the inner state with anything but an inner ink. Yet the rational imperfections of analytic philosophy are beside the point of American society’s deep acceptance of romantic forms. Their pervasiveness bears witness to the preferences of American society. Like Freudian theory, Jungian thought is more literary than profound (Dufresne, 2003; Macmillan, 1997; Moloney, 2013). Yet its call on social imagination is powerful, especially as it ratifies embedded cultural thinking. Jung’s work, like Freud’s, placed essential human motivation in the [ 8 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

unconscious. The unconscious gave rise to consciousness, but its great power lies in faintly perceived biologically determined instincts and impulses. Archetypes formed the content of the unconscious and could be perceived only as blurred images that might be clarified through introspection, and more effectively with the guidance of a trained therapist. These Platonic shadows of reality composed a collective unconscious shared universally by humanity. They were inherited biologically but did not have a biological presence. They were entities of the soul but determined the material reality of human beings, in effect subordinating the material world to the spiritual world, which was Jung’s central purpose, that is, to redeem man’s soul from the materialism of the modern era. Human behavior is not merely “activity of the glands” (Jung, 1962, p.  178):  “We overestimate physical causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is as inscrutable as mind” (p. 177). Jung’s unconscious psyche, which “existed before taking corporeal form and afterwards as well,” is therefore “timeless and immortal” (p.  182). Indeed, as a source of knowledge and universal inheritance, the psyche takes on the power of Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge:  preexisting information about the world that comes to humans without knowledge of the world. Moreover, notions of a collective unconscious as a “world system of the spirit” leaves open the door to ever more spiritual and religious certitudes of the existence of supernatural forces, and even the notion of human progress teleologically ensured by a benevolent God coordinating the march of human history through a World Spirit. Today we know for certain that the unconscious contains contents which would mean an immeasurable increase of knowledge if they could only be made conscious… . Man’s unconscious contains all the patterns of life and behavior inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning. (p. 185)

Jung divorced archetypes of the collective unconscious and the existence of the unconscious psychic life generally from materialism, that is, the common notion of an objective reality. He posed the psyche as independent of the body. His statement “The idea of spirit in and for itself, of a self-​ contained world system of the spirit that is the only adequate postulate for the belief in autonomous, individual souls” (p. 180) captures the essence of the authentic self. Thus the centrality of soul, spirit, and anima—​psychic reality—​to human existence naturally imposes pursuit of knowledge of the authentic self as an obligation of human existence. It also creates a hierarchy A n A m er ic a n A rch et y pe [ 8 9]

of human consciousness; self-​k nowledge, which is to say authenticity, measures the superior human. The pursuit of the authentic self in American policy making and society is not a metaphor of belief—​ a device to dramatize belief—​but rather a longstanding, active, core archetype of actual belief that coincides with institutionalized social choices. A fascination with incompatibility lies in a construct of determinative collective imperatives alongside individual uniqueness and free choice. Every individual has the obligation to search the unconscious for his or her authentic soul, which is presumably unique in spite of the collective unconscious imposing the universal structures of human existence. Nonetheless, the point of Jung relative to analysis of policy romanticism is neither his psychology nor perhaps his own self-​deception, but rather his accuracy in describing entrenched American romanticism. Even though American policy romanticism seems scripted by Jung, it is more likely that Jung and the authors of romantic constructs embellished extant cultural forms than that they imagined them. Successful mass media play to popular tastes that seek affirmation and sanction in their thinkers and artists. Compatibility with culture, rather than sincerity, eloquence, and independence, determines the acceptance of an author. Much that is true is rejected, and much that is untrue is immensely popular. The quest for the authentic self persists as a signal statement of American policy romanticism, a “psychic reality” despite its pervasive falsity and, perhaps too, despite its many harms. However, unlike the psychic and biological reality of Jung’s archetypes, the quest for the authentic self as archetype is metaphoric, even satiric, employed in the sense of an enduring and widespread social attribute but neither as a psychic nor a material structure. It is only literary, but valuable in pointing to the depth to which this belief is broadly shared in American culture. Note that all the journeys for the authentic self explore internal entities, none of which have a physical presence, while none of the pleasures or benefits of discovering the authentic self are certified except by personal testimony. The journey is dualist, imposing two realities:  the external world and the structures of psychic reality—​soul, spirit, will, and others. These journeys are about good feelings—​emotions—​not good deeds. Thus the transformations, if in fact they are more than controlled hallucinations, predict nothing about the good society or improved behavior. They are journeys that begin in psychic reality and end there as affirmations of the sublime and the subjective, with little social value but perhaps with some considerable social harm. The harm lies in the travel inward and away from “the moral duty of justice and the fight for justice” (Baeck, [ 9 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

1958, p. 275) and to an indifference to others, more pernicious than intolerance of passivity in the face of suffering and want. The following examples of quests for the authentic soul are taken from among the most popular books and other mass media. The books are usually bestsellers, if not actually mega-​successes that have sold many millions of copies. The popularity and nearly universal appeal of these self-​explorations suggests the depth to which authenticity quests have penetrated American culture. Their intellectual shallowness and obvious reliance on both magical thinking and mystical entities recalls the romanticism of the culture and the absence of pragmatism in either personal or social considerations. The book jacket blurbs reveal the author’s and the publisher’s sense of the market, that is, the potential of the book to attract sales. In turn, the immense sales testify to symmetry with popular beliefs. Because the authentic self as well as its pursuit is invariably without material substance or proof, it is almost impossible to look at the authenticity business differently from the huckster business. Indeed, their styles coincide. The many authenticity savants usually follow a similar three-​step path to validate the quest for the authentic self: first, often following a life-​changing epiphany, a passionate belief in the presence of an authentic self that is usually inborn; second, insight into a process to reveal it (self-​help, psychotherapy, introspection, prayer, and so forth); and third, faith that it is so. Good science and credible evidence of either the presence of the structures of the authentic self or the effectiveness of the process is absent. Instead, faith and the sly inducements that cozen belief customarily accompany the trip to authenticity, which is almost invariably packaged and sold by a profit-​making enterprise. Authenticity is a lucrative business and its profits indicate its broad appeal. Not surprisingly, the mystical insights of authenticity, including an otherworldly organicism, usually reduce to platitudes of self-​help and self-​reliance. With rare exceptions, the social explanations of individual destiny and performance are downplayed or simply ignored in tribute to the endless theme of authenticity: people can invent themselves, and although not painless, self-​i nvention is usually inexpensive—​t he cost of a book, a lecture, a CD—​relatively easy and short-​term, compatible with social customs, and transformative. The exception is long-​term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, which can cost many thousands of dollars and persist for years. In cultish fashion, the authenticity professions never question the existence of an authentic self nor offer proof aside from romantic assurances that feeling and emotion provide true evidence. A sensible nation would rise up with indignation that it is being gulled and manipulated. In contrast, the United States citizenry enriches the authenticity gurus. A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e  [ 9 1]

THE AUTHENTIC SELF IN AMERICAN PSYCHOTHERAPY

The business of psychotherapy does not persist for its apparent purpose of relieving psychological pain and changing unwanted behavior. Its almost endless literature has failed to adduce credible evidence of its effectiveness (see note 1 in Chapter 1). The enormous number of outcome studies of psychotherapy would yield a textbook of research bias and methodological pitfalls more than a demonstration of the field’s ability to monitor itself. Hundreds of feet of shelf space in big bookstores are devoted to psychology, pop psychology, psychotherapy, self-​ treatment, and the like, but rarely contain even a single volume voicing skepticism among the thousands of testimonials to effectiveness. Doubt does not sell well to a population seeking affirmation of their heroic selves. Rather than a clinical science, psychotherapy is largely a romantic expression of the quest for the authentic soul and the culture’s insistence on the fiction of self-​reliance. Indeed, its inspiration lay in the 19th-​century continental, largely German, philosophic tradition starting with Kant (noumena affecting phenomena) and including Fichte (the self-​positing ego), Hegel (the world spirit and teleological progress), Schopenhauer (the ubiquitous will), Nietzsche (again will), and others. The small critical tradition in the field is powerful and persistent but largely belittled, if not actually ignored. Mainstream psychotherapy offers an upper-​end travel agency for psychic quests largely marketed to a verbal, literate middle class. It divides itself into often overlapping types of tours including psychodynamic, cognitive, cognitive-​behavioral and others. The strictly behavioral tradition (token economies and the like) is reserved for preverbal groups and those whose cognitive capacities are in question at least by society—​ the terribly impaired and often the poor as well. Introspective, psychodynamic therapies and the behavioral therapies of one sort or another have long standing in departments of clinical psychology and counseling. The frankly inspirational forms of psychotherapy that constitute pop psychology—​less informed by learning theory—​d raw their epiphanies from spiritual, ineffable, and religious sources. Even less disciplined and with even weaker claims on anything approaching reason or objective evidence of value, the more marginal psychotherapeutic treatments are still amazingly popular. The high church of psychotherapy claims allegiance to scientific clinical proofs; the low church claims a relationship to the universal inheritance of common sense, personal witnessing, and the immediacy of experience. Yet all are romantic forms relying on metaphysical entities [ 9 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

that are immaterial; all three—​mainstream, pop, and New Age—​lack rigorous clinical evidence of effectiveness and a serious commitment to the canons of clinical science. Even when psychotherapy claims to be practical in attending to immediate problems that impair functioning, it still rejects the pragmatic commitment to scientifically credible tests of effectiveness. Lilienfeld, Lynn, and Lohr’s effort (2003) to distinguish between the psychotherapies by the degree of their adherence to clinical science fails except as style. There is no “evidence based practice” of psychotherapy because there is no body of credible evidence to distinguish the useless from the effective intervention. Superstition, faith, the narcissism of seekers, and the embedded insistence of the culture that deviance and need are largely individual failures of will drive the endless search for the authentic soul, for the revealed self, for the immortality of spirit, and for the exorcism of demons. Thus, those who persist in their evil ways and those who fail to find the Godhead in their existence are responsible for their own unhappiness. The society itself remains innocent of wrong. Behavioral interventions would seem to be exceptions from pursuing authenticity, but perhaps with even worse implications for social equality or indeed human dignity. They do not quest for the self, largely because cognitive function and the individual have been eliminated from treatment, and thus the ability to quest for a soul becomes irrelevant. Strictly Skinnerian behavioral treatments pose conditioning paradigms:  reinforcements of positive behavior that seem to bypass the necessity for positing internal structures of will, soul, and the like. Behavioral interventions, at least under demonstration conditions, may have had marginal success in teaching the most basic behaviors of daily living—​such as dressing, bathing, and feeding oneself—​to severely incapacitated patients in highly controlled environments. However they fail in more complex situations except to dehumanize the patients, reducing them by implication to unreasoning animals that need to be trained, restrained, punished, and fed bananas when they are good. Behavioral treatments are quite popular in prisons, homes for orphans such as Boys Town, and underfunded, stark institutions where the first imperative is to maintain order. In contrast, reasonable people can benefit by “rational induction”; but from miscreant subtypes conforming responses need to be elicited through reinforcement. Indeed, the poignant isolation of foster children and poor children generally from the American communion is conveyed by the belief that they require discipline rather than the nurturing of reason. In this sense, behavioral psychotherapy is often a ceremony that justifies social marginalization. A n A m er ic a n A rch et y pe [93]

Mainstream Psychotherapy

Mainstream psychotherapy is built around the assumption that the patient—​the quester—​can develop the capacity of will through an analytic process of introspection to modify first attitudes and then behavior. Although the language of psychotherapy often appears rational, its legacy and practice is predicated on emotion and a series of hypothetical constructs (ego, the unconscious, a variety of intrapsychic processes, and so forth); “rational induction” in psychotherapy is essentially emotional induction. Even cognitive-​behavioral therapy, perhaps the most prevalent form of current practice, simply converts the mystical language of intrapsychic experience into an imprecise, often mystical, language of stimulus, reinforcement, and response. Cognitive-​behavior therapy still maintains a basic allegiance to will. It builds on will toward the dramatic denouement of almost all psychotherapy: the point at which patients are encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and change their dysfunctional behaviors—​a ceremony of cathartic reunion with their authentic souls. The basic goal of therapy is to discover a truer self, often by making unconscious content conscious through introspection guided by the therapist. The assumption that there is a more authentic being to be discovered in the psyche often mirrors Jung. But even the mainstream approaches that drop the psychodynamic baggage implicitly assume that a more authentic identity can be constructed through the patient’s will, which recapitulates American faith in the plausibility of human perfectibility and societal progress through planned interventions. Psychotherapy, and notably mainstream psychotherapy, has banished persistent evidence of the intransigent irrationality of human behavior. Practice is predicated on the convenient fallacy that attitude change can be induced and that it leads to behavioral change (Kahneman, 2013; Chaiklin, 2011). In fact, human behavior may well precede attitude change, usually as social adaptation to the demands of peer groups, family, economic imperatives, and so forth, while attitudes follow along afterward to sustain the change, perhaps in order to reduce cognitive dissonance (Kahneman, 2013; Chaiklin, 2011). Individual and social change are profoundly cultural rather than quasi-​rational processes of choosing wise goals and of screening alternative strategies to attain them through good information. In this way, psychotherapy remains a social ceremony rather than a process of modifying unacceptable behaviors. Arnold Lazarus’s widely referenced multimodal psychotherapy is typical of contemporary psychotherapy, combining both psychodynamic and cognitive-​behavioral treatment strategies. It appears to be focused on specific behavioral problems in their material conditions, in the manner of [ 9 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

many other treatments presumably influenced by behaviorism. Yet multimodal psychotherapy still promises personal growth through a process of self-​discovery and posits a variety of metaphysical entities, namely a heroic, self-​reliant will and, often, unconscious processes that are explored through guided introspection. In this way, what seems to be a limited attempt to apply specific material solutions to a definable problem is actually a quest to restore an authentic essence. Indeed, the thoroughgoing absence of treatment efficacy robs psychotherapy of all but a tacit hope of uncovering a superior, authentic self. The aim of multimodal therapy is to reduce psychological suffering and to promote personal growth as rapidly and as durably as possible…  . Practitioners of multimodal therapy dissect human personality into discrete but interactive modalities or dimensions. By assessing each individual through each of these specific modalities, and then examining the salient interactions among them, one is better able to achieve a thorough and holistic understanding of the person and his or her social environment. (1981, p. 13)

Presumably, a holistic understanding leads to treatment success. Analyses of the seven modalities—​ongoing behaviors, affective processes, sensations, images, cognitions, interpersonal relationships, and biological functions—​make up the holistic understanding. However, lacking reliable instrumentation to describe the entities or the processes of analysis, Lazarus offers largely intuitive ways of applying his seven modalities, with the result that they exist as hypothetical constructs rather than specific diagnostic tools. Even more troubling for the scientific aspirations of multimodal therapy, interactions between modalities revert to psychic processes which defy objective specification. Indeed, the process of multimodal therapy is a stylish way of offering the quest for the authentic self to patients who will be more comfortable with the psychic touring bus outfitted in scientific kitsch than with spiritualism’s voodoo dolls and crystal balls. Lazarus is proud of his eclecticism, claiming to pick the most effective techniques of the masters of his trade: “Freud, Rogers, Ellis, Perls, or any other personage” (1962, p. 62). Yet he relies on largely discredited techniques, notably “imagery” and dream analysis in the manner of Freud and his descendent psychodynamic therapists, without providing any systematic, credible evidence of their effectiveness. In the long, lucrative tradition of the self-​reliance literature, Lazarus (1977) proposes a series of self-​treatment imaging techniques to assist patients in overcoming numerous problems: poor self-​confidence, adult and children’s fears and anxieties, bad habits, sadness and despondency, A n A m er ic a n A rch et y pe [9 5]

psychosomatic disorders, prevention of future shock, and others. The techniques are like psychic push-​ups, best if practiced daily and in good form: exaggerated role taking, the step-​up technique, self-​desensitization, brain synchrony exercises, and many others. In his manual on how to change oneself, Lazarus provides “step-​by-​step procedures for using imagery and fantasy to overcome” personal problems (1977, p. 3). The process invokes a variety of psychic entities that mediate successful imagery therapy: idealized self-​images, willpower, imagination, and others. Just as his use of imagination grows from the physical sense of visualization to the romantic notion of superior insight, imagery therapy expands from simply a solution for specific problems to a grand quest for an improved soul. If you have read this book with reasonable thoroughness, and if you have applied some of the imagery methods to your own life situations, I would say that your brain has stored up a great deal of useful knowledge. You will have added significantly to the range of creative solutions within you. If you are fairly inventive, you will be able to devise your own imagery techniques and you will put them to good use. In any event, I hope that you will realize that very little progress will be made from merely reading about imagery. You have to practice imagery exercises diligently and regularly if you wish to gain appreciable results. Albert Einstein once commented, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I hope that this book will enable you to use your imagination in order to acquire greater knowledge, better health, and personal fulfillment. (p. 192, emphasis in original)

Lazarus avoids any reference to systematic evidence of effectiveness, in spite of claiming effectiveness in the very title of The Practice of Multimodal Therapy: Systematic, Comprehensive, and Effective Psychotherapy (1981) and throughout In the Mind’s Eye: The Power of Imagery for Personal Enrichment (1977). References to outcomes and effectiveness in the 1981 volume refer to a concern with predicting specific clinical outcomes and choosing the appropriate intervention. However the pairing of outcomes and interventions is based on anecdotes usually drawn from Lazarus’s own practice. In the end, multimodal therapy is as mistaken as any of the more favored “scientific” treatments of Lilienfeld et al. (2003); it exists alongside Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and the range of alternative medical treatments, fashionable nonsense yet widely popular in the quest for an authentic self. With a greater behavioral style and even more influentially than Lazarus, the Becks’ cognitive-​behavioral therapy still employs intrapsychic processes, promising personal growth in addition to remission of specific psychic and behavioral problems. Over the decades, father and daughter Aaron Beck and Judith Beck have published voluminous descriptions and justifications of cognitive-​behavior therapy. Regrettably, [ 9 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

cognitive behavior therapy is neither reliably effective nor a defensible advance in clinical science (Epstein, 2006; Moloney, 2013). It is, however, a continuation of the nation’s enchantment with intrapsychic quests for the authentic self, which are powered by the self-​reliant individual’s heroic will to overcome personal problems. Since the cognitive phenomena are readily observable by the patient through introspection, their nature and relationships can be tested in a wide variety of systematic experiments—​u nlike the more abstract constructs postulated by psychoanalysis… . This new approach to emotional disorders changes man’s perspective on himself and his problems. Rather than viewing himself as the helpless creature of his own biochemical reactions, or of blind, impulses, or of automatic reflexes, he can regard himself as prone to learning erroneous, self-​defeating notions and capable of unlearning or correcting them as well. By pinpointing the fallacies in his thinking and correcting them, he can create a more self-​f ulfilling life for himself. (Beck, 1976, p. 4, emphasis in original)

The strategy of cognitive-​behavioral therapy is to change cognitions—​ thoughts, ideas, beliefs—​ in anticipation of permanently modifying unwanted emotions and behaviors. This strategy is consistent throughout most psychotherapies. In a nutshell, the cognitive model proposes that dysfunctional thinking (which influences the patient’s mood and behavior) is common to all psychological disturbances. When people learn to evaluate their thinking in a more realistic and adaptive way, they experience improvement in their emotional state and in their behavior… . For lasting improvement in patients’ mood and behavior, cognitive therapists work at a deeper level of cognition: patients’ basic beliefs about themselves, their world and other people. Modification of their underlying dysfunctional beliefs produces more enduring change. (Beck, 2011, p. 3)

In the same nutshell, Beck assumes a host of immaterial psychic processes and structures that are as “abstract” as the hypothetical constructs of psychoanalysis. Dysfunctional thinking may influence mood and behavior, but it may itself be the product of internal as well as external factors that undercut the strategy of cognitive behavior therapy. The “deeper level of cognition” and “basic beliefs” invoke psychic structures of consciousness, unconsciousness, and hierarchies of causative entities, which inspire the quest for authenticity as self-​discovery. These psychic structures are reminiscent of Jung and Freud but are often updated by a more contemporary vocabulary drawn from scientific discourse. A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e  [ 9 7]

Among the 10 principles of therapy that J. Beck describes, self-​reliance remains the overarching one: patients are taught “to identify, evaluate and respond to their dysfunctional thoughts and beliefs” (2011, p.  10). The insistence of cognitive-​behavior therapy that individuals are capable of modifying their own behavior regardless of their social environment is an heroic statement of personal efficacy. It defines cognitive-​behavior’s symbolic attractiveness to a nation insisting on both individual responsibility and self-​reliance and loath to modify social conditions in order to address social problems. Psychotherapy, with its implicit moralizing of the quest for authenticity, seems to be an inexpensive and socially compatible alternative to reducing the vast social and economic divides of the nation. The emphasis on cognition itself, especially in the absence of a warrant for the therapy’s effectiveness, proselytizes personal responsibility and converts a clinical treatment into a ceremony affirming social ideology. In deference to behavioral learning theory, cognitive-​behavioral therapy adds concrete exercises designed to sustain changed cognitions:  a host of homework assignments to reinforce learning during treatment sessions, activity charts, Core Belief Worksheets, credit lists, problem solving, refocusing, reality testing, rating scales, and many others. Indeed, elements of cognitive-​behavior therapy—​homework, self-​administered questionnaires, and much else—​are carried throughout psychology and the many less-​disciplined expressions of the quest for authenticity. It is intriguing that despite their reliance on formal learning theory, the Becks largely ignore the logic of reinforcement and conditioning, preferring instead, in conformity with the ethereal intuitiveness of psychoanalysis, to rely on the patient’s sincerity, will, and introspective insights. The absence of formal reinforcement schedules, isolated stimuli of treatment, and carefully measured responses undercuts any claim that cognitive behavior therapy has taught anything at all of lasting value. The multitude of its evidence for effectiveness reduces to a shambles of methodologically biased, unrepresentative, poorly constructed, and poorly administered clinical science, and the specificity of its many exercises (including homework and charting) seems to be a vulgarization of clinical rationality rather than reliable instrumentation. Pop Psychotherapy

The principal difference between mainstream psychotherapy and the interventions of “pop psychology” parallels the distinction between pietism and the liturgical tradition in religion. The two forms of psychotherapy are largely distinguished by style, social standing, and the [ 9 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

degree of their institutionalized acceptance—​the established versus the rebellious—​a lthough frank psychic quackery in the guise of treatment and even mystical religious practices akin to catharsis certainly preceded formal psychotherapy by centuries if not millennia. Both are romantic forms that have long resisted and distorted pragmatic processes of validation, and both take patients on quests for authenticity. Martin Seligman’s positive psychology (1991, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2011, 2012) is probably the pop psychotherapy closest in form and spirit to mainstream psychotherapy. Indeed, Seligman’s earlier work, extending from his discovery or invention of “learned helplessness,” was situated in the mainstream largely because it was grounded, however poorly, in learning theory, although it quickly departed from the rigors of the genre. Positive psychotherapy offers a quest to the authentic self through the happy mantra of upbeat thinking, embellished by Seligman’s boasting, visionary wisdom, confessions, epiphanies, testimonials, and many spiritual commitments. Seligman repeatedly calls on hidden psychic structures as sources of strength and encouragement for positive outlooks, which, according to positive psychology, lead to all sorts of personal pleasures and worldly rewards. By itself, the spiritual context should deflate any pretense to standing as science. Unfortunately, both the mainstream and the pop forms of psychotherapy still maintain attachment to unseen forces as active therapeutic entities. Paul Pearsall (2003), frequently citing Seligman, describes positive psychology as the art of thriving through adversity, assured that hope drawing from “untapped evolutionary strengths [is] made not only to carry you through any trauma but also to help you become stronger and elevated by it” (p. xvii). However, Pearsall does not present a therapeutic process, but rather hundreds of pages of injunctions to see the bright side, persevere, and think of oneself as a “thriver”—​the authentic, upbeat self. Along the way, he cautions his readers to beware of gurus, which could be a bit of oblivious self-​humor except that the rest of the book is dead serious. Although he flatly asserts that research in positive psychology sustains his many claims about thriving, his footnotes almost unanimously cite only opinions, usually of positive psychologists, that support his propositions. Positive psychology claims much more than simply to handle depression, which would reduce it to the promises of mainstream treatments including psychopharmacology. Positive psychology offers a quest for the authentic self through the rearrangement of one’s emotions and outlooks on the basis of developing heightened will. In its own fashion, it pursues superior existence and mental health, rather than just coping with mental problems. Put another way, optimism is not merely the result of good situations and the state of mental health, but rather the cause, the vehicle A n A m er ic a n A rch et y pe [9 9]

by which the authentic self—​mentally healthy and boasting a positive character—​is attained; in turn, positive thinking is attained through application of the principles and processes of positive psychology predicated on the “scholarly field” of learned optimism (Seligman, 2012, p. 17; 1991). Seligman is not at all hesitant to reveal his deepest emotions and share his most private professional moments and intimate family experiences as inspiration and testimony to the miraculous power of positive psychology. One day, while weeding in his garden, he yelled at his five-​year-​old daughter for gamboling in the grass while he was seriously at work in his backyard. His daughter Nikki spoke up. Daddy, I want to talk to you. Yes, Nikki? Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three until when I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch… . Nikki had found me my mission… . (2002, p. 28)

Authentic Happiness (2002), despite its obvious attachment to therapeutic change in psychology, contains a series of arguments for traditional virtue and traditional spirituality, that is, belief in an unseen world that affects the material world and can be known only through epiphany and faith. It is, like all of positive psychology and the genre of the pursuit of authenticity, more heartfelt than helpful in any clinical or behavioral sense. It is perhaps revealing that Seligman is keenly aware of the enormous Templeton Prize awarded to “entrepreneurs of the spirit—​outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality” (Templeton Prize, n.d., para. 1). It even seemed to have been written in application for the prize. Similarly Seligman’s founding text, Learned Optimism (1991), offers little in the way of clinical therapy or even respect for conventional science. Its core premise is that, like his famous construction of learned helplessness, pessimism is learned behavior that can be unlearned. Its techniques of learning are customarily lists and self-​administered questionnaires, which lack standardized methods of interpreting responses. It offers nothing in the way of credible evidence of successful outcomes; nor does it appear to be open to systematic scrutiny, preferring to rely on the faith of those seeking authenticity.

[1 0 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Learning is the lynchpin strategy of positive psychology. Yet learning in positive psychology, as in most of psychotherapy, does not conform to conventional behavioral definitions of stimulus, reward or reinforcement, and learned response. In positive psychology, learning takes place as a function of will. The purported stimulus is a series of injunctions to be happy, and patients apply their will to make the decision to be optimistic. In order to facilitate the learning process, positive psychology offers a number of tools. Presumably the benefits of learned optimism are sufficient to reinforce a positive outlook. However, the stimulus is poorly defined, customarily leaving out the situation of the patient and the patient’s environment; the descriptions of rewards or reinforcements, let alone the reinforcement schedule, are at best vague and incomplete; and the learned behaviors, if any, are not documented. Learning itself becomes an issue of character, will, spirit, and even transcendence—​the ability to quest for one’s authentic identity. It also assumes, erroneously but characteristically of almost all psychotherapeutic interventions, that attitude change precedes behavioral change. In Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-​ Being (Seligman 2011), positive psychology renews itself by substituting the more inclusive concept of flourishing, that is, well-​being, for happiness as a more mature, authentic identity. Once again Seligman provides detailed but still similarly self-​administered tools, often self-​assessments, to facilitate the quest for authenticity. And again, he fails to provide credible evidence of their contribution to psychotherapeutic goals; that is, the self-​assessments are not empirically tied to the prowess of positive psychology in engineering successful interventions. Flourish also seems to have the Templeton Prize in mind, graduating Seligman from a mere spiritualist to a visionary. Both Seligman and Pearsall write in the style of self-​help rather than in the medical and psychiatric style of the clinic, reprising Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie but unmoored from a Skinnerian or otherwise scientific anchor. Through their wise counsel and inspired by their personal revelations, people heal themselves and evolve into their authentic being. Positive psychology frees the human spirit. Yet positive psychology as a weak form of psychotherapy is seemingly as ineffective as clinical psychology, not least because it has not been systematically evaluated. All in all, positive psychology is based on less reverent imperatives than either Seligman or Pearsall would probably agree to: don’t be a grump even if this is your authentic self, and look on the bright side even if you have to fake it.

A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e  [1 0 1]

New Age Psychotherapy

A host of psychotherapeutic interventions aimed at the quest for the authentic self seem to share the tenets of New Age thinking:  deeply intuitive; frankly hostile to methodological rigor, let  alone to science and objective evidence; convinced of the palpable spirituality in every human being; and actually preferring alternative psychological interventions (that is, alternative to science). In fact, New Age is a synonym for the romantic. The New Age aims to create “a spirituality without borders or confining dogmas” that is inclusive and pluralistic. It holds to “a holistic worldview,” emphasizing that the mind, body and spirit are interrelated and that there is a form of monism and unity throughout the universe. It attempts to create “a worldview that includes both science and spirituality” and embraces a number of forms of mainstream science as well as other forms of science that are considered fringe. (Wikipedia, July 11, 2013, http://​en.wikipedia.org/​w iki/​New_ ​A ge)

Aside from style and the degree of conformity with core cultural institutions, there is little difference among the mainstream, the pop, and the New Age. All share an occult quality, a reliance on unseen forces and magical transformations which is, at worst, a belief in the sublime interrelatedness of all-​w ith-​every, but commonly the assumption of soulful entities, hidden processes, and cryptic forces. Their science aspires to the fringe. Laurie Day, a licensed and certified social worker (insurance-​ eligible) opened the Center for Positive Living in Washington, D.C., offering to a troubled world in search of authenticity “past life therapy, Mari El healing, Gestalt psychotherapy, and stress management” (Center for Positive Living, n.d.). Past life therapy begins the quest for healing and authenticity in the resistant problems of the patient’s past incarnations, under the obviously reasonable assumption that unresolved issues in earlier lives bedevil the present incarnation. It carries Eriksonian assumptions about psychological stages of growth back to astrological roots. As described by Reverend Wendi of the Spirit Journey Academy, the theory behind Mari El healing is that every cell in our body has a memory. A stored memory of a negative emotional or physical experience blocks the flow of energy. Mari El healing releases these memories. The creator of Mari El healing, Ethel Lombardi, is a Reiki master and teacher. There is an obvious similarity between a Mari El healing and a Reiki healing. (Mari El Reiki, n.d., para. 2) [1 0 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

Laurie Day apparently received certification for Mari El and Reiki healings at the Spirit Journey Academy. Her Center for Positive Living has moved to Portland, Oregon, expanding to offer a wider array of quests to mental health, good living, and authenticity for a seemingly unlimited range of potential clients. Laurie Day, LCSW-​C . Holistic Psychotherapy with Energy Healing. Free Yourself of Depression and Anxiety and Stress. Be Free of Past Conditioning and Trauma. Experience Inner Peace, Inner Strength, Clarity and LOVE. Learn Simple, Effective Techniques to Empower Yourself. Bring Ease, Tranquility and Joy into Your Life and Discover Your Real Self . (Center for Positive Living, n.d., para. 3)

The website contains lectures from her radio show, testimonials to her healing powers, love letters, and an interview with Sri Babaji (renowned for the “meditation of eternal existence”) in which he “answers the universal questions many of us have about spirituality and human life.” The love letters are invocations to quest for the authentic self and, naturally, seek the counsel of Laurie Day along the way. The site offers no systematic information about the outcome of the interventions. New Age psychotherapy and healing, notably in its advocacy of the personal quest for the authentic soul, has a gargantuan presence on television, radio, and other mass media: Oprah Winfrey; Dr. Phil; Dr. Laura Schlesinger; an endless number of broadcast interviews with authenticity experts, swamis, gurus, and savants; innumerable evangelicals and missionaries who add a religious dimension to the quest; and a huge online presence. The quest inward for the authentic soul provides the narrative for popular movies and novels and inspires the lyrics of popular music. It also provides frequent explanations for human behavior as a yearning for a truer, elusive, immaterial reality. American religiosity takes root in the same soil. The religious and the secular quests for the authentic self share a similar core of romanticism: the dominance of emotion, an exaggerated sense of personal responsibility, the all-​important heroic will, invocation of inner psychic structures often including the presence of an undiscovered self (not simply a capacity for learning), transcendence of the mundane, and reliance on intuition, common sense, epiphany, and personal testimonials. The broad and persistent popularity of New Age psychotherapy coincides with American beliefs and a characteristic receptivity to affirmations of faith in romantic truths. Indeed, popular faith in the romantic imposes a demand for conformity and literally builds institutions on that faith. Quite to the point of rejecting pragmatism, the quest for authenticity rarely carries a social theme of A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e   [1 0 3 ]

looking outward to the conditions of society that inhibit the realization of authenticity, of the good life, of self-​actualization, or even of good health, decent jobs, adequate schooling, supportive communities, and so forth. New Age superstitions and New Age pursuits of the authentic self are not new at all. They are centuries old. Martin Gardner commented that they are proliferating in the 20th century, which seems even more superstitious than the 19th century. Taking encouragement from the expansion of quests for authenticity, the 21st century may yet mark new highs for romantic social inventions of self-​help. SELF-​H ELP AND SELF-​R ELIANCE

The self-​ help and self-​ reliance literature pursuing authenticity is grounded in the same pietistic tradition as the characteristic American religion, at least in style, appealing for its certitude to emotion and crowding out objective coherence (Bloom, 1992). The avalanche of popular self-​help books promising a rendezvous with one’s authentic self engages in a remarkably monotonous rhetoric that testifies to the pervasive cultural belief in the existence of the metaphysical self. Self-​ help is tractable largely because it assumes some inner structure—​a soul, a self, an anima, an inborn identity more authentic than the outward person—​t hat can be activated by will. Because of the inner presence of a more authentic and superior potential of psychic reality in every person, self-​i nvention is possible. Typically, the authors discover the inner being through an epiphany that comes along with instructions for the pursuit of an authentic self, rather than a thoughtful, disciplined, objective, even skeptical investigation. Out of deep compassion for human beings, a newfound commitment to the interrelatedness of all and everything, and a transcendent assurance in the possibility of individual progress leading to social progress, the authors selflessly dedicate themselves to share their truths with the world of the forlorn, the oppressed, and the underachieving. Sir Ken Robinson, according to his publisher “one of the world’s leading thinkers on creativity and innovation,” had an intimation of immortality. I believe passionately that we are all born with tremendous natural capacities, and that we lose touch with many of them as we spend more time in the world. Ironically, one of the main reasons this happens is education. The result is that too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don’t know what they’re capable of achieving. In that sense, they don’t know who they really are. (2009, p. xi) [1 0 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

He offers no evidence, only passionate insight. If indeed this were a factual claim about the deficits of the American school system, parenting, or society, then it would be reasonable to expect Robinson to go on to suggest specific reforms. Yet, although critical of the school system in particular for not providing broad education and individualized instruction, his solution to the problem of authenticity remains self-​reliant; finding and nurturing one’s natural aptitudes and passions can apparently overcome the deficits of social institutions. The authentic self is apparently not a social creation, a result of investments in education and growth, but rather a result of individual will, that is, self-​creation. Robinson posits an extreme individualism capable of embracing his program of self-​improvement, most of which is as metaphysical as salvation, but Robinson’s promises are far more accessible. On the basis of interviews with successful people, Robinson concludes that the quest for authenticity is a search for one’s Element. The Element is “the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion” (p. 21), and “being in our Element depends on finding our own distinctive talents and passions” (p. 8). People have not found their Element because they do not understand their capacities, how they relate to each other “holistically,” and their potential. But they can find their Element, their authentic self, unlock their potential, and become far more successful. The Element has two main features, and there are two conditions for being in it. The features are aptitude and passion. The conditions are attitude and opportunity. The sequence goes something like this: I get it; I love it; I want it; where is it? (p. 22)

The Element then proceeds to outline suggestions for finding one’s aptitudes and passions, all certified by the self-​help platitudes of a small number of inspiring interviews with immensely successful people and of course Robinson’s own chirpy experiences. There is never a note of skepticism that the sources may be misreporting the situations of their success by ennobling themselves in the fictions of extreme individualism. The book refuses to follow its own observations about inadequate material and institutional provisions and highlights the lasting effects of deprivation. Rather, Robinson insists, in good obedience to Emerson, that the individual will, defiant of social conditions, is sufficient to unlock great hidden capacities. Indeed, the book is written with little reference to the objective conditions of the world, reducing existence to feeling. It filters all of its observations through common understanding, that is, an emotional and personal understanding of human existence that is more literary and dramatic than objectively descriptive. It laments the separation of mind and body, insisting that the dualism is requisite to deep understanding of A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e  [1 0 5 ]

human potential. In the end then, The Element is a vacuous plea for spiritual renewal. Indeed, its more sophisticated antecedents were crafted during the First Great Awakening in colonial America by Jonathan Edwards. Yet for all of its shallowness, the book, at 511th place on the Amazon pop charts even four years after its publication, mirrors popular superstitions about self-​invention and human capacity that are based on the assurance of a mystical, spiritual entity within every person. A “New York Times bestselling author” and guest on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, Joan Anderson, in A Weekend to Change Your Life: Find Your Authentic Self After a Lifetime of Being All Things to All People (2006), “gives women practical advice and inspiration for building creative, independent, and fulfilling lives through discovering who they truly are and who they can be” (book jacket). The pursuit of the authentic self is conducted through a single weekend retreat of self-​discovery and self-​ empowerment. Anderson’s epiphany took place during a year alone, after isolating herself from family and friends, trekking through the dunes and hiking along the beaches of Cape Cod. I gradually gained some clarity, reconnected with my intuition and instinct, repaired the wounds of self-​neglect, and uncovered a fresh slate upon which to design the rest of my life. Along the way, I realized that the barbed labels cast my way [for abandoning family and friends] had very little to do with me… . My job was to save the only life I could save—​my own. (pp. 2–​3)

Anderson draws inspiration from the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Emersonian arrogance:  “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has” (quoting Mead; Anderson, 2006, p. xvii). Mead’s obliviousness to the influence of the agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, climate change, population density, war, and so forth is not surprising in an anthropologist who apparently cooked her observations about life in Samoa. In this sense, the self-​help tradition remains loyal to individual self-​invention and blind to social influences. In saving her own authentic soul, Anderson discovered her mission to save the souls of other women: “Clearly, other women have the desire to find purpose beyond the roles that they play. All they need is the time, some supportive cheerleading, and some gentle guidance. So I  began hosting Weekend by the Sea Retreats” (p.  5). Nonetheless, Anderson’s presence at the retreat is not necessary. With only the assistance of the book and without a professional to provide guidance, individual women can go on retreat by themselves or with a group of friends. The retreat goes through the typical stages of change: recognize the need for change, [1 0 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

discover the dynamics of change, implement change, and reinforce it. All the steps rely on immaterial elements, and every point of enlightenment is spiritual. The actual presence of an authentic soul is the core assumption from which self-​discovery, self-​realization, and self-​help proceed. Thus the retreat offers a scholarship in “self and soul” and converts exploration of this uncharted territory into a heroic quest, even a martyrdom of individualism. The women on retreat are “heroines who have accepted that, in order to find themselves, in order to reconnect with their own blurred dreams and desires, they must first step away from the clutter and chatter of everyday life and seek solitude” (p. 43). In short, questers are taken through a process of grand romanticism by which they divorce themselves from the actual, material world of their lives and enter the realm of their emotions and selfless heroic fantasies in pursuit of their authentic souls. Womanhood becomes a world of umbilical connection to the infinite of the universal. Questers are elevated above the mundane to accept a psychic massage of narcissism. The participant becomes a wonder of divine creation, a unique expression of Woman, a self-​creation of eternal verity on “a solo sojourn in nature, … a Navajo vision quest” (pp.  114, 116). The quest promises to return to the world a more knowing, self-​assured, and improved human being who has “decided to be new in an old place” (p. 201). The quester returns home to Anderson’s graduation oratory. If there is a mountain to claim, claim it; if there is a river to forge, forge it. If you feel like swimming naked in a pond or the ocean, go for it. Challenge not only your mind, but your body. (p. 238)

The pursuit of the self-​help adventure is made mystical and romantic by the subjective determination of need for change; intuitive assurance of the dynamics and structures of change; and, if any change takes place, assurance that it resulted from the prescribed quest for authenticity. Importantly, the successful quest results in a state of superior existence that is not merely psychic but also material. The traveler becomes more satisfied psychologically, but her superiority also becomes manifest, boosting status and prestige. However, the process is not based on evidence of success nor justified by the presence of any measurable, certifiable, objective entity of blockage, problem, change element, or process. The entire self-​help industry depends only on consumer satisfaction. At best, it is alternative medicine. At worst, it encourages a number of bad habits, namely narcissism, social irresponsibility, and the retreat into fantasy, an inexpensive, unhelpful popular form of entertainment that says much about the audience’s taste for a confectionary psychic reality. A n A m e r i c a n A r c h e t y p e  [1 0 7]

The self-​engendered search for authenticity gorges itself on romanticism’s empty calories, spawning a library of modern-​day Odysseys. Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self (1998), another inspired alumna of Oprah’s paean to self-​invention, explores the authentic self through “soul directed events—​authentic moments—​[that] never betray us” (p. 8). Breathnach counsels women to reach authenticity by an act of will, to stop loathing themselves and to be true to their passions—​self-​reliance certified by emotion. She rarely acknowledges any reality outside of women’s feelings: “we are giving birth to our authentic selves” (p. 14). And, she might add, painlessly, without scars, in less than nine months, and without the assistance of hated others. Choosing truth, “what is real,” is Harriette Cole’s recommendation (2003) for an authentic life. The truth, however, is entirely internal, the realm of the “inner spirit” with assistance from God. Pray. Open the doorway to your soul. Cole’s authenticity is a psychic reality divorced from the material world. Mark Nepo (2005) listens to the “voice inside” to understand and be one with “the unseeable web of connection between all life” (p. 14). Authenticity emerges from “the risk to still our own house so that Spirit can come through, so that we might drop into the vital nature of things, and the risk to then let that beautiful knowing inform our days” (ibid.). Mike Robbins (2009), addressing men for a change as well as women, wants people to be themselves, to be true to themselves, implying that inside every person there is another, better, more authentic being. He recommends self-​k nowledge, self-​expression, boldness, and a celebration of authenticity at the end of the quest. Still, he ignores what to do when one’s authentic self, discovered through deep self-​reflection, is an absolute rotter, a sociopath, a violent human-​hating person who litters and smokes cigarettes indoors. It might be wise for him to add a chapter or even a few paragraphs in new editions of Be Yourself, Everyone Is Already Taken (2009) to explain how the essential inner being is a chip off the old block of all of us, and that this organic inheritance of oneness with God is good, pure, nutritional, and safe for the environment. Not so innocently, the construction of an inner self entirely from ethereal entities ignores the relationship between the outer world and the inner person. It devalues the tie between social conditions and individual problems. In just this way, Helene Lerner (2012), in a book more notable for its calming off-​white paper than its objectivity, shares that On her deathbed, my mother whispered tenderly, “I’ve never understood you, but I  have always loved you, Helene.” […] Her poignant statement has become an

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empowering legacy that I keep before my mind’s eye: do I understand myself, and do I love the person I understand myself to be? (p. ix, emphasis in original)

Helene then proceeds through self-​discovery of authenticity to enumerate nine steps—​“ facets of a woman’s power”—​to reach authenticity. She closes with a few chapters of bulleted appeals to the will, to rights, and to heroic conquest. Gregg Levoy (1997) begins on a country road, where “a part of the invisible world was made, for a brief moment, visible to” him (p. 1). His book is structured around invisible calls from the spiritual realm for the individual to become authentic. Connie Zweig (Zweig & Wolf, 1997), after an inspiration from Oscar Wilde, sets out to deal with the unconscious by way of bringing forth individual authenticity. She seems oblivious of the historic, documented failure of psychodynamic travels into the inner being and still wishes to approach the stranger in us all (pace Jung, the shadow) through the soul. Carol Adrienne (1998) also hears soundless calls, relies on intuition and creativity, and assures her audience “that anything is possible” (p. 72). In another nod to the frank metaphysics of Jung, the shadow reappears as the key to authenticity. Penney Peirce (2005) provides instructions in harnessing intuition, “the creation cycle,” the subconscious and the superconscious, dreams, imagination, and “the natural flow” to arrive at personal authenticity through the self-​reliant will: “By now you should be able to trust and apply your intuition in many ways to create a smoother, fuller, more rewarding life” (p. 195). “Spend some time,” Peirce writes, “thinking about your ‘soul activities… . Describe in detail how it feels emotionally and physically to be involved in a soul activity” (p. 215). Not to be outdone, Albert Clayton Gaulden (2006) in You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You found his sober, authentic self with the assistance of Swami Swahananda. Along the journey to authenticity and enlightenment, he discovered love, generic religion, karmic mirrors, angels, the influence of the Sun and the Moon, and the eight stages of the quest for the true soul. His testimony to reincarnation is one of the most extreme statements of individualism, taking responsibility for choosing his past lives and thus his current situation. I have lived thousands of lives, famous and infamous—​both as a man and as a woman—​some as a good little boy or girl, and a lot where I was a bad apple. I chose my parents and siblings because they provided the proper DNA, family dysfunctions, and also positive qualities that would best help me fulfill my destiny. (p. 199)

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The numbingly repetitious rhetoric of the search for authenticity through self-​reliance is enough to convince a bitter skeptic that the self-​ help authors are not actual individuals but rather conveniences of the editorial and marketing departments of large publishers that pulp out the material and then train glib, photogenic salespersons in spontaneity and genuineness to promote the stuff. The author’s personal suffering; the epiphany that there is an authentic self; revealed steps to discover the authentic self; appeals to will, uniqueness, faith, and hidden power to motivate the pilgrim; and then a statement of the nobility of searching for oneself are repeated with monotonic dullness. Inner eyes see the truth, inner ears hear it, and God-​g iven common sense certifies it. None of the authors employ formal, objective, coherent methods to test their literal processes and structures. Objective truth is not their point. Rather, the self-​indulgence of romantic self-​actualization preys on unhappy, credulous people and relies on superstition and faith to embark on imaginary quests for peace and power. Authenticity touring is a profitable business because its many customers prefer to escape the discomforts of reality for the demulcent simplicity of empty flattery, however quixotic. This recourse to romantic self-​delusion reveals much about the nation’s political and social values. There is an understandable appreciation for Emerson and Jung in the self-​help literature. However, the literature often affirms its spiritual guidance by referring to the arcane teachings of swamis, gurus, and mystics, usually from the East and Middle East but often from one-​w ith-​ nature aboriginals—​ for example Cole’s Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Breathnach’s Rumi and Kahlil Gibran, Gaulden’s Swami Swahananda—​ as though they offered a higher truth that could liberate the West from its evil ways. Yet those higher truths do not seem to have been successful on their native ground, leaving India for one with a huge number of impoverished, often starving, people and a predatory ruling class. Nor for that matter have a variety of monks, savants, meditators, bagwans, hermits, and yogis been at all successful in elevating the material or spiritual conditions of billions of other Asians, unless of course fatalistic acceptance of degradation can be considered a success of their spiritual teaching. If nothing else, the literature evokes the exotica of Madame Blavatsky—​ Russian accent, mysticism, piercing gaze, séances, and Asian adepts—​ who benefited mightily from America’s gullibility and fascination with the hidden truths of inscrutable aliens (often from other worlds, but usually only from lands east of Europe). Madame Blavatsky would be in awe of the success of many self-​helpers. It is a curiosity verging on perversity that despite its promise to resolve problems in the material world, the self-​help literature ends up content [11 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

with the lassitude of romantic self-​involvement; it ignores actual self-​ reliance, typically deferring to emotions and feelings. The constant, almost complete pursuit of authenticity within a psychic reality rather than a social state is a retreat from the world into a near-​infantile narcissism of need and fantasy. It is a narcosis of inaction rather than self-​help. Yet its popularity begins to explain or at least coincide with the intense individualism of the American ethos—​personal responsibility for correct mood crowding out social responsibility to provide material relief of social deficits through government or collective private action. Public social welfare programs—​monuments to the preference for personal responsibility—​are usually inadequate, while private initiatives customarily emphasize self-​help. The self-​help liturgy typically addresses women, and often as victims, but usually of their own distorted feelings. In its romantic quest inward, the literature suggests that women’s unhappiness is a problem of how they view themselves, that is, their emotional state, more than the social conditions that created painful inequalities and restricted opportunities. However, the popularity of the self-​help material among women may suggest that passivity and internal emotional redecoration draw a larger constituency than political and social activism. Indeed, participation in feminist organizations has been steadily declining (Epstein, 2013).

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CH A P TER   4

Spiritualism, Religion, and Other Romantic Quests for the Authentic Self

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piritualism and religion may be distinguishable by their style more than by their substance. In fact, they often combine in a single offering. Both embrace mystical constructions and pleas for faith. Still, spiritualism separated from formal religious entities is usually more marginal and less mainstream than organized religion in the sense of conforming with social expectations. However, their tools are largely the same. Both customarily share pietistic styles, although there is at least a larger theme of thoughtful liturgical reasoning among established churches. SPIRITUALISM AS ILLUMINATION OF THE TRUE SELF In The Voice of Knowledge, Miguel Ruiz reminds us of a profound and simple truth: The only way to end our emotional suffering and restore our joy in living is to stop believing in lies—​mainly about ourselves. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, this breakthrough book shows us how to recover our faith in the truth and return to our own common sense. (Ruis & Mills, 2004, back cover)

Authenticity for Ruiz is emotional and achieved by rejection of “the voice of knowledge” that tells lies. Emotions are the only reality, and “by following your emotions, you can change your circumstances.” The truth is in the real you; it is your own integrity, and nobody can guide you to that place. Only you can take yourself there. When the voice of knowledge becomes the

voice of integrity, you return to the truth, you return to love, you return to heaven, and live in happiness again. (p. 228)

Still and all, the quest for the authentic you apparently requires Ruiz’s insights, guidance, books, and compact discs—​available in English and in Spanish. As of June 18, 2013, The Voice of Knowledge (2004) was number 9,734 on the Amazon hit parade of more than eight million books; another of his books, The Four Agreements, reached number 68. The truth of Ruiz’s propositions are self-​evident “common sense,” the residual wisdom of Toltec traditions that remains when its superstitions and witchcraft are eliminated. With no appreciation for circularity, Ruiz argues that the truth of emotion frees our faith in the truth of emotion. It is good to be good. In good romantic standing, Ruiz asks for belief devoid of reason, the suspension of intellect in building faith but within a realm presided over by God and his angels, who coordinate the benefits of integrity, reward the veracity of the emotions, and bless the search for authenticity. The pursuit is packaged as individualism, but an individualism devoid of critical imagination and systematic skepticism, which would seem to reduce the individual to a member of a herd. Even while Ruiz separates blind faith from true faith, the distinction reverts to an inner truth rather than an objective test. Real faith, or free faith, is what you are feeling in this moment. This moment is real; you have faith in life, faith in yourself, faith for no reason. This is the power of your creation in the moment. From this point of power, you can create whatever you want to create in any direction. (p. 141) When we release our faith from the lies, we recover free will and make our own choices. We recover the power to believe whatever we want to believe. And when we have the power to believe whatever we want, all we want is to love. (ibid.)

Ruiz’s revelations came to him in true naturalistic fashion, during a night in the desert, his Walden Pond, his “walk with Jesus,” and his eureka moment. Then something even more extraordinary happened. My perception shifted, and for a moment I was the immensity of the stars perceiving the infinite in my physical body. I could see myself in the middle of the desert—​so small. I saw that my physical body was made of billions of tiny stars which I knew were atoms, and they were as vast as all of the stars in the sky. That night, I knew that the infinite inside my physical body is just a continuation of the infinite all around me. (pp. 46–​47)

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More in the mainstream of American religion, Gary L. Thomas’s Authentic Faith poses defiant beauty as the authentic self: “At some points in our history, the beauty has been marred and partially hidden. But it is always there. It’s our legacy, and this is an invitation to pick it back up again” (2002, p. 20). The quest for defiant beauty is guided by a variety of disciplines: waiting, suffering, persecution, social mercy, and others. The truth of defiant beauty and the necessity of the quest rests on authentic faith in the revelations of Jesus and His disciples in conformity with Baptist theology. Indeed, the quest for the authentic soul is apparently the quest for redemption and salvation. However, the circumstances of the quest are not reasoned but conform with Baeck’s sense of romantic religion, notably an ecstatic merging with the Divine. Thomas suggests that the rewards of heaven and the penalties of hell—​“every account will be settled in eternity” (Thomas, 2001, p. 228)—​a long with faith in the revelations of the Bible, notably the divinity of Christ and the will of God, are powerful incentives to steer free choice. The notion of free agency guided by “God’s voice” (p. 229) reflects the extremity of individualism that runs through the religious quest. The more secular pressures of American theology push toward conformity, although again walking their logic through a personal relationship with God that reinforces extreme individualism. Thomas’s quest for defiant beauty through authentic faith poses the situation of a free conscience and thus free choice, which are largely impervious to worldly imperatives. People have the internal capacity of conscience and insight, and the capacity of soul and character to make appropriate moral choices. Because of their freedom of conscience, they are responsible for their choices and will be held accountable for all eternity by God’s judgment. These entities in Thomas and pietistic religion generally are not metaphors. They are the reality perceived through faith. The search for the authentic self by turning to God can be interpreted metaphorically as the choice to do right and avoid evil. In this case God, in the embodiment of the supreme good, and the sacred texts become transformed from divine revelation into earthly analects and Aesopean fables. However, Thomas’s quest for defiant beauty and other popular religious quests take God, the soul, heaven and hell, faith, revelation, and the rest quite literally. They are statements of reality that defy tests of reality. They are intensely romantic instances of religious belief predicated on the actual existence of otherworldly forces that dominate American belief and the assurance that within each of us a more authentic reality literally exists—​an authentic soul, divinely inspired if not actually gifted—​to be uncovered through faith in the pursuit of the divine: “there are truths to

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the duty to follow God that may, indeed, initially taste bitter, but obedience is never quite as costly as disobedience” (2002, p. 247). When we live only for this world we lack the character to tackle difficult relationships with any moral comprehension. We have to be happy right now, or we assume the struggle isn’t worth it… . Even the mere mention of “the wrath of God” makes one sound hopelessly outdated. Although this is a foundational truth of Scripture that has served Christians well for centuries, it is seen as anachronistic today. But what was essential for Jesus cannot be nonessential for us. (p. 237, emphasis in original)

Leslie Ludy’s Authentic Beauty: Going Deeper (2007) addresses an unconventional sense of feminine beauty, although through a conventionally pietistic religious faith in a passionate personal, ecstatic, and somewhat erotic relationship with Christ—​“nothing strengthens intimacy with Christ more than a sense of His fingerprints on our lives” (p. 137). The search for the authentic self fulfills the “God-​g iven longing to be valued, cherished, and found beautiful by a noble, gallant prince” (p. 7). It entails obeying God’s call to the “set-​apart” life of true purity and obviously implies a willingness to heed the inner voice of God. True purity is more than simply saving sex until marriage. True purity is a complete set-​apartness for our heavenly Prince, not just in the area of relationships and sexuality, but in every aspect of our existence. (p. 27) Jesus Christ is our true Prince, the One we have been longing for, searching for, and dreaming of since childhood. The One who will love us the way no one else can love us. The One who will cherish us forever. The One who will transform us from hopeless girls in rags into beautiful, confident, radiant princesses. (p. 15)

Love of Christ is the necessary first step in finding a more earthly prince. By surrendering her existence to Christ, the young woman is transformed by His love. She then “sparkles with a radiance that cause[s]‌others to stand back in awe” and presumably attract an appropriate mate. Religious ecstasy apparently translates into emotional and sexual fulfillment rather than hysteria. Ludy’s religious pilgrimage to authenticity through Christ is quite literal. The surrendering to a higher power allows the young woman to follow Christ’s wishes and become set-​apart, and thus chosen not only for membership in the “Fellowship of the Set-​apart” but presumably also by God. There is no metaphor of morality running through Ludy’s structures of belief. The “intimate romance” with Christ transports the believer into a realm in which the young woman presides, again recalling Baeck’s Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [115 ]

characterization of romantic religion and the lassitude, obedience, and loss of self it demands. “In every generation, there are a few young women who discover passionate, daily, unhindered intimacy with their true Prince, Jesus Christ” (Ludy, 2007, p. 173). Every semblance of reason has yielded to emotion. In the very popular The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-​ discovery, David Benner (Benner & Pennington, 2004) ridicules pop psychology’s promises of authenticity and self-​discovery as psychobabble but then writes biblebabble about finding the true self through Christ: “Body and soul contain thousands of possibilities out of which you can build many identities. But in only one of these will you find your true self that has been hidden in Christ from all eternity” (p. 14). Authenticity is predicated on accepting Christ’s “personal love for each of us” in order to fulfill one’s unique destiny. All is revealed through faith in Christ, an act of will that paradoxically results in obedience and conformity rather than uniqueness. All is mystical. Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self (2013; about 2,000 on the Amazon pop charts) does in fact interpret many of the religious references symbolically:  the Risen Christ as the True Self, the Resurrection as joyous contagion. However, each symbol represents a nonmaterial or subjective entity that perpetuates the mystification of the religious experience and its pursuit of authenticity. The true self is “God-​in-​ you,” the soul: “God-​in-​you already knows, loves, and serves God in everything else. All you can do is fully jump on board. I would call that jump consciousness” (p. xii). The true self—​the authentic soul—​is accepted through faith and will, an individual decision within a community of believers. Rohr argues for the surrender to the “divine indwelling,” a mystical process of religious participation to realize the true self. Yet in spite of the metaphorical use of religious images, not a single concept in Rohr’s theology is defined in any but subjective terms of faith and special knowing. Osho’s The Book of Understanding (2006) embarks on its journey with promise, insisting that religious inquiry “be scientific, based on doubt, so that we need not believe, but we can come to know someday the truth of our being, and the truth of the whole universe” (p. vi). The cruise to authenticity does not even get out of port before science is overwhelmed by the ineffable constructs of conventional religion:  soul, mind, and transformation. Osho proposes a new religion, “purely a quality of being whole,” and then notes that “science has failed” (p. 7). Osho recommends meditation to transcend the finite and apparent and to find the real and the authentic. Understanding is sublime and is realized through true meditation. Osho also encourages visits to the Osho International Meditation Resort, located in Pune, India, which [11 6 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

was “originally developed as a summer retreat for Maharajas and wealthy British colonialists.” Osho International Meditation Resort is a place where people can have a direct personal experience of a new way of living… . Resort programs are all based in the Osho vision of a qualitatively new kind of human being who is able both to participate creatively in everyday life and to relax into silence and meditation. Most programs take place in modern, air conditioned facilities and include a variety of individual sessions, courses, and workshops covering everything from creative arts to holistic health treatments, personal transformation and therapy, esoteric sciences, the “Zen” approach to sports and recreation, relationship issues, and significant life transitions for men and women. (pp. 277–​78)

The religious transition from skepticism to faith is best facilitated by meditation on personal comfort, on the sublime malleability of the human soul, and on its natural, easy romanticism. In Osho’s adept hands, meditation relieves the stress of the sorrowing soul caught between doubt and faith.1 It seems a commentary on social preferences that none of the contemporary religious pursuits of the authentic self are explicitly addressed to heathens, backsliders, and the condemned who are lost in the pleasures of their sins. No fire, brimstone, or Hell. To the contrary, the authors seem to assume an audience motivated to seek personal transformation for worldly success but settling for psychic relief. Rather than salvation and eternal life, the goal seems to be emotional ecstasy in the present through discovery of a transcendent individual identity—​a romantic existence that rejects the ambiguities and limitations of a pragmatic world. With only the merest mention of poverty, deprivation, or any sort of social and political injustice, the religious pursuit of authenticity markets itself to pilgrims who wish to take the journey in plush limousines with drawn shades. OTHER ILLUMINATIONS OF THE TRUE SELF

Romantic enlightenment requires illumination of one’s true self. For Caroline Myss (2013), this implies knowledge of one’s own personal archetypes, patterned after Jung, which she defines as the universal forms of individual expression. They have apparently become “the new language of power that operates through networks of people—​Arch-​e-​mates …—​linking up 1.  A  tribute to Elihu Vedder’s (1836–​1923) painting The Sorrowing Soul between Doubt and Faith. Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [117]

with one another through their archetypal patterns” (p. xiii). The journey to the personal true self takes place through the “Inner-​net,” which she claims is the same as Jung’s collective unconscious. Jung allowed for a multitude of archetypes; Myss settles on 10 that “reflect the power trends of our times,” for example the advocate, the caregiver, the artist, the fashionista, and so forth. Jung defined them as timeless and universal; Myss suggests that newer ones are created as people “evolve.” In fact, Myss seems to be discussing social roles, which become heroic forms, and Weberian ideal types, which Becker (1973) invoked to try to explain human motivation. Yet Becker never claimed that his process of applied philosophy was therapeutic in any clinical or spiritual sense. Myss’s personal journey to enlightenment entails “establishing a relationship with your archetypes” (2013, p. 12). You have “a cluster of archetypes that are particular to you, forming your Inner-​net of influences that express themselves singly and at times blend their energies” (p. 13). Archetypes are “continually interacting with the sparks of energy we generate” (p.  18). This, however, is not what Jung meant by the collective unconscious, which was decidedly not unique to every individual but rather a universal inheritance. Perhaps Myss’s artistic/​creative archetype is working here. How are archetypes identified? “You know what’s true about you and always has been true” (p.  13). That’s it; you know. How are archetypes chosen? I love this question… . My personal belief is that we are born with life assignments and those assignments are governed by our archetypal patterns. I call these assignments “Sacred Contracts.” (That’s also the title of a book I wrote, as well as the focus of my teaching.) The archetypes contained in your Sacred Contract govern your relationship to your personal power and to spiritual power, and are expressed in every aspect of your life. (p. 15)

Myss shares Jung’s problems of logical proof, but not his imagination or discipline. Myss never establishes the existence of archetypes or their influence. She never even discusses the issue of proof. She simply lays out her truths as received, unimpeachable facts, which is all in the manner of the genre of the soul search, stretching with the help of her colleagues the tolerances of the category called nonfiction. Probably because Myss offers no testimony to the value of her insights, the publisher apparently feels obliged to defend her credentials. Caroline Myss has been in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness for over 20 years. Since 1982, she has worked as a medical intuitive, providing individuals [11 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

with an evaluation of the health of the energetic anatomy system. She specializes in assisting people in understanding the emotional, psychological, and physical reasons why their bodies have developed an illness. (Myss, 2013, in bookflap)

The opera of Illumination and the True Self, a staple in the American musical theater, unfolds through its own five-​act classic with standard libretto: Act One:  Opening setting and the source for the revelation:  “The stone walls of the old church glistened in the rain” (Chatfield, 2010, p. 11). Self-​reflection. (John-​Roger & Kaye, 2004, p. 9) Act Two: The romantic revelation—​the light of enlightenment: “The Spirit” that flows through all of us; “We are indwelt by our source, by the Spirit that brings perfection and wholeness to our lives” (Chatfield, 2010, p.  27). “Total being is the true self [the soul], who we really are. Who we think we are, or want others to think we are, is the false self ” (John-​Roger & Kaye, 2004, p.  11). “If we change who we think we are, we change who we are… . The human mind has no limits … but we need to push ourselves … if we’re ever to discover who we really are.” (Staples, 1996, p. 14, 21) Act Three: The process: “Authentic self-​identity from a perspective of integrative spirituality” (Chatfield, 2010, p. 2). Discovering the soul. The true self perspective. “Spiritual science” (John-​Roger & Kaye, 2004). Belief in “our Maker.” Personal responsibility and self creation. The Renaissance Program and “over 21 incredible insights.” (Staples, 1996) Act Four: Steps in the process or more usually, portentous injunctions: “Embrace change … dream new dreams … conquer guilt … reinvent yourself … dance with the divine” (Chatfield, 2010, p. 5). “The four basic spiritual laws are Acceptance, Cooperation, Understanding and Enthusiasm.” Also chants and exercises for the soul (John-​Roger & Kaye, 2004, pp. 83, 163, 169). “The Universal Achievement Process:  ‘desire’ ‘clear, focused goals,’ ‘unquestionable belief in both ourselves and our goals,’ ‘a plan to implement our goals,’ ‘taking consistent action in the direction of our goals,’ and ‘assessing results,’ and ‘keep on taking action’ ” (Staples, 2010, pp. 30–​31). “God created each of us in His own image. He put a little of Himself—​H is love, His grace, His power—​in each of us.” (Staples, 1996, p. 379)2 2.  And on and on and on, through Chopra, Ford, and Williamson (2010); Tolle (1999, 2004); Alexander (2012); Houston (2012); McGraw (2001); Mack (2009); Lawford (2002); Cope (2012); and countless others. The genre reproduces faster than rabbits and Xerox machines, and with even less variation. Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [11 9 ]

Act Five: Final chorus: “You are authentic; you are a genuine original” (Chatfield, 2010, p. 101). “Place your attention at the third eye. Call in the Light of God to come into your Soul, to push out any negativity or imbalance, and to surround full you for the highest good.” (John-​Roger & Kaye, 2004, p. 165) Virtually all of the tracts on authenticity through self-​reliance, religion, psychotherapy, and the like share similar language, style, and assumptions:  simple, unsophisticated words and short sentences, reliance on belief usually in God, the superior value of feeling relative to reason, self-​ help based on assumptions of extreme and even heroic individualism, generic problem-​solving methods but without any specific content, internal spiritual structures of soul and authentic identities, assurance of life-​ changing outcomes that are worldly but also spiritual and psychological, and personal witnessing to testify to effectiveness. None of the works offer any coherent, disciplined, objective evidence; all of the authors, including Jung and Emerson, view the material world with some contempt, favoring “spiritual science” over its more mundane expressions. Indeed, romanticism is reactionary, a retreat from modernity, science, and industrialization to the safety of an inner Eden. A new consciousness has been entering the human world… . We know that life is about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting—​a n unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified… . All that any of us have to do is suspend our doubts and distractions just long enough … and miraculously, this reality can be our own. (Redfield, 1993, Author’s Note)

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND THE PURSUIT OF THE AUTHENTIC SELF

Much of modern life relies on the success of complex and informal organizations. Successful management of organizations requires leadership; leadership requires authenticity; and authenticity is spiritual, converting pragmatic leadership into heroic individualism. Dispensing with the empirical chore of building a theory of leadership from data about managerial characteristics and organizational outcomes, the pursuit of the authentic soul, as the pursuit of organizational success, begins with a series of epiphanies about the necessary nature of leadership that are immune to falsification. Leadership’s primary task then becomes ceremonial—​the affirmation of spiritual values—​rather than functional, except slyly as the function of the organization rests on the representation of those values. In [12 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

this sense, authentic leadership as spiritual plays to the audience engaged in the romantic heroics of individualism—​in the manner of authenticity as religious expression, self-​reliance, and psychic ease—​more than to the managerial pragmatists. Robert Terry’s basic management textbook (1993), which predicates leadership on spiritual authenticity, defines spirituality as a conventional belief in God. The door into new meaning opened a crack when I understood authenticity metaphorically as the ever-​present partner of all action. The door opened totally when I  understood that God was authenticity. God was the ever-​present partner of all action… . God is many; God is one. God is my center of authenticity, unified in a deeper authenticity, all at the same time. (Terry, 1993, p. 270, emphasis in original)

The door into new meaning opens with the assumption that authentic leadership is effective, but without any evidence that authentic leadership achieves measurable organizational advantages. It also comes along with the customary baggage of spirit, soul, inner meaning, universal structures, insights, the light of emotional truth, and the author’s personal testimony, which in this case includes the quaint confession following his long avowal of faith that he “thinks he was born a skeptic” (p. 269). The customary injunctions are often platitudes: “engage fully in life without answers,” “we do not have to find theoretical unity before we can join together in practical wisdom,” “the joy that comes from total engagement is its own confirmation of validity” (pp. 272–​73). The book contains little more than six perspectives on management followed by Terry’s unifying theory of authentic leadership. The quest for personal authenticity and the quest for authentic leadership travel the same road. The pursuit says much about the penetration of romanticism into universities and their business schools. Seemingly writing in a more pragmatic, academic style, Joan Marques, Satinder Dhiman, and Jerry Biberman (2011) end up with the same plea to the romantic as does Terry (1993). It is not surprising why authentic leadership has been making such headway in the past decade. It was instigated by repeated manifestations of corporate greed, leading to a financial, but more importantly, a mental and emotional depression noticeable in all countries of the world. (2011, p. 1)

It is also not surprising that emotional depression rather than economic recession seems to be the more important problem for the authenticity experts who supplant social forces with individual will. Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [121]

“The unending stream of corporate blunders has augmented awareness of the need for authentic leadership,” say Marques et al. (2011, p. 2). Authentic leadership is achieved through intense self-​search, well-​defined values, and great willpower to be the kind of person others want to follow. Yet it needs to be underscored that authentic leadership stems not from the will to be a leader of others, but from the urge to live right and do the right things (p. 6). Marques et  al. (2011) seek credibility for their take on authentic leadership in a long list of references to respected academic journals, for example the Harvard Business Review; to the more prominent management gurus such as Anthony Robbins; and to innumerable testimonials to authenticity from corporate leaders. Yet in the end, Marques and colleagues come up with only the “spiritual guiding forces” of romantic self-​i nvention and a long series of intuitive pop psychology exercises to improve self-​insight and awareness:  whole body learning, the death-​ awareness exercise, the self-​reflection exercise, using creative drawings to visualize leadership, team-​based right-​brain learning in a university classroom, role play, and others. Every one of them lacks even rudimentary evidence of effectiveness. It would all seem quite silly except for the embedded romanticism of the society, its insistence on a quest for authenticity, even in the most mundane commercial settings in which more objective measures of testable theories of economic behavior would seem warranted. Marques et al. may portray the state of the art of authentic leadership, but only as a cultural ceremony, the retreat to emotion and self-​certification. Authenticity as a metaphor for a list of specific attributes, including sincerity, might serve as an effective literary device—​a concise trope of commendation. Yet the quest for the authentic self in the workplace is meant literally. Moreover, the search for the authentic self in the workplace confers organizational and personal advantages. Clearly, authenticity is a promised road to corporate profit and personal success. It is also a demand for organizational conformity by becoming immensely attentive to workplace tasks, “being fully present to each event in your workday … by being fully present with each and every person with whom you interact” (Giardina, 2002, p. xxiv). Giardina’s authentic self, “also called the Inner Self, Spirit, or the soul, is the true source of creativity, innovation, and intuition” (p. xxiii). The authentic self is heroic and fully self-​inventive. First, we are 100 percent responsible for our own responses to what happens to us; and second, … we have the power of choice to transform our experience of the world around us at any time and in any circumstances. (p. xxiv)

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The authentic self at work begins to look like a corporate homunculus embedded in the soul. Its virtues derive from those of the organization, which confers a true identify and role on its employees. In turn, employees need to reveal their true corporate selves through self-​analysis, spiritual quests, and prayer. The quest for authenticity at work as a ceremony of popular values has come to mystify conformity to market values and loyalty to employers as Divine, spiritual values requiring, for Giardina and the quest for authenticity in general, the protection of prayer and the inspiration of supernatural entities, even angels. These themes are given an immense prominence by Anthony Robbins in his extraordinary march to success as a capitalist avatar, corporate consultant, and life coach. Robbins insists that a titan of power and success slumbers in every person. His “life quest has been to restore the dream [of destiny] and to make it real, to get each of us to remember and use the unlimited power that lies sleeping within us all” (1992, p. 19). Robbins argues that because all problems were caused by human behavior, the solution lies in every person’s changing his or her behavior. The trick is to make a plan and then stick to it, while relying on the inner resources of will and the motivators of pain and pleasure: “If you truly decide to, you can do almost anything” (p. 35). Decisions act as the source of both problems and incredible joys and opportunities. This is the power that sparks the process of turning the invisible into the visible. True decisions are the catalyst for turning our dreams into reality. The most exciting thing about this force, this power, is that you already possess it. (p. 37, emphasis in original)

Referencing the heroic deeds of leaders—​Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, among innumerable others—​who seemed to change world destiny, Robbins argues that all of us are capable of summoning the hidden strengths of their authentic self to do the same. The context apparently matters little; all that counts is the individual’s will, determination, and dedication to the plan. Greatness is within the grasp of every person. With absolutely no acknowledgment of competitive advantages, inequalities of resources and capacities, environmental limitations (notably including imperfect information), and the role of luck, Robbins insists that destiny is in everyone’s hands. The only impediment is the search inward to find one’s authentic powerful self and then reap worldly benefits. Robbins provides all that the individual quester needs. You now know that the most powerful tool on the planet is the biocomputer between your two ears. Properly run, your brain can make your life greater than any dream

Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [12 3 ]

you’ve ever had before. You’ve learned the Ultimate Success formula:  Know your outcome, take action, develop the sensory acuity to know what you’re getting, and change your behavior until you get what you want. (Robbins, 2003, pp. 404–​5).

Along with the claim that every person’s potential is nearly infinite, Robbins offers only grandiosity and platitude in substitution for specific strategies and tactics that confer advantage in the constant, intense competition for success. What is the proper way to use the “biocomputer between the ears”? How can one know the outcome when information about the future is profoundly uncertain? What changes in personal behavior will produce successful outcomes? How can a person overcome embedded and serious intellectual, emotional, and physical impairments in the quest for success? How is it possible to know the truth about psychic reality when introspection is unreliable? Robbins keeps coming back to faith in oneself as answers and anecdotes of personal success, which are customarily simplifications and distortions of leadership. He perpetuates the myth of leadership, that it dominates social and political contexts and that history turns on individual decisions rather than the tectonic forces of culture, commerce, climate, technology, and so forth. To even the most unpracticed eye, it is quite apparent that many disciplined people, with the best information and the most acute insights into themselves, often fail. Why, then, has Robbins enjoyed such vast success—​millions of books, lucrative consultations, an iconic popularity as an up-​f rom-​obscurity entrepreneur, and profitable ancillary businesses including a resort in Fiji? His success emerges from skillful adaptation of the archetypal quest for the authentic soul, which exploits an enormous market of amenable Americans who wish to be soothed and flattered with the certainty that greatness resides within them. Robbins’s extreme individualism, largely reducing events to questions of human will, is a ritual of the romantic communion of Americans with self-​invention and the invisible world of personal authenticity. Indeed, his advertised vacation at Namale—​Robbins’s exclusive private resort in Fiji, reserved for only 20 people at a time—​is a stunning materialization of the spiritual quest for the authentic soul into an actual trip (“turning the invisible into visible” financial profit): “After staying at Namale, you’ll never look at the world—​ or yourself—​the same way again” (Robbins, 2003, p. 422). Perhaps less innocent, the motivational speaker and consultant who imposes such a strict sense of personal responsibility on employees is subtly conveying an executive threat. The company’s profits depend on the heroic deeds of its workers. They are enjoined to look deeply inside themselves to “awaken the giant within” and contribute more to organizational profits. If they are not going to make personal decisions of loyalty [12 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

to productivity, they might consider another type of employment to fulfill their quest for greatness. It also imposes a demand for belief in spectral entities and events through an inquisition into motive and the quality of inner being. Work is converted from a livelihood into a quest for personal value; the role of worker becomes the authentic self. Corporate culture can be as intolerant, magical, and punitive as democratic populism itself. Not to be outdone by Robbins, Maggie Craddock builds the authentic career on the Authentic Career Process, an “executive coaching program” of self-​discovery that begins with self-​awareness and “emotional ownership” (2004). Craddock claims that the Authentic Career Process is based on best practices but offers no evidence of effectiveness, only reference to her own life story, acquired wisdom, and a few case examples out of her coaching experience. The quest for the authentic self searches for what people “really want,” their “genuine values,” “their genuine desires,” by looking inside, presumably to a spiritual place in which the genuine self exists. However, the quest is promoted by “psychoanalytic and spiritual approaches” and their intense baggage of psychic reality, which have never been converted into demonstrable interventions of clinical effectiveness. Authenticity grows beyond sincerity; it is truth itself and achieved through emotional self-​reliance. The theory of authentic leadership exceeds a simple statement of leadership’s centrality in organizations. Rather, it attributes the outcomes of both formal and informal organizations to inspired leadership as the most crucial element of success and pays little attention to the quality of personnel. Inspiration costs little; in romantic hands, it is largely the result of individual will. However, improving the quality of workers is very expensive, implying broad investments in education, training, health care, and other basic social institutions. It also implies maintaining salubrious social and economic conditions in which industry and culture thrive. In contrast, the search for leadership authenticity is a denial of greater equality. Socially, the inspired leader is among the chosen elite; economically, authentic management represents a justification of American stratification (the authentic deserve what they earn). It is quite in keeping with its heroic individualism that a call for greater public oversight and regulation of business is absent from the authenticity literature, predicated as it is on an epiphany of religious and spiritual goodness. The spirit of the authentic leader remains volitional rather than a product of social investment, notably in family, community, and education, and the coercive penalties of market regulation. Thus, successful organizations rise almost mystically from their soul work.3 3.  Much of the management literature that addresses authentic leadership is self-​ contradictory, simplistic, uninformed. In this regard, Kenneth Ruge, a guest minister at Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [12 5 ]

OTHER PERSONAL QUESTS FOR THE AUTHENTIC SOUL

The quest for the authentic soul meanders through unexpected lands, but the travelogue of personal testimony still constitutes the most common evidence for reaching one’s true self. They are statements of literal encounters with psychic reality, which is possibly an oxymoron but probably a true contradiction. Glenn T. Stanton (2011) wishes to help children mature into their authentic roles as men and women. He claims to draw on the “breadth of stabled and emerging scientific discovery” and examine “this research in light of the Christian story” (p. 3). Yet his quest for authentic sex roles relies largely on a Christian spirit of strict inborn sex role differences. My prayer for you [parents] is that you have gained a deeper more colorful appreciation for the essential contributions you make to the growth and maturity of your children. And that you know you do this simply by being the unique, gender-​d istinct parent god created you to be as you cooperate with an other gender-​d istinct parent in raising gender distinct children. (p. 240)

Rachel Simmons (2009) charts the process of raising authentic girls apparently in reaction to praise, such as that from Stanton (2011), for the stereotypical Barbie doll as a role model for girls. Her process to achieve greater gender equality goes through the customary steps of heroic self-​invention, beginning and largely ending with the scrutiny of emotion:  “building emotional intelligence,” dealing emotionally with stereotypes, and reinforcing thoughts in an appropriate way. Simmons seems to be applying cognitive psychology to her process of liberation through confidence building. She assumes the possibility of a heroic transformation: the quest to authentic girlhood and womanhood as a result of individual will. Yet the failure of cognitive psychotherapy and its many clinical derivatives is unaddressed, and the many cultural barriers to women’s equality are Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church and a psychotherapist, writes a book about the true self but confesses that he does not know what it is: “The true self is essentially a mystery” (1998, p. 5). George and Sims (2007) go through a large number of interviews with organizational leaders but cannot attribute the successes and failures of the organizations to leadership or other factors. In other words, they have no ability to test the insights of their respondents. Often authentic leadership is used as the equivalent of effective leadership but tries to ride the popularity of spiritual quests. Yet even when the management literature attempts to approach empirical truths, it is hampered by weak scholarship marred by insurmountable methodological problems. In its romantic form, the literature characteristically exaggerates the contribution of leadership to organizational outcomes while minimizing the influence of lower-​level employees and the social environment in which organizations function.

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ignored. Simmons offers only personal testimony about the prowess of her Girls’ Leadership Institute. Nicole Radziwill (2010) finds her authentic self by disconnecting from the internet and media addiction. Anne Kreamer (2009), an immensely successful corporate executive, learns to accept that her authentic self has gray hair and is middle-​aged—​a heroic discovery of surprising grandiosity in light of the aging American population and the fact that most people manage to get older without having to justify it by finding an inner being. Kat James (2003) promises to uncover “your true radiant potential” with dietary supplements. Untold vitality lies within each of us. To connect with it, we must build a sanctuary far from the constant physical and sensory bombardments and life challenges that can take a toll on our inner and outer beauty. In that sacred space, we can rise about the fray, retrace our steps, face eye-​opening fact, and reprogram the mind-​sets that led us to the choices that have kept us from our vital essence. (p. xvii)

James’s assurance of the literal vital essence is accompanied by a “Legal Notice: the health related statements in this book have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” Recalling Christian Science’s radical reliance, Ilchi Lee’s Human Technology (2005) asserts that “every human being is created to be totally self-​sufficient, self-​healing, and self-​sustaining—​and completely capable of total self-​realization in a single lifetime.” In pursuit of authentic self-​ realization, he offers the skills and techniques to activate the “fundamental mechanisms of life” (p. 9). These technologies, many drawn from the “healing arts in northeast Asia,” include acupuncture, acupressure, moxibustion (“the practice of burning small, tightly rolled dried cones of the plant mugwort on or over specific points”; p. 63), breathwork, meditation, exercise, diet, dance, energy sensitivity training, meridian exercises, whole body patting, toe tapping, abdominal clapping, and others. The goal of Human Technology is not simply physical health but spiritual authenticity: “we can only begin to hear the soul’s voice after the sounds of our bodies, thoughts and emotions become softer” (p. 103). Personal awakening is sustained by the principles of suffering, transience, and “no-​ self.” No-​self is an ecstatic escape from the I, a merging of the individual with the eternal and universal, often through fasting and sleep deprivation. Still and all, realizing no-​self does not require a position of meek selflessness: “Knowledge and experience are not who you are. They are simply the ‘I’ that you know and experience… . A great soul creates a road if one cannot be seen” (pp. 109–​10).

Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [12 7]

The business of the authentic quest is accompanied by the business of the personal testimonial to its effectiveness. With no discernible exception the testimonials elaborate the themes of heroic overcoming, personal responsibility, and the quest for the authentic self. These themes conform with the Mormon church’s definition of free agency, a sense of extreme individualism that Bloom (1992) made much of as typifying American religion. We believe that the source of the experience of good and evil is the fall of Adam. The light of Christ entices all individual to choose good. Satan entices all individuals to choose evil. But, existence in a fallen world that is made up of opposites is enough to give agency. There “men are free according to the flesh [because they live], and all things are given them which are expedient unto man” (2 Nephi 2:27). Everyone has been given all that is necessary to choose good or evil. If a person were tied up in a dungeon all his life he would still have moral choice. He could think good thoughts or bad. He could be kind or mean. Like Viktor Frankl taught, he could choose how to respond. No one can take away agency. But we can lose agency through sin. An immoral person may reach the point where he cannot control his thoughts. (emphasis added, letter from Steve Fotheringham, Latter Day Saints Institute instructor, Oct. 23, 2002)

The essential romantic element in this extreme form of agency lies in the notion that the knowledge of good and evil is inborn, the legacy of God, recalling both Freud and Jung’s notion of the unconscious. The quest for authenticity shepherded by Freud and Jung involved psychoanalysis of the unconscious; the quest for American religion lies in seeking the self through acceptance of the inborn Christ. Both quests are intrapsychic, involving constructions known only through faith—​an insistence of the sublime that defines the American distaste for pragmatism. The immensely popular “Chicken Soup” series of books, written to “open the heart and rekindle the spirit,” anthologizes hundreds of testimonials and advice by both prominent individuals and others to their successful quests for authenticity and fulfillment. All seemingly involve intrapsychic searches and individual behaviors; that is, they report individual changes predicated on heroic will rather than changes created by social policy. Their environment is the human will and personal responsibility rather than social structures, economic conditions, and political realities. Most are exemplars of traditional religious faith and the power of love, good citizenship, concerned parenting, insight, and dedication among others, but with hardly a word about the social provisions necessary to nurture these qualities such as good schools, adequate income and jobs, health care and mental health services, and others. After all, they are [12 8 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

testimonies to the inborn ability of people to do the right thing, the power of agency over social provision. This romantic vision provides many of the narratives and themes of popular culture: movies, television dramas and comedies, talk shows, mass market fiction, and the rest. Overcoming obstacles in the Chicken Soup series is only a question of self-​reliance. Frankl, referring to the Nazi concentration camps, recalls that “everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: The last of his freedoms—​to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one’s own way” (Canfield & Hansen, 1993, p. 227). There are many who would dispute the heroic challenge of the extermination camps and argue that bestial circumstances take everything away from people, including responsibility for what they are forced to do and think. To convert the death camps into a moral test of individual will must be viewed as bizarre, if not obscene. The remainder of the testimonials to overcoming obstacles are monotonous paeans to the irresistible, inevitable, unstoppable will: one can achieve any goal by discipline, effort, optimism, determination, “yes, you can,” faith, “everybody can do something,” “failure, no, just temporary setbacks” (pp. 227–​81, passim). The Chicken Soup series of books lack even a hint of limiting circumstances that cast the smallest shadow across the pages of assured individualism; nary a nod to the stunting effects of deprivation, inadequate families, pernicious communities, or bigotry and discrimination; not the weakest skepticism toward the reality of its claims. After all, the goal is inspiration rather than analysis, emotion rather than reason, romanticism rather than pragmatism. In the opening episode of Chicken Soup for the Soul (1993), a university professor followed up on slum children written off as failures 25 years before. He found that 176 of 180 had actually “achieved more than ordinary success as lawyers, doctors and businessmen.” They attributed their success to a single teacher. The teacher was still alive, so [the professor] sought her out and asked the old but still alert lady what magic formula she had used to pull these boys out of the slums into successful achievement. The teacher’s eyes sparkled and her lips broke into a gentle smile. “It’s really very simple,” she said. “I loved those boys.” (p. 4)

Love as the solution to the nation’s problems of public education seems fanciful and unreasonably burdensome as a qualification for teachers. However, it encapsulates a common complaint about teachers that kindles popular support for weakening public education through privatization and underfunding: the convenient insistence that the psychic conditions Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [12 9 ]

of teachers—​their dedication and love—​are more decisive determinants of the educational outcomes of their children than the material conditions of the school system. Under the assumptions of the romantic overcoming the determinative influence of psychic forces, the teacher’s role is distorted from the didactics of a disciplined intellectual engagement with the world to shamanism—​education by epiphany—​which encourages children’s quest for their authentic souls. Lengthy testimonials to the inevitable success of self-​reliance, motivation, and will in achieving authenticity and its rewards are common. Equally common is the refusal of the authors to acknowledge the assistance they received from others or the benefits of their economic and social circumstances. Jane Velez-​Mitchell (2009), hostess of her own television show, became sober, spiritual, and less egocentric through her 12 Step quest for her authentic soul. Inspired largely by religious rebirth, she says, “the Twelve Steps have guided me through a whole maze of mind blowing changes that have formed the true adventure of my life, a journey of self discovery that is still in full throttle” (pp. xix–​x x). Absent from the manuscript, however, and in spite of her claim to selflessness, is a consideration of the circumstances that propelled her to sobriety. Her will and deep religious faith displace the plausible roles that family, a lucrative and engaging job, and biology play in the rare cases where sobriety is achieved. Contrary to her enthusiasm for 12 Step approaches and their popularity, there is little credible evidence that they are successful at achieving sobriety. Yet they are successful as popular ceremonies of the insistence that sobriety is achieved through personal will and that addiction is immoral, rather than a disease or an accommodation to social and psychological circumstances. Such beliefs obviously reduce pressure on public health interventions to handle the problem. Glenn Beck, the former Fox News commentator, realized his authentic soul and “lost about 300 pounds of nastiness, sorrow, sin, ego, addiction, and misery in his life” (Beck & Ablow, 2011, p. 9). How did he do it? Through the predicable experiences of epiphany, faith, courage, common sense, and will, and with the support of family and friends. People are “born with a barometer of truth inside”; they are “the temple of God” and thus they should rely on intuition and common sense (p. 279). In any event, self-​reported successes are quite suspect. A major league baseball player who overcame a career-​threatening injury, R. A. Dickey (2012) recovered to become one of the game’s dominant pitchers. Dickey’s publisher summarizes the book quite accurately even while Dickey probably misses the true causes of his success. Dickey—​sustained by his profound Christian faith, the love of his wife and children, and a relentless quest for self-​awareness and authenticity—​details his transformation [13 0 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

from a reckless, risk-​taking loner to a grounded, life-​a ffirming fan favorite and star. While he views his story as one of redemption, readers will recognize it as something more—​a uniquely American tale of beating back demons, listening to your heart, and overcoming extraordinary odds. (book cover)

With the typical self-​aggrandizing of the athlete’s memoir, Dickey emphasizes his will and ignores the huge role of luck, medicine, coaches, inherent athleticism, family support, and physique. Most people would gladly “be like Mike” (Michael Jordan); unfortunately they are not six feet six inches tall and born with a leopard’s grace and jumping ability. The promises of finding personal authenticity are unsubstantiated. It is however remarkable that they are believed, largely on grounds of emotional individual testimony, to the extent to which the quest for authenticity has become a cultural archetype of the American credo. The quests, though heroic in their promises, are certainly not epic in their demands for self-​sacrifice, discipline, and resources. Rather, they are consistent with a demotic reliance on magical thinking and superstition in pursuit of an easy identity that affirms prevailing preferences and social arrangements. SOCIAL EFFICIENCY, SUPERSTITION AND QUICK AUTHENTICITY

The many quests for authenticity share a common budgetary characteristic: they are all inexpensive and consistent with American custom. That is, they are socially efficient, weighing lightly on public provision by insisting that authenticity is achieved through a personal journey inward. Psychotherapy itself, seemingly expensive, is a very cheap alternative to the provision of greater social and economic equality through enriched public education, jobs programs, health care, and the rest. The quests for authenticity do not entail difficult political or social revolutions, but only revolutions in human consciousness, which have little potential to disrupt the quotidian patterns of American commerce and social life. To the contrary, they assume the virtues of the free market and the family, seeking only voluntary self-​reform. The quest for the authentic soul customarily ends with the virtues of adaptation. In spite of the advertised intransigence of false identity, authenticity is quite easily achieved, and usually by the individual’s decision to conform to traditional idealized authority. As ever, the quest for authenticity in America often returns to another comedy of blithe self-​deception. Embedded policy romanticism gives permission for make-​believe to become anointed social truth. It creates the sacred excuses to impose Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [131]

boundaries, to demand obedience, to stigmatize, marginalize, and exile dissent. These are enacted through ceremony, the units of tradition. The quest for the authentic soul is one of these ceremonies. As faith in the literal existence of spiritual entities, religion is a romantic form, little different from other journeys to discover the immaterial, spiritual world. Romantic religion as practiced through established churches is a conventional social institution in the United States, and the pursuit of the authentic self has become quite mainstream. Indeed, in its form of a quest for the indwelling Christ, it is central to much of Christian dogma and practice. By concentrating on its factual flaws, moral deviousness, and antic romanticism, that is, a quest to a dead end, many of the criticisms of the authenticity business miss its essential social meaning as an accurate depiction of dominant social values. Salerno’s investigative journalism (2005) blames the self-​help movement for costing the nation trillions of dollars and treats self-​help as an alien infection rather than as a native, embedded social value. McGee’s scholarly parsing of the self-​help literature (2005) analyzes its various interpretations but stops short of considering its centrality to American culture. Potter (2010) depicts authenticity “as the most rarefied form of status competition” but stops well short of extending his critique to American society as dominated by the romantic rather than the pragmatic (p. 267). Yet the quest for authenticity is not simply a sign of dissatisfaction with modernity, following Potter and others, but also the simplistic, romantic manner in which Americans wish to handle their angst; it is less serious philosophy and more the anthropology of daily life. Although the critical literature is attentive to the complexity of human self-​reflection implicit in a search for authenticity, it largely ignores the dominant influence and political expressiveness of the demotic, mindless forms the quest has taken. By and large, the thoughtful critiques of self-​help and the pursuit of authenticity are cautionary tales, often warning that the nation is being imperiled by the sham of self-​invention and that uninformed, troubled, and weak citizens are being misled. They miss the representation of the values of the American population in the actual characteristics of the quest for authenticity as it is being carried out, that is, as the American people wish it to be. Psychic self-​help becomes problematic when the only way to measure its effects is through individual satisfaction. In this sense, it is like entertainment rather than art, food rather than nutrition. It has no social function other than the ceremony of affirmation, which is personal in the sense of sustaining belief and institutional by endorsing particular social preferences (in this case the appreciation of romanticism at the cost of pragmatism). Without the embellishments of soul, unconscious, and [13 2 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

spirit and the pretensions of psychological comfort, commercial success, and metaphysical wisdom, the search for the authentic soul and its tour business is reduced to sentimentality, platitudinous moralizing, and the audience that thrives on it. If an authentic soul does exist, it may not be benign, glorious, and Godly; popular metaphysics may misperceive psychic reality and human nature. The authentic soul may be psychopathic and the state of human nature quite hellish. Indeed, the romantic veil may be best understood as denial and hope that the painful experience of the American people with themselves and one another is an illusion and that a more comforting reality rewards the mythic trek inward. The several categories of the search for the authentic self have much in common, differing only in their portal to enlightenment (e.g., religion, self-​help, psychotherapy, etc.), but they usually agree on what needs to be packed for the trip to true being: heroic self-​reliance, inner wisdom, and of course the undiscovered presence of a customarily Divine, biological, or otherwise otherworldly superiority. Yet the quest is a ceremony of belief alone. After all, there is no demonstrable material value in any of it. Even mainstream psychotherapy, despite its many pretensions to scientific method, has failed to adduce credible evidence that any of its interventions are effective even under the most favorable conditions of practice (Epstein, 2006, 1995; Moloney, 2013; Zilbergeld, 1983; Gross, 1978; Masson, 1988); Dufresne, 2000, 2003). The vaunted individualism of self-​help and self-​reliance becomes an Orwellian contradiction in the opera of authenticity—​reality as fantasy, the world as spectral proof. The pursuit of the authentic self is less a journey inward to uniqueness than a face-​saving attempt at social conformity, the acceptance of a series of faith-​based beliefs that rationalize the abandonment of healthy individualism for the comforts of mindless adaptation. Most of the recommended processes begin with an individual’s statement of what he or she really, truly desires and then adopt presumably instrumental steps to that end. However, all of the pursuits assume a particular ethic, eschewing self-​centered hedonism (sex, drugs, and rock and roll). In its place, the credo of authenticity conforms with the conventional American virtues of work, family, self-​reliance, and acceptance of the myths that lead to those ends—​faith in a higher power and gnostic knowing generally, heroic individualism, and chosenness. The literature of the pursuit is essentially escapist, but the danger is less personal than social—​a loud and flashing alert that the society has settled for clairvoyant certitudes. Bram Stoker’s Gothic tale Dracula made no claims on reality. The quest to slay the vampire was only fiction, although with a common Spi r i t u a l i s m , R e l i g i o n , a n d O t h e r R o m a n t i c   Q u e s t s  [13 3 ]

metaphoric message of defeating evil through will and a common appeal through fantasy and horror. Dr. Van Helsing, Stoker’s vampire expert, stands as a rebuke to the guides, pundits, and charlatans of the romantic quest for the authentic soul. In a few superficial regards, they are like the good Dr. Van Helsing: experts in nonexistent threats, in contrived monsters, and in absurd solutions. Yet the authenticity mavens more closely resemble the bloodsuckers that Dr. Van Helsing slayed. They at least had the good taste and civic regard to remain in the pages of a novel.

[13 4 ]   Explaining Social Policy Making

SEC TION   II

Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

CH A P TER   5

Year Up He is a self-​made man and worships his creator. —​Benjamin Disraeli

T

he enormous number and wide range of personal social services in the United States occupy a substantial portion of civil society and materialize the nation’s responses to a variety of social needs. Elusive of definition, personal social services by and large seek to address social and personal problems by changing individual behavior through relatively short interactions with professionals or supervised nonprofessionals and volunteers. They may also offer minimal material assistance of food, clothing, housing, and the like, but their principle effort lies in exhortations of one form or another. Their basic assumption insists that the problem lies in the individual will rather than in the failures of the culture. They include programs based on counseling, mentoring, psychotherapy, case management, supervision, short-​term tutoring, and numerous other personal interventions. It is expected that in an open democratic society such as in the United States, there will be little tension between civil society, government, and business. In fact, the primary political task of a democracy is to harmonize relations between its parts. Naturally, then, social services in the United States, just like other institutions of the society, reflect broadly cherished preferences. Unfortunately, democratic processes do not necessarily come along with generosity, fairness, and concern, but only those values that the society chooses. Reflecting democratic choices, personal social services in the United States are ritual affirmations of embedded policy romanticism more often than pragmatic responses to substantive deprivations.

The personal social services cover numerous social needs with a multitude of public and private initiatives. Customarily they are housed in nonprofit agencies, although many for-​profit agencies contract with publicly funded programs, for example Medicaid, to deliver personal social services such as psychosocial rehabilitation. Quite reasonably as direct expressions of social preferences, personal social services are less frequently points of nurturing philanthropic light than instances of obedience to the nation’s romantic tenets. They rarely achieve their material ends of poverty reduction, education, skills training, dropout reduction, and abstinence, as examples. Most frequently, they simply cerenmonalize democratic populism expressed as policy romanticism: personal responsibility for social and economic failure that often encourages social service agencies to hasten the individual’s search for their authentic selves, the glowing certainty of the nation’s specialness, and all certified through epiphanies of correctness. The evaluations of personal social services are routinely misleading and inconsequential, better understood as clever public relations than serious social science, as professions of virtue rather than instances of programmatic success, and as instances of gnostic certainty, heroic individualism, and chosenness. Praising Year Up in Focus, a journal of the prestigious Institute for Research on Poverty, Heinrich characterizes the program as an “innovative and viable model for helping urban young adults gain access to the job market” (Heinrich, 2012–​13, p. 13). The model offers skills training in information technology and investment operations and mentoring for disadvantaged, usually minority, youths between 18 and 24 with the intention of closing the “opportunity gap.” Year Up argues that the opportunity gap is created for poor minorities through social stereotypes, frank bigotry, and lack of mentoring and education to develop technical, social, and other marketable skills. Because poor and marginalized people are frequently isolated from the informal information and relationships that enhance access to employment, Year Up provides entry to internships and jobs through the program’s relationships with many large companies, at the same time that the program builds the youths’ self-​confidence to handle the often-​a lien corporate subcultures. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION AND EVALUATION

The Year Up model of mentoring and skills training includes a rigorous admissions process with a series of interviews to identify the motivated, resilient, and presumably talented; a performance contract with every trainee; six months of technical skills training, regularly updated to [13 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

meet the needs of the program’s corporate partners; “training in written and verbal communication appropriate for business; opportunities to earn college credit; “a six-​month internship with some of the top companies in each region to help young people build their skills, professional experience and networks; a weekly stipend during the classroom internship phases that is tied to the performance contract”; an extensive array of emotional support, guidance, and mentoring from staff, professionals, and supervisors through weekly group meetings and frequent individual meetings; and quite notably “assistance with the job search process and/​or college enrollment upon program completion” (Roder & Elliott, 2011, pp. 3–​4). The program claims that it invests $24,562 in every participant, of which $8,481 is spent to sustain the national office and operating costs (e.g., rent), fundraising, and administration (p. 2). Most of the program’s revenue is derived from the participants’ internships and contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations (p. 19). Year Up hired the Economic Mobility Corporation (EMC) to evaluate its performance through a randomized experimental design.1 Among those acceptable to the program, 135 youths were enrolled in Year Up and 60 were placed on a waiting list, constituting a temporary control. The controls were eligible to enroll in the program after 10 months. At least superficially, the outcomes of the EMC evaluation suggest that Year Up is modestly successful. In the fourth year, after random assignment (the third postprogram year), the 102 Year Up participants (an attrition rate of 24%) earned an average of $19,191 compared with an average of $17,257 the 41 members of the control group earned (32% attrition), a difference that works out to about $37 per week. In the third postprogram year, the average hourly wage of Year Up participants was $14.21 and $11.70 for controls. The third postprogram year earnings differential represents a substantial decline over the three postprogram years, falling from $6,504 in the first to $1,934 in the third. The differentials in the third postprogram year were much higher for the 34% of Year Up participants who obtained

1. “The Economic Mobility Corporation [Mobility] identifies, develops and evaluates programs and policies that enable disadvantaged individuals to acquire the education, skills and networks needed to succeed in the labor market so that they can support themselves and their families” (Economic Mobility Corporation n.d.). Mobility, based in New York City, is composed in the modern manner—​private and public funding, a board of prominent academics and professionals, an experienced staff—​following the experience of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), the Urban Institute, and numerous other university and nonprofit groups committed to state-​of-​t he-​a rt contract social research and evaluations of social welfare programs. However, it does not seem to do the same quality research, although it follows popular trends with the same assiduousness. Y e a r Up  [13 9 ]

jobs in information technology and financial operations. Moreover, 73% of Year Up participants and 53% of controls were attending college at the end of the study (all data from Roder & Elliot, 2011). Appearances are often misleading. Numerous problems of design and inference limit both the reported success of Year Up and its general ability to close the opportunity gap for poor minority youths. Much to its credit, EMC used a randomized experimental design to evaluate Year Up, including the intent to treat (analyzing outcomes of all participants, not just those who finished the program).2 A randomized design protects but does not ensure the ability to attribute measured outcomes to the program itself and not extraneous events. However, numerous defects of the design undercut its credibility. First and most serious, the evaluation breached its basic design logic by allowing control group members to enlist in the program after 10 months. One third of controls did in fact enroll in Year Up, and they outperformed all other groups, notably the initial group of Year Up participants. In the third postprogram year the average earnings of the controls who entered Year Up were $27,761, compared with $13,364 for nonparticipating controls and $17,257 for randomized Year Up participants. But this is not surprising since the controls who entered Year Up were presumably the most motivated even within the study’s elite sample of highly motivated youths, while the Year Up averages are depressed by the less-​motivated and those who were selected for the program but dropped out and were lost to the analysis. However, the crucial point is that allowing controls to enter the program during the followup years prevents the evaluation from making credible assessments of the program’s impact; there is no true control group. The evaluation makes an evasive statement of the problem in the text. In fact, 29  percent of the control group members in our final sample returned to participate in Year Up during the second and third years after random assignment, which complicates our ability to assess program effects without compromising the experimental design. (p. 6)

2. To its credit, Year Up is participating in Projectisis.com, a randomized evaluation of career pathway programs funded by the federal government. Year Up represents eight of the evaluation’s 18 sites. Unfortunately, Year Up’s high selectivity circumscribes the ability to generalize any positive finding. Although apparently more sophisticated than the previous evaluations of Year Up, Project ISIS is still hampered by a number of problems such as likely attrition, especially in the controls, constituting a “randomization bias”; measurement challenges; relatively short-​term follow up; and others. Moreover, by addressing only limited compensatory programs, Projectisis.com sustains the longstanding popular decision to avoid deep investments in repairing failing social institutions. [14 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

Yet acknowledgment of the full problem is buried an appendix: “It is not possible to estimate the effect of the treatment on those treated experimentally” (p. 25). In short, there is no credible nonprogram group against which to measure the effects of Year Up. Additional problems further erode confidence in the research. Year Up justifies itself as relevant to the enormous number of minority youths stranded in the opportunity gap, but its program enrolls only a highly select group of youths with backgrounds that attest to their special motivation and success in overcoming obstacles. Year Up reports that 89% graduated from high school and the remainder earned GEDs; 90% had substantial prior work experience, and 84% were living with a parent or guardian. The screening process is intense—​initial application, open house, return invitation for group interview, one-​on-​one interview, final decision. Among the initial pool of inquiries—​a screen itself for the motivated—​only about one in 10 is offered a position at Year Up. The screening process is designed to identify those who will adapt well to a corporate setting: highly motivated, collegial, affable, and appropriately dressed, with interpersonal awareness and adequate academic skills. The screening process eliminates those whose lack of income, ill health, homelessness, or family responsibilities would interfere with their ability to complete the program. A panel of Year Up staff including the interviewers makes the final selection. Thus Year Up tests its effectiveness only on motivated, skilled, and advantaged youths while ignoring the opportunity gap for dropouts, troubled youths, and otherwise disadvantaged young people. Year Up is a demonstration that professes the relevance and replicability of its interventions. However, demonstration personnel are often unusually motivated and capable, which is why they are hired in the first place. They are not like the customary work-​weary, often-​discouraged professionals who end up staffing out programs after their days in the sun. The demonstration situation itself is unusual, customarily surrounded by broad social interest spotlighting staff and enhancing their careers and presumably also their motivation to succeed. Further, Year Up’s modest employment gains, such as they were measured, may be attributed more to the program’s aggressive job search and placement successes and to its rapport with large corporations than to its training and mentoring efforts. After all, Year Up does not create jobs; it only sponsors its trainees for existing internships or employment. A more thoroughgoing evaluation would attempt to identify those who did not get the placements that Year Up graduates occupy. Was a comfortable middle-​class candidate displaced, as suggested in the program material,

Y e a r Up  [141]

or to the contrary did the Year Up participant simply occupy an existing slot that a corporation dedicates to minority youth at risk? There are still more problems with the program and its evaluation. The data on employment were collected by Year Up staff (presumably from participants) and by a survey firm (presumably from nonparticipants). The evaluation design did not ensure blinding; that is, the program staff were aware of who was in the program and who was in the control group, which opens the door to unreliable reporting, first due to the natural desire of staff to seek out evidence that supports the effectiveness of the program and second by participants to show that they succeed. The evaluation made no apparent effort to validate the earnings reports. Additionally, attrition was substantial in the control group—​27%, but 36% among 18-​and 19-​year-​olds—​but only 11% overall among program participants (except that the attrition rate by the fourth year had reached a sizable 24% as noted above). EMC’s argument that those who dropped out were demographically similar to those who remained does not explain why they left, or sustain the possibility that attrition may have been random. Indeed, the fact that participants and wait-​listed enrollees dropped out raises unanswered questions about the representativeness of the final samples, especially in light of considerable attrition. Finally, some of the important findings regarding earnings differential are only marginally significant statistically; the .10 level of significance is more convenient than definitive. In the end, Year Up and EMC do not conform to the requirements for credible evaluation of manpower programs that have been detailed for decades (Manski & Garfinkel, 1992). The Year Up website boasts about its media coverage, including a 60 Minutes segment, but does not back up its celebrity with credible evidence of effectiveness. Serious program evaluations are not reported exclusively on websites of contract evaluation firms such as EMC. They are published in prestigious peer-​reviewed journals and authored by independent evaluators. If a program evaluation is to pass the scrutiny of qualified reviewers and gain entry into prestigious professional journals, then it needs to incorporate sophisticated protections against alternative explanations of its findings created by bias, unreliable measures, unrepresentative samples, undue attrition, and so forth. The fact that few evaluations establish credible outcomes does not justify finding virtue for questionable programs in debased research. The EMC evaluation lacks accurate data, representative samples, customary conditions of service, and viable comparisons to ground experimental outcomes. Despite EMC’s evaluation, Year Up’s telling success is ceremonial more than substantive. It does not offer a generally applicable

[14 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

model for mobility, income insufficiency, or inequality, but it does conform to the quintessential tenets of American policy romanticism.

YEAR UP RECONSIDERED

Year Up does not exist because of programmatic prowess in closing the opportunity gap. The tenuousness of its reported success is not obscured by the magic of advanced statistical manipulation and recondite methods. All of the deficiencies of its evaluation and the limitations of its program model are manifest. Even Heinrich, a true Year Up cheerleader, pointed to the probable unsuitability of the program for the bulk of deprived youth: “the evaluation results may only generalize to the more motivated group of young adults typically selected for the intervention, not to the larger population of disadvantaged youth” (2012–​13, p. 16). And because of the study’s faulty methods, Year Up may not even benefit the motivated. Indeed, Year Up’s social role is better explained by myth making than by EMC’s technical description of its operations and the narrow interpretation by Heinrich. The project’s most notable publication is a mass market book by the program’s founder, which describes the history of the program, including lengthy autobiographic passages. Not surprisingly, he found his calling to serve disadvantaged youth early on as a Big Brother, another voluntary social service program that claims great effectiveness on the basis of a similarly impaired evaluation of its effectiveness (Valentino & Wheeler 2013). Gerald Chertavian’s A Year Up:  Rediscovering American and the Talent Within: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs with Real Success (2012) is a passionate defense of the program that proceeds through numerous case examples and the tragic backdrop of the opportunity divide separating the haves from the have-​nots. Eschewing false modesty, Chertavian throughout presents himself as the quintessential new humanitarian—​committed, wise, clear-​eyed, data-​ based, and honest—​a personification of the nation’s majestic spirit, its chosenness. The young adults he met had immense talent; yet all too often they were stranded outside the economic mainstream. Chertavian saw that when given a fair chance, with challenging standards and high support, these young people could accomplish anything. In 2000, he dedicated his life and business expertise to closing the Opportunity Divide, and Year Up was born. (book jacket)

Y e a r Up  [14 3 ]

Gerald Chertavian styles himself a “successful businessman and a social entrepreneur,” one of the “newer breed of nonprofit executives who tackle stubborn social problems with workable business strategies” (p.  6). He takes pride in the mobility of his father, an immigrant dentist from Armenia, who raised his family in working-​class Lowell, Massachusetts, and his mother, who stayed home to care for the children. The paradox of the program seems to lie at the hypocritical heart of romantic social welfare policy. Chertavian devotes considerable space to the broad institutional failures of the nation—​“the new inequality … the racial gap … the rising costs of institutional inequality … lack of opportunity … chronic unemployment …”—​and the ostensible reasons for the problems, which point to inadequate education from preschool through higher education, insufficient jobs, racism, classism, lack of adequate income support, and so forth. Yet in the face of these systemic problems, Chertavian’s enthusiasm and talents are lavished on a limited, vocational program restricted to the most obedient and talented of poor minority youth. Most telling, Chertavian attributes the success of the program to the strong character of the participants—​perseverance, hard work, and buoyancy—​as well as his own civic nobility. Disraeli captured the mood pungently as vanity. However, Chertavian’s autobiographical revelations demonstrate that he was not at all self-​made but rather the product of considerable investment in both formal and informal education, and of an economically comfortable environment, as well as the beneficiary of a caring family and community. Had he perceived his own experiences more accurately as a systemic success and less ideologically as romantic self-​invention, Year Up’s short and minimal attempt to compensate for decades of deprivation might not have seemed so reasonable. Chertavian relies on insight to identify what is needed to close the opportunity gap for worthy youth. The program is a monument to Chertavian’s sense of citizenship and self-​actualization, which illuminates the grim corners of American society, and gives tribute to his many corporate sponsors. In defiance of his own autobiography, he builds the case for Year Up on selected examples of its participating youths, whose reported successes are offered as emotional witnessing to redemptive transformation—​v irtue rewarded, a lost soul saved. These students were invited to help narrate our story… . If anything stood out about them during their first week with us, it was the sheer determination they showed in just getting themselves to our door. (p. 15) Devon’s mom, cherished by all, gave birth to four sons by age nineteen and then with her husband had two more sons. She died very young. “When my mom passed away

[14 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

I got in my mind that I don’t care anymore. I was depressed … I didn’t want anybody to see me.” (p. 30) Devon’s earth angels pulled him from the brink; the friend he had been talking to on Skype called his spiritual mentor, a man from church, who called and thundered at Devon, “You are not going to kill yourself. You know where that will land your soul… .” (p. 30) Damien [Devon’s twin] and I  were doing nothing after high school. Not working, nothing. Not caring about family or church. Going down was all. Our brother heard about Year Up through his mentor, who works for the city or something. Jean-​Luc [a younger brother] said, “you’ve gotta do this.” It was just a week to the application deadline, and he said, “You just got to. Pull yourself up, Devon. Pull yourself up.” (p. 31)

And so forth, with numerous other tales following a similar script of challenge and overcoming through personal heroism with the assistance of Year Up. Each is a tribute to awakened personal responsibility and self-​ motivation, but, too, most of the short descriptions of participants speak to the presence of extensive emotional and family support and even some material resources, which may explain the unusual resilience of the youths. The accuracy of Chertavian’s little stories of plucky youths who luck out with Year Up is not as important as the fact that they reflect the author’s sense of the society. Indeed, Chertavian’s book seems very sensitive to mass market sensibilities. It hints at a professional hand in crafting its arguments and choosing its language. The book, the author, and the presentation of Year Up are as premeditated, scripted, edited, and tested as television shows, movies, commercials, and political campaigns. The effusions and enthusiasms surrounding the program are well practiced and rehearsed, like soap operas. And like soap operas they constitute cherished mythic tales, allegories of American values, and even the folklore of contemporary society. The portraits of Year Up participants and Chertavian’s claims that they are representative of the vast pool of need contradict the very function of the initial screening process to identify exceptionally motivated and capable young people. If anything, the success of participants in the face of reported challenges is testimony more to their resilience than to their representativeness. At the same time, the EMC studies demonstrate the selectivity of the program. Still, Chertavian rejects the fact that Year Up “creams” amenable applicants from an ocean of need. If there is one thing that gets this mild-​mannered social entrepreneur into a decidedly unsociable state, it’s the suggestion that our graduates are so exceptional, our success rates so above the curve, that we must “cream” our admissions pool and accept those most likely to make it through. Nothing could be further from the truth. (p. 14)

Y e a r Up  [14 5 ]

Chertavian also ignores the ability of Year Up’s placements by themselves to explain the program’s reported advantages. Indeed the differentials between participants and controls (such as they are) may well be accounted for by the jobs and internships that the program provides. Keep in mind too, that the controls were successful Year Up applicants put on a waiting list, and those who switched over to Year Up after 10 months performed stunningly well, again suggesting an intake process that creams the most motivated. Chertavian’s insistence on the representativeness of participants is a heroic contradiction of his claim to be data-​driven. This transcendence of reality in the context of American belief is applauded as a demonstration of faith in the nation’s sublime chosenness, its spiritual uniqueness, which resides in all citizens as if it were an archetype of a collective unconscious that needs to be pursued through quests of authenticity. In this regard, Year Up guides the quest, an Esalen Institute for the conventional. The successful Year Up participant bears witness to the truth of American romanticism; the failures are demonstrations of recalcitrant bad character, which pays homage to the need for continuing quests. The model was written centuries ago in the texts and charters of missionary evangelism and reinforced by the common pietistic style of the American religion (Bloom 1992). Contrary to the defining commitments of Chertavian and the Economic Mobility Corporation, Year Up seems disconnected from the grand purpose of decreasing economic inequality and the opportunity divide in the United States. Chertavian pointedly rejects a systemic approach to the opportunity gap and inequality. He seeks funding from corporate philanthropy, but he does not approach the corporate sector or its prominent charitable arms such as New Profit with a message that, in the end, only public moneys will be sufficient to repair the deficits of the educational and vocational systems of the nation, or to scold them for their own lax commitment to Affirmative Action. Rather, he insists that good-​hearted business people with advanced managerial skills will be able to finesse enormous material inequities with small, piece-​meal efforts such as Year Up. Companies that hope to do well by doing good are getting another option as the largest division of the world’s largest agency holding group forms a practice devoted to advertising efforts that include cause-​related marketing, sustainability and corporate social responsibility, which are aimed not only at consumers but also at employees, policy makers, thought leaders and Wall Street… . A daunting challenge in developing cause-​related campaigns is public skepticism about the sincerity of the advertisers and whether they are more interested in doing well than doing good. A  vocabulary has even sprung up to describe ads [14 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

deemed inauthentic or hypocritical: “greenwashing,” for environmental ads; “pinkwashing,” for breast cancer and other ads about women’s health; “rainbowwashing,” for ads aimed at consumers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. (Elliott, 2014, p. B6)

As previously noted, charitable and philanthropic giving in the United States represents a fraction of both the annual budget of the federal government and its welfare budget, while probably less than 10% of donations are devoted to poorer populations. Especially in light of the market sector’s aversion to increased taxes, government remains the only instrument of policy with access to the necessary funds to address any widespread problem. On his part, Chertavian is a sedulous apostle of the market and corporate kindness who carefully avoids addressing the necessity for government action. For him, the apotheosis of a response to social need is voluntary and spiritual, as attentive to the nobility of the giver as to the charitable act itself. His is a personal calling, an epiphany of civic responsibility, a mystical transformation of motive, a successful quest for the authentic soul. Yet without pressing for adequate public funding, heavily promoted social service programs such as Year Up are povertywashing. A question remains: If Chertavian’s own success is a natural outcome of patient and generous investment within a caring environment, then why shouldn’t Year Up youths and those who are deprived generally get the same? The provision of jobs and internships for a few hundred presumably deprived and carefully screened minorities contrasts sharply with repairing the daunting institutional imperfections—​school, family, community, and economy—​that create so much failure. The reality is of a terribly flawed educational system in the United States affecting many millions of poor people, but also the middle classes. In 2013, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveyed adult skills in 24 industrial countries including Russia, Spain, Northern Ireland, and Cyprus. The United States ranked dead last in many crucial measures of educational attainment, including literacy among 16-​to-​65-​year-​olds, mean proficiency in literacy among 18-​to-​ 24-​year-​olds, numeracy, and many others, and close to last in most of the remaining measures related to educational skills. Although the United States contains at least 18 of the 25 top-​rated universities in the world, the survey suggests that the average performance of American college graduates is worrisome. The United States fared little better in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which unlike the OECD study included many developing nations. In PISA’s survey of 15-​year-​olds in 69 countries, the United States was tied with Lithuania and Hungary below the middle in math proficiency and a bit above the middle in science Y e a r Up  [147]

proficiency, reading proficiency, and problem solving (Selected Findings from PISA, 2012). This reality should worry anyone who believes—​as many economists do—​that America’s long-​term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as more jobs are exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be increasingly difficult to believe that only our K-​12 schools have serious problems. (Carey, 2014, p. SR3)

Year Up detracts from the extensive educational and employment deficits of the society. In defiance of systemic problems, Chertavian’s exit line from his book is a call for personal commitment—​“Become part of the opportunity movement … volunteer … invest … advocate” (2012, pp. 315–​16)—​but not a word about public responsibility realized through broad government investments offering consistent professional services rather than hit-​and-​miss volunteer efforts. There are many ways in which you can help Year Up close the Opportunity Divide… . Creating opportunity for our students requires multiple layers of support. As a professional mentor, you can help prepare our students to navigate the business world. As a student or professional, you can become a math or communications tutor, impacting students’ academic performance during the program and beyond… . There are other ways to become involved, including guest speaking and conducting mock interviews. (p. 341)

Year Up and similar social services are hardly marginal or unintended. Chertavian’s acknowledgments—​a roster and paean to corporate America, volunteerism, and the rolodex of his philanthropic prominence—​are a profound statement of the popular will. The United States cherishes these kinds of little self-​deceptions. The attachment to a romantic ideal of voluntarism—​the self-​actualizing will as the giving soul—​displaces the need for extensive public action. The civic culture and private commerce are prized over government, that is, publicly mandated collective action. It is a choice that the American masses have made. Year Up testifies in program design, execution, evaluation, and continuation to the embedded romantic tenets of popular belief rather than to the program’s pragmatic goals. Clearly, Year Up favors assertive, mannered, and intelligent minority youths. In the wider context of American choice, this preference for the scholarship student, the gifted, and the easy winner implies that the shy, the average, and the slow, those without outstanding natural talents, and the complacent are not worth attention. The United States prefers to forget in the rush to economic efficiency that they [14 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

also have the capacity for good citizenship, social contributions, and pleasure. They, too, are members of the civic culture. American society disparages the run of people with common problems and with predictable deficits for being a drag on the splendid unfolding of the national destiny as the ideal of civilization. They apparently fail the test of heroic individualism for remaining poor and human in their frailties and defiantly inattentive to their authentic, indwelling virtues. Rather than jobs, education, and surrogate arrangements for absent family and protections against predatory communities, American social welfare allots counseling to them—​moral exhortation, preaching—​preferably in large groups led by inexpensive, intuitive staff who are socially compatible with the subspecies of citizen and can provide mentorship of the successful. By refusing to promote his own social advantages for the Year Up youths and for the populations from which they are drawn, Chertavian implicitly endorses the race and class divides of the United States. In this sense, Year Up preforms in the narrowest role of highly discretionary private charity to repair the rare injustices of the free market system; the program performs as a bulwark against the moral hazards of broad public entitlements to service. Presumably public welfare creates public dependency—​pauperism—​by rewarding, among other vices, laziness, divorce, and fatherless children who the mothers cannot support. The few highly selected beneficiaries of programs such as the Year Up become the ethical norm, the social standard to judge those too poor to purchase a social position in American comfort or a pew in the nation’s communion. It is worth considering more broadly that as an institutionalized expression of policy romanticism, American philanthropy through programs such as Year Up evangelizes the justice of class and race differences, and the distributive fairness of the American marketplace. Yet closing the opportunity divide is not the point of the program. In a pragmatic society concerned that its social arrangements achieve material, measurable purposes, Year Up would not last long; nor would it be allowed to waste money on needlessly weak evaluations. However, the United States is a romantic society rather than a pragmatic one. Its social welfare arrangements are justified through gnostic insights that sustain the nation’s belief in an extreme individualism rather than through the tough scrutiny of scientifically credible evaluation. Even more threatening to the pretenses of decency, Year Up in the manner of many personal social services takes pride in the ability to reward the provident but luckless—​in this case, assertive youths who have finished high school, have a record of work, live with their parents, and pass the other, discretionary tests of social compatibility that the program employs to Y e a r Up  [14 9 ]

screen applicants—​while ignoring the vast portion of poor youths who are by default assumed to be irresponsible, lazy, wayward, unambitious, and dumb. If indeed these sorts of limited, inexpensive programs could compensate for decades of deprivation, then the enormous sums spent on intense, lengthy education for privileged populations are mistargeted and unnecessary. If this were true, then in pursuit of social parsimony, education for the general population should be reduced to the bare bones of slum schools with the confidence that deserving youths will eventually be made whole through the balm of limited programs such as Year Up and their own inherent goodness, ambition, and ability to invent themselves. But in fact, Year Up does not succeed, and its minimalist provisions cannot respond to the needs of the millions of youths who have been deprived of good schools, attentive parents, and nurturing communities. Moreover, Year Up does not create jobs but only increases the labor pool of qualified workers. At best it may provide a leg up for a very small number of needy youths, but at the expense of others—​a bit more equality but without fairness or heart. If anything, Year Up and similar incarnations of voluntarism and the commercial spirit signal the business sector’s ceremonial use of Affirmative Action. If indeed corporate America was sincere about compensating for prior discrimination with their own hiring and training programs, there would be no need for Year Up. In this sense too, Year Up continues the superficial commitment of the society to repair serious inequalities. Embodying a mythic obligation to affirm heroic individualism as the essence of civic virtue and personal value, Year Up mandates participants to embark on the quest for authenticity through mentoring and training en route to employment. Yet the myth of Year Up defines one of its most enduring attractions. It is inexpensive and highly selective, in the end a very efficient way to certify the nation’s chosenness without disrupting customary social arrangements, without redefining the relationship among people, and notably without transferring great amounts of assets and income to those in need. Chertavian’s book documents the immense effort of time, caring, and resources that went into his development; he obviously did not invent himself. Yet he propagates the essence of American policy romanticism through Year Up:  that character (assertiveness, sociability, hard work, etc.) created by individual will rather than the material conditions of education, family, and community justifies the stratification of American society. It is the great hypocrisy of American society to believe in character as self-​w illed—​a gnostic event of mystical impenetrability—​but to act as though it were a purchased credential. In a reward system redundant with [15 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

investment, poorer people, whose deficits are taken as signs of bad character, are denied resources at the same time that resources investments are lavished on more privileged groups with assurance of creating good character. The contradiction is reconciled by the romantic imagination, made immune to inconsistency by a sublime moral complacency. Year Up is a benevolence of romantic unreason, the entrepreneurial invention of those who benefited from the society’s deep investments but call themselves self-​made.

Y e a r Up  [15 1]

CH A P TER   6

Communities in Schools

C

ommunities in Schools (CIS) repeats the experience of the personal social services with a flourish of stubborn deception that is typical of the philanthropic sector. CIS announces itself as the largest program to handle the nation’s very serious problem of school dropout. It attempts to coordinate existing community services and perhaps add small amounts of additional resources. It claims to draw on the services of 5,000 professionals in 25 states. The program was the inspiration of Bill Milliken, its founder, who revealed his calling in two prominently endorsed books. In the manner of successful philanthropic endeavors, its board is constructed with prestigious representatives of the corporate world. CIS repeats the basic characteristics of American personal social services—​a minimalist approach to a serious social problem; exaggerated, deceptive claims to success; and programmatic failure. CIS, just like other social welfare programs, is ceremonial philanthropy that exists not as a serious attempt to fulfill its defining material function but rather to proselytize policy romanticism. In the manner of other social services that obscure their failures, CIS may actually intensify the problem of school dropout by offering false assurances of progress to a complacent nation, and by relying on a haze of volunteer efforts rather than greater public investment. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

CIS promises participating schools a process and services to improve educational outcomes, in particular those leading to retention and graduation. Each school identifies student barriers to success and provides services that presumably address these problems. Two types of services

are provided:  schoolwide and individual. The “short-​term whole-​school services that are provided to all students, regardless of their risk for developing serious problems … [include] presentations and assemblies, motivational speakers, and health fairs” (ICF International, vol. 1, p. 27). Individual services are more intense—​“targeted and sustained interventions provided for specific students over a period of time” based on individual student needs (p. 21). These services include “one-​on-​one academic tutoring, linkages to legal or medical resources, and substance abuse or anger management counseling” as well as professional mental health services, college and career preparation, family engagement, and life skills training, among others (p. 27; Communities in Schools, 2014). The personal, intensive services are apparently offered through case management, a process of individual supervision, accountability, planning, and evaluation. Most CIS schools provide both kinds of service while a small number of schools provide one type or the other. CIS’s Spring 2014 National Impact Report states that the program “reached 1.3  million students in 375 school districts” through 2,250 schools at every level; more than 80% of the 128,482 case managed students were black or Latino.1 CIS creates “community partnerships” with local organizations and volunteers to offer services to the schools:  “In 2012–​2013, 41,758 volunteers worked with affiliates across the country … [to deliver] more than 1.4 million hours of service across all sites, an estimated value of $31,127,467” (p. 5).2 CIS is clear about its role and its success. The following statements are excerpted from CIS’s national website and that of the CIS program in Nevada run by the National Board chairman, Elaine Wynn. For more than 30 years, Communities In Schools has been helping students achieve in school, graduate and go on to bright futures. Our mission is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. The story of Communities In Schools began in the 1970s, when Founder Bill Milliken, then a youth advocate in New York City, came up with the idea of bringing community resources inside public schools—​where they are accessible, coordinated and accountable… . And that’s exactly what Communities In Schools does… . Independent research demonstrates that Communities In Schools is one of the very few organizations proven to keep students in school and the only one to document that it increases graduation rates. The study also shows that a higher percentage

1. The Five Year Summary Report lists 3,400 schools and 1.2 million students. 2. CIS applies the Independent Sector estimate of the volunteer hour at $22.14 for 2012. At best the estimate is inflated and self-​serving. It is arrived at with little concern for representativeness or accuracy. C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [15 3 ]

of students served by Communities In Schools reach proficiency in 4th-​g rade and 8th-​g rade reading and math. (Communities in Schools of Nevada, n.d.) PROGRAM EVALUATION

CIS hired ICF International, a large for-​profit consultant, research, and technical support firm, to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and compile the findings in a series of reports. ICF conducted longitudinal evaluations of CIS based on a quasi-​experiment of four cohorts of students in seven states that began in 1999 and ended in 2005. CSI also instituted three small sample randomized experiments in Austin, Wichita, and Jacksonville, along with parallel surveys and eight case studies developed through site visits. CIS relies most heavily on the findings from the quasi-​ experiment for evidence of its effectiveness. The quasi-​experiment reported that after three years of CIS services, the CIS schools outperformed the matched non-​CIS schools on a range of important measures: higher graduation rate (1.7%); lower dropout rate (2.0%); better attendance in elementary school (0.1%), middle school (0.3%), and high school (0.3%); and higher achievement in grade 4 math (2.2%), grade 8 math (2.0%), and grade 10 math (0.4%). However, CIS performed worse than comparison schools in reading achievement at the three grade levels, in each case less than one percentage point. Presumably, none of these changes are statistically significant and all are insubstantial (ICF International, 2008, p. 80). 3 The quasi-​experiment also provided a multitude of additional findings across their many measures, which consistently depicted insubstantial differences between CIS schools and relevant comparison groups that were usually not statistically significant. ICF compared a small sample (30) of CIS schools that faithfully implemented the CIS model with an even smaller sample (17) of CIS schools that only partially implemented the model and with their matched non-​ CIS schools. These comparisons presumably underwrite “definitive statements about the CIS process and the relationship between this process and outcomes” (p.  10). The subsample of those that faithfully implemented the model and the subsample of those that only partially implemented the model usually contained only about 35 schools and about 20 3. Most of the statistically significant findings in the report are pre-​post comparisons, that is, the gains made by CIS schools over the three years of the experiment. However, CIS’s claim to success is predicated on differences between CIS and non-​CIS schools, and these were routinely not statistically significant since the CIS school gains were discounted by the gains in non-​CIS schools. The claim that nonsignificant differences “provide support for CIS’s effectiveness” is simply misleading. The more accurate statement is that effectiveness was not substantiated. [15 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

schools respectively. The “schools that implemented the CIS model with fidelity were 3.6% more likely to keep students in school than their comparison schools” (p.  31). The partial implementers improved only 1.5% over non-​CSI schools in keeping students in school. Compared with their non-​CIS schools, high-​implementing CIS schools improved graduation by 4.8%, one of the rare statistically significant findings. ICF also compared the services provided by a small sample (25) of higher-​performing CIS schools with a small sample (10) of lower-​ performing schools. Apparently the former provide more services of each type than the latter. However, higher-​performing schools seemingly concentrated their resources on needier students. Higher-​performing schools provided schoolwide services to 23.7% of their students and concentrated services on 19.7% of their students; lower-​performing schools provided 42.6% of their students with schoolwide services and 34.7% with individual services (ICF International, 2008). It is notable that “behavioral services” targeted on presumably a small number of students averaging 244.8 hours for each in higher-​performing schools are by far the most intense service provided by any class of CIS schools.4 The CIS research fails to sustain its claims of “proven results” (Communities in Schools, n.d.-​b). The invalidating pitfall of the quasi-​ experiment lies in its basic logic. The quasi-​experiment developed comparisons by matching schools that voluntarily participated in CIS with schools that did not. ICF states that their process of selecting comparison schools produced comparability that was improved by employing “propensity score matching.” Yet the CIS schools were obviously more motivated to provide quality education than the comparisons; after all, they agreed to participate in CIS and may have even sought out other resources in addition to CIS. The technique of propensity score matching cannot control for “unobserved covariates,” in this case motivation and demonstration effects.5 The problem of motivation is likely to affect the performance of CIS schools while the CIS staff is aware of participating in a special study, 4.  “Behavioral services” include anger management, gang intervention, substance abuse prevention and intervention, social and life skills development, leadership skills development and training, and truancy prevention. As expressions of efforts at counseling, mentoring, psychotherapy, empowerment, and the like, they are routinely ineffective. Indeed, few of the less-​concrete services that CIS provides enjoy any record of success (see note in Chapter 1). 5. Propensity scoring is a way “to adjust for random selection differences,” but the differences between CIS schools and non-​CIS schools was, as noted, probably not random at all (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell 2002, p. 306). According to Shadish et al., “The goal [of propensity scoring] is to include all variables that play a role in the selection process (including interactions and other nonlinear terms …)” (p. 163). However, the CIS research failed to adjust for motivation or it seems the organizational context of the schools including budgets, outside services, quality of staff, and so forth. C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [15 5 ]

an experimental demonstration of the value of their program. During the relatively short period of an experiment, participants are likely to be highly motivated, and not least because they are more closely evaluated. The matched schools that constituted the control were not motivated to join CIS; nor did they participate in the special conditions of the experiment’s oversight. Moreover, the ICF criteria for matching schools did not include budgets, teacher and administrator skill, the school environment, and additional draws on off-​budget service expenditures (e.g., other community services for students that did not appear in the school budget or services that CIS accounted for). Thus, the positive findings, insubstantial and insignificant as they are, might well be explained by variations in the spirit of service and efforts on the part of the schools to provide quality education as well as by demonstration effects. Most telling, the insubstantial differences may also suggest that motivation without substantial resources is quite inadequate to address serious student deficits. Various additional problems with the quasi-​experiment continue to undercut any assurances of CIS’s effectiveness. The research as it appeared on its website apparently did not include systematic reports on the reliability of its data. This problem is notable concerning the CIS services; crucial information is absent relating to their quality and the fidelity of their delivery (that is, whether in fact they were delivered as intended). In particular, the value of volunteer services is not evaluated directly; contrary to CIS assumption that the volunteers’ efforts are worth more than $22 per hour, the performance of volunteers is often inconsistent and generally a poor substitute for professional care. Hours of service are an imperfect measure of intensity, especially without observational descriptions of the delivered service. Although the process for allocating services is case-​managed for the individual student, it is not clear how many of the services are delivered to groups. Moreover, it is unclear whether the average hours of service reported per student cover one year, the three years of the experiment, or some other time period. Presumably, the average represents those served rather than all students in the school, though this is not clear. Still, the experience with the services is collected only from the small subsamples of higher-​performing and lower-​performing schools. Moreover, ICF measured graduation and retention by the number of students enrolled at each level, which fails to account for transfers, in particular those that may have increased the numbers in CIS schools; the proper but more difficult and costlier procedure would have been to follow every student from the point of enrollment. Indeed, the more motivated schools may have provided a better school environment and thus attracted a larger number of transfers over the years while still failing to address their dropout and graduation problems. Tested scores in [15 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

math and reading may have reflected differential preparation for tests rather than actual achievement. Throughout, the consistent interpretation of findings that are not statistically significant as though they were important is improper; to make much of differences that may well be due to random factors is misleading. Yet, such as they are, the findings are so insubstantial that they dwarf the problems of methodology. The randomized studies, providing two years of services beginning with students entering the ninth grade, were as deficient as the quasi-​ experiment, failing to provide any credible evidence of the benefits of CIS. ICF conducted three randomized studies to evaluate the influence of CIS case-​managed services—​largely the intensive services it provides—​on a variety of student behaviors, notably including retention and academic performance but also a variety of other behaviors and attitudes presumably related to retention and academic performance. ICF and CIS strained to make much of consistently small and mixed results. For example, ICF concluded that at Austin, generally the most successful of the three sites, the greatest impacts … were found at the end of Year 1 (i.e., ninth grade). These included significant positive differences in student attendance rate, GPA [grade point average], and credit completion, with substantially important effect sizes… . Year 1 dropout rates also demonstrated the positive effects that the CIS focus on ninth grade is having during an important transitional year… . Sustained services provided positive effects for student attendance and GPA… . Overall 2-​year impacts, while not significant and somewhat subdued, were also positive. (ICF International, 2010, p. iv)

Yet this description of outcomes is evasive. In fact, the positive outcomes of the Austin experiment were very small, often not statistically significant, and, because of weaknesses in the design, questionable to begin with. There were also a number of curious negative findings. Yet because of the porous study design, all of the findings are subject to explanations other than the influence of CIS services. Over the two years of the study, attendance fell 7.2% for controls and 4.9% for CIS students, a gain of 2.3%. Grade point averages fell 9.9% for controls but only 8.0% for CIS students. There was no difference between the groups in the average number of completed credits. The crucial two-​year dropout rate for CIS students was 9.7%, slightly higher than the 8.6% for controls. There were no differences between the groups in math scores, but the reading scores improved more for controls than CIS students (ICF International, 2008).6 6. None of these differences were statistically significant. However, the conversion of the small differences to effect sizes in many cases was statistically significant. Nonetheless, this procedure does not change the fact of small, insubstantial differences. ICF pays notable C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [15 7]

Disciplinary referrals declined for both groups. However, after two years of service they declined by nearly 59% for CIS students but by about 75% for controls (ibid.).7 It is not surprising that treatment did not reduce disciplinary referrals or materially achieve any of CIS’s goals. The absence of substantial and credible outcomes is expected in consideration of the very small amount of material support provided by CIS. As in the quasi-​experiment, most of the services involved counseling and case management, presumably often provided by amateur volunteers, while the duration and intensity of care both seem usually superficial. The average treated student received only 18.4 hours of CIS care the first year and 10.7 hours the second year. Of the total of 29.1 hours of CIS care in two years, fully 18.7 were devoted to “supportive guidance and counseling” and “initial assessments” (ibid.). Rather than intensive care as CIS claims, the superficiality of care may go far to explain the absence of substantial gains. Moreover, the estimates of hours comes from employee logs, which were not checked for reliability. The insubstantial positive effects, even if accurately measured, might well be explained by a variety of possible biases and imperfections in the design of the studies rather than by the CIS services. As with the quasi-​ experiment, reliability was not checked, reports of behavior came from staff, attrition was substantial, and the experiment failed to control or adjust for demonstration effects. By itself, randomization is not a sufficient condition of research. Although the study sample may have been carefully randomized between the group that received CIS services and those that did not, in the end the representativeness of the samples of students at the schools and of the CIS caseload was seriously compromised by selection criteria. Apparently many parents refused to consent to have their children receive CIS services, and then many refused to consent to participate in the study. The representativeness of samples was further compromised by a substantial number of presumably needy students who were mandated to receive services. The final samples may have contained the students most amenable

attention to explaining away inconvenient findings, such as the rare statistically significant and substantial finding of a correlation between declining reading scores and parental involvement activities, one of the CIS services. CIS explains it away as a result of “an outlier for both Year 1 and Year 2.” Then again, if ICF were as punctilious with the positive findings, there would nothing credible to report. 7. If ICF leaped for meaning with this data as they have throughout, they might have concluded that CIS services were less effective than neglect, and perhaps even pernicious in light of the fact that the incidence of “possessed, sold, used or was under the influence of an alcoholic beverage” actually rose for CIS students from 1.9% in year one to 3.0% in year two (ibid.). [15 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

for care rather than a valid sample of the population of need. A study with a sample of motivated students that fails to improve their performance may hint at the inadequacy of current arrangements even augmented by CIS to address serious educational deficits and behavioral problems of youth. In any event, the effects of the experiment on the small group of 151 study participants defy generalization. The control and experimental conditions may not have been well-​ maintained; indeed, the differences in the receipt of care may not have been great enough to constitute a valid test of the effects of care. Many in the control group received services and some even received CIS services, while the services the CIS students received may have substituted for available care instead of adding to it. Thus the findings may be more the artifacts of the sample’s characteristics, unreliable measures, reporting biases, selective attrition, and demonstration effects. Even more to the point, there were no findings of any importance except, by default, the obvious failure of CIS to demonstrate substantial improvements in retention and student behavior. The other two sites largely replicated the weaknesses of the Austin research while similarly failing to produce even modest benefits. CIS claims to be not only very effective, but inexpensive as well. CIS’s Communities in Schools:  Five Year Summary Report (2010) runs a cost comparison among CIS and two “peer organizations” (ICF International, 2010). The peer organizations served far fewer students in fewer schools, but one cost $600 per student and the other $1,600 per student while CIS cost less than $200 per student.8 And not only inexpensive but also cost-​ efficient with an enormous economic return:  the tainted, exaggerated findings of the quasi-​analysis flowed into a projection of the economic benefits of CIS services (Economic Modeling Specialists, 2012). The report estimated that over the first 10 projected years CIS services provide a net economic benefit of almost $68 million; over 25 years, almost $1 billion; and over 53  years, about $2.5 billion (with a benefit-​to-​cost ratio of 11.6:1). Projecting insubstantial, statistically insignificant data for any period of time is usually inappropriate, speaking more to pleasing a client than providing credible estimates of outcomes. Projecting weak uncertain data for more than 50 years is rarely defensible. Had ICF applied the same method of projection to the small regressive reading scores, CIS services would be condemned as a public menace, routinely turning out illiterates for 50 years.

8. It is not clear whether the figures are for one year or the duration of the service. The report also fails to specify the components and the methods of the cost comparisons. C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [15 9 ]

One could argue that the researchers at ICF and Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI), sophisticated enough to employ complex designs and analyses, apparently missed the limitations of the research. Indeed, the EMSI report boasts technical support from the staffs of some of the nation’s leading financial firms and philanthropic foundations, while “Morgan Stanley was pleased to provide its analytical expertise in examining the work presented in” the report. Nonetheless, the methodological imperfections of the studies—​quasi-​ experiment, randomized experiments, economic impact report, and others—​are so severe and the importance of findings are so consistently exaggerated that they bring the independence of the research into question. Indeed, the claim of independence confesses dependence when it states from the beginning that its purpose is to “demonstrate effectiveness of the overall CIS model and specific model components” (ICF International, 2008, p. 3). The purpose of evaluation is to test effectiveness rather than set out to prove it. This might seem a quibble except that the obvious desire to demonstrate effectiveness apparently overrode prudent analysis and interpretation throughout the studies. The studies are what a public relations and advertising firm comes up with when it appropriates the style of scholarship in pursuit of its clients’ interests and the demands of the culture. Like any firm in the marketplace, CIS seems sensitive to prevailing preferences for inexpensive and minimal interventions that employ the traditional wisdom of personal responsibility. CIS is a tribute to romantic national values and not a data-​ driven, results-​oriented, end-​product-​accountable, evidence-​based enterprise at all. It is babble in defiance of both evidence and reason, which is broadly popular. CITIES IN SCHOOLS RECONSIDERED

The manifesto of CIS—​romantic, even otherworldly, but a defining statement of American social choice—​is laid out in three, often autobiographical, books by Bill Milliken, the program’s inspirational founder. In the style of American policy romanticism, Milliken’s wisdom, his knowledge of what it takes to put straying youths on the right track, which came to constitute the strategy of CIS, is achieved through a personal quest for authenticity. The wisdom is gnostic, deeply personal, and interpreted as mystical and religious: the epiphany of sin, repentance, and redemption. It is a sudden revelation of the universal and absolute through the personal. Yet if CIS is any measure of its value, the wisdom of Milliken has created a social welfare conundrum, one that fails in its substantive purposes but [1 6 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

succeeds as a ceremonial affirmation of the popular values that sustain embedded social inequalities. Milliken repeats the national mantra that self-​ creation—​ the self-​ actualizing will—​explains social failure and success. Thus personal responsibility is the key to resolving social problems, and consequently the role of social services is to stimulate the individual’s motivation—​“a hand up, not a hand out.” Counseling and mentoring in one programmatic form or another are intended to encourage people to activate their will to conform with social norms and succeed. The Milliken manifesto is a profound rejection of a number of progressive social tenets: that social and economic deprivation—​ systemic failures—​are the root of personal failure, and that a large and expensive government role is necessary to prevent and resolve social problems such as educational failure. The programmatic minimalism of CIS—​mostly providing counseling and case management rather than comprehensive access to health care, mental health services, food, housing, employment for parents, direct economic subsidy, and so forth—​and the extensive reliance on volunteers realize the insights of Milliken’s archetypal quest for truth. The thoroughgoing programmatic failure of CIS to achieve its goals, in particular dropout prevention, also measures the tenacity of American belief in romantic forms. The sustained denial of reality becomes a test of faith and character—​a ritual of public commitment and cultural loyalty. The fact of CIS’s deep acceptance by corporate America is as emblematic of the nation as the broad popularity of the largely unregulated market, its consumer products, and the common substitution of spiritualism, revelatory religion, and superstition for objectivity and reason. It comes as no surprise that Milliken’s life story, written with the unquestioned conviction of pulp fiction, closely follows the most typical theme in American literature, theater, movies, television, and the rest of mass market media: lost but found via the quest of the virtuous will for civic and often religious salvation. Milliken was a bad boy from a very wealthy family. He hung out in pool rooms, dropped out of high school, associated with other desperate types and petty criminals, lacked a good relationship with his parents, and had no hope (Milliken, 2012, p. 4).9 9. In this version of his autobiography, Milliken is approached cold by a Young Life worker, and there is hardly any mention of a supportive family. To the contrary, Milliken’s family is described as aloof and uncaring. However, in Tough Love, Milliken’s initial version of his religious and social awakening, he states that his older brother Bob had taken him to a Young Life club meeting, and thus the meeting at the pool hall was a follow-​up. Moreover, Bob “had decided he wanted to be a minister, and was attending seminary” (Milliken, 1971, p. 14). Thus the family that raised Milliken was hardly indifferent to him, and he was apparently raised in a religious environment. In each iteration of his heroic overcoming, Milliken minimizes the extent to which he was not as deprived of basic familial affection and caring as he portrays himself to be. He did not invent himself. Yet Milliken and by extension C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [1 61]

Milliken and some of his friends were recruited to a Young Life camp that proselytized Christian commitment. Milliken was initially resistant. Yet through personal relationships with the camp staff and their religious prodding, he experienced an awakening of faith. Jim told us that God cared so much about us that he sent his own son to live and suffer and walk through the valley of the shadow of death with us. God wanted to dwell with us and in us. I walked off into the darkness, away from the others, with the bright full moon lighting my way. At the foot of Mount Princeton, I stopped. “God,” I said, “I don’t know if you’re real, but I need this very much. I’m not going to make it without you. If you can take someone who isn’t sure about you but is hungry for meaning and hope, then please enter my life.” The tears were rolling down my face, and suddenly, something happened. It’s hard to explain exactly what. I felt a calm, a peace I’d never known before. It was mysterious and real; I know I wasn’t making it up. (p. 9)

His conversion experience at the camp also revealed to him the core insight that inspired CIS. I was learning the most important lesson of my life… . Personal relationships are the key to change . . . [S]‌ermons, proselytizing, and guilt trips aren’t going to open anyone up to the Spirit. I needed to find adults I could trust and who trusted me … (emphasis in original, p. 5)

All this in only one week, which may explain the minimalism of CIS and its focus on the self-​actualizing will through counseling, mentoring, and case management. It may also explain Milliken’s heroic cheapening of material and institutional deprivations as the abiding source of youth dysfunction and his frequent omission of the previous advantages he enjoyed as a member of a wealthy middle-​class family. Milliken and a friend then became Young Life missionaries, bringing the Word to Harlem, where “we were trying to do for others the same thing that had been done for us” at Young Life (p. 10). Since reality for the romantic is essentially one of will, the pernicious influences of socioeconomic deprivation and inequality are largely ignored in greater appreciation of soul work that leads to attitude change. Milliken’s core tenet for CIS is all about personal relationships that teach individual responsibility, often through “tough love,” one of the CIS and American social welfare generally are loath to acknowledge the importance of a rich, caring family life and then take steps to create it when needed through social services. Milliken, his romantic biographies, and CIS are stage-​managed presentations of imagined reality that reflect the preferences of its mass audience. [1 6 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

mainstays of the self-​help literature and pop psychology. Milliken insists that tough love does not imply cruel retribution but rather “for us, it was all about accountability” (p. 35): “I found out loving is tough—​it costs; and the love itself has to be tough, too, tough enough to hurt if the hurt can heal” (Milliken, 1971, pp. 13–​14). Milliken expands on the meaning of tough love as it is applied to young addicts and criminals. Tough love means prison. It also means reconstructing people psychologically. We build a turtle shell around us, not just against the dirt and evil of the ghetto but against anything unpleasant. Whenever we build this kind of shell around ourselves, and it doesn’t get ripped away, we pay a price for living inside… . We have shut ourselves off from the type of hurt that produces love, the type of growth that builds manliness. (1971, p. 39)

Yet tough love becomes cruelty when it does not heal. It is startling how much all of Milliken’s long efforts to address youth crime, addictions, and problems in school focus on tough love toward the children’s attitudes and behavior rather than toward the material and social deprivations of their lives (Milliken, 1971, 2012). Nourished by the institutional commitments of the culture, the typical strategy of American social services enthusiastically pursues individual accountability and ignores social accountability. Little in any of Milliken’s books bothers to acknowledge the pervasive objective evidence that personal social services (and notably related to addiction, delinquency, and schooling difficulties) routinely fail. Boot camps and diversion programs for delinquents, pediatric psychotherapy, counseling, drug programs, and on and on have been empty promises, one fading into the other in an endless soap opera of romantic renewal (see Epstein, 1997, 2010). Milliken only offers anecdotes to sustain the value of rebirth through tough love. I tore him right down to the bottom and then I  started to build him back up…  . “You’re a basketball star, you’ve got a great singing group, everything’s going for you, what you could do for God if you let him take over!” I stood back and waited. He said nothing. “Look if you want to fight, fine.” I waited again. Instead of slugging me, Tap suddenly broke down. He started talking, telling me his problems, and then he prayed and recommitted his life to Christ right there in the dark woods outside the cabin. (Milliken, 1971, p. 74)

For Milliken as a cultural patriot, the truth about the nature of social problems and individual deviancy is not derived from objective coherence—​ social science—​but through personal revelation and a gnostic indulgence C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [1 6 3 ]

in the sublime, the archetypal Oneness threaded through human existence that defines the mystical goal of the quest for authenticity. As ceremonies of American tradition, social service programs, including CIS, pursue authentic personal change by exhorting the uncoerced will to accept the Spirit. In the playbook of American romanticism, social responsibility exists to prod individual responsibility rather than to pursue greater social and economic equality. Reiterating the American preference for personal change over social reform, the barriers to perfection are imagined in the individual rather than in the social system. Milliken weds CIS to a conversion experience to renew the spirit and will of miscreant youth through both capitalism and religion. Responding to systemic problems—​the broken school system; the broader failures of the health services, social services, and the criminal justice system; and the sense that “our businesses and churches offer little hope for citizens” (Milliken, 2007, p. 19) such as troubled youths—​M illiken states that I have to disagree with this last point. It is precisely our businesses and faith communities, joining with social-​service providers and volunteers that can take the lead in offering, not only hope, but real accomplishments that can help our young people become prosperous citizens of tomorrow. (p. 20)

Quite pointedly, Milliken does not wish for churches and businesses to unite and encourage government to raise taxes for programs that handle the economic and social inequalities of youths and their families. He saves his concern with the material deficits of the school system for tangential references to other organizations—​the National Dropout Prevention Center and the National Education Association—​in the final chapter of The Last Dropout. These organizations advocate for seemingly large but, in consideration of need, still modest increases in expenditures to handle the dropout problem:  universal day care and preschool and afterschool programs, tutoring, smaller classrooms, more individual attention, and so forth.10 The attention to family, and the conditions of poverty, unemployment, health, and mental health among others, would make the budget for handling school performance much greater. Against even this backdrop of incremental generosity, Milliken’s program suggestions seem dull, off the point, and futile, but nonetheless quite popular. Yet CIS is obviously 10. Yet, as its final proposal the National Education Association suggests providing only $10 billion over 10  years to support dropout prevention programs, presumably like CIS (Milliken, 2007, p. 192). If there are 10 million children at risk of dropping out of school—​ there are probably many, many more—​t hen this proposal works out to only $100 per child per year for dropout prevention. [1 6 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

favored over massive increases in school and related funding. The focus of CIS is on the spirit, after all, and not the material conditions of inequality and deprivation—​the prowess of personal relations with volunteers, mentors, and counselors to inspire conversion experiences such as Milliken’s, which profoundly change behavior. In contrast to the National Education Association’s call for much greater resources, CIS realizes Milliken’s pervasive assumption that the coordination and redirection of existing services and resource, rather than massive new resources, is at least an important and possibly even a necessary step toward addressing the dropout problem. However without new funding, the “coordinated delivery of services to keep kids in school” takes funding away from other programs. The assumption that social service moneys are being wasted but can be effectively redirected through CIS is generally in support of conservative politics and the antagonism of the business community to more public spending and higher taxes. Milliken and CIS are not simply recognizing commercial interests and antigovernment conservatives; they are acceding to the social preferences of the United States—​a disinclination to opt for greater generosity toward the problems of youth and education. The eloquence of absence speaks to a preference for inexpensive volunteer programs that pursue character change by way of guided exhortation—​self-​help quests for authenticity. Since CIS diverts some portion of existing community resources to the schools, the economic impact report might have attempted to evaluate the net opportunity costs of this shift. The poor performance of CIS in increasing graduation, reading and math achievement, behavioral conformity, and its other goals questions the use of scarce resources for a failed program, as well as the process by which these allocation decisions are made. Yet CIS takes its mandate from its ceremonial role rather than from any ability to actually handle the dropout problem. The insufficiency of CIS as a response to the challenges of public education comes out clearly in Nevada, the home state of CIS’s billionaire national president, Elaine Wynn. Wealthy Nevada sustains one of the worst public school systems in the nation (National KIDS COUNT, 2016) and largely because of a broadly popular refusal to raise taxes for any civic purpose, including police, recreation, mental health, higher education, and others (notably public education).11 In spite of its long-​ established CIS programs, Nevada suffers the highest dropout rate in the 11. On the basis of expenditures per student, a National Education Association (2015) study reported that in the 2014–​15 school year, Nevada spent less than 43 other states: Vermont spent the most per student ($21,263), and Nevada spent $8,693. Employing more complex measures of school performance—​expenditures, student outcomes, and others—​Bernardo C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [1 6 5 ]

nation, and its kindergarten through high school system is weaker than Mississippi’s. Long active in Nevada, CIS has had little apparent effect if any. Indeed, to the extent to which it deflects public attention from the serious material deficits of its public school system and performs as a ceremony of policy romanticism, CIS is actually harmful. According to Forbes magazine, Elaine Wynn, the national chairman of CIS, has a net worth of $2.5 billion. She cofounded the casino empire that bears the family name with ex-​husband Steve three decades ago and still sits on the board of Wynn Resorts. As part of the couple’s 2010 divorce settlement, Elaine received 11 million shares of the company, though an agreement with Steve’s former business partner, Kazuo Okada, required that she clear any shares sales with her ex-​husband. Elaine is in the midst of a lawsuit attempting to nullify the agreement that restricts her shares. In January, Wynn was reported as the buyer of Francis Bacon’s triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” for which she paid $142.2 million in November of 2013. The price was a record for a painting sold at auction and the identity of the buyer had been carefully guarded. Wynn sits on the board of the Basketball Hall of Fame, and was with the U.S. Olympic team when it won gold at the London Summer Olympics in 2012; she wears a commemorative ring to mark the event. Wynn is also president of the Nevada State Board of Education. (Forbes, n.d.)

Social services being a relatively inexpensive hobby compared with art collecting, Elaine Wynn has presumably contributed to CIS much less than she paid for the Bacon painting; she apparently volunteers her time to social causes in the common manner of the business elite. The business sector generally, and notably the Nevada gambling corporations, have long opposed higher taxes. The fact of Wynn’s prominence and the policy romanticism that perfuses CIS testify to national values. Her response to the problems of the education system—​repetitive of responses from Nevada’s conservative Republican governor, state board of education, and superintendent of schools, and echoed by the minimalism of CIS—​largely reflects the preferences of Nevada residents and the American masses to limit their financial commitments to public education. The state’s main strategy in response to the appalling failure of its school system is to hold schools and teachers more accountable to higher standards for student outcomes (Milliard, 2014). The strategy converts a structural deficit of school funding into an issue of management and

(2015) ranked Nevada’s schools 47th out of the 50 state systems and the District of Columbia; Frohlich and Kent (2015) ranked Nevada next to last (only Mississippi performed worse). [1 6 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

character. The Las Vegas school system estimates that it needs $1 billion a year more in funding, but in the spirit of CIS, the problem is redefined as the initiative, skills, and dedication of teachers and principals and the absence of appropriate standards. Apparently students require conversion experiences from motivated professionals and tough love, which is accountability to appropriate standards. Dropping out and scoring poorly on standardized exams comes to mean that teachers and administrators have not tried hard enough. In this way, romantic individualism displaces a pragmatic approach to education. It is worth speculating that policy romanticism and the core of democratic populism is complicit with the intellectual mediocrity of the American public. The major threat to the United States is not from foreign competition but from its own civic choices.

C o m m u n i t i e s i n S c h o o l s  [1 67]

CH A P TER   7

Generations of Hope Communities

O

ffering care since 1994, Generations of Hope Communities (GHC) declares that it addresses the appalling failure of the nation’s public foster care program by arranging family adoption and communal living for foster children with a low likelihood of permanent placement. The communal living provides subsidized housing both to the adoptive parents and to senior citizens who live within the program community and offer volunteer support to the children. The first community was set up at an abandoned military base in Illinois. At Hope Meadows, 12 families agree to adopt three or four children from the foster care system whose chances of finding permanency are slim, and approximately 50 older adults volunteer six hours per week to the community in exchange for below market-​rate rent. Adoptive families and older adults remain in the neighborhood for as long as they want. Youth leave the neighborhood and transition to adulthood in the same ways other young adults do. Traditional programs and services (therapy, case management, tutoring, after school programs) as well as nontraditional programs and services (camps, picnics, special neighborhood events, caring “grandparents”) are provided within and by the neighborhood. (Hopping, Eheart, Power, & Mitchell, 2013, p. 2)

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

The program describes itself as an innovative, creative, and effective response to the problems of troubled children without parents—​“an approach that taps the transformative power of intergenerational community living to address social problems” (p. 2).

Historical data indicate that the program did achieve its goal for 72 children. Statistically about 40% would otherwise have aged out of foster care or come under the purview of the juvenile justice system… . The overall rate of permanency … at Hope Meadows has always been high (85%)… . Hope Meadows has pioneered the development of innovative systems of support for adoptive families, providing instrumental, informational, and emotional support to parents, both before they adopt children from the foster care system and after the adoptions, for as long as they live at Hope Meadows. (pp. 4, 5)

Yet GHC substantiates few of its claims and even fewer of its assertions about effectiveness. Worse than the shortage of scientifically credible evidence of effectiveness, Brenda Eheart, the founder and director of the program, devalues rigorous research methods—​randomized controlled trials—​as inappropriate and misguided for the intricacies of GHC. Instead, she draws evidence of the program’s effectiveness from case studies and numerous weak qualitative methods (Patton, 2011; Schorr & Farrow, 2011; Seligman, 2011). She also devalues independent evaluation, falling back on gnostic inspirations including personal experience and professional knowledge, the canards of marginal fields such as social work. The expert opinion she cites is often not expert at all. As two examples, Zigler is not an eminent authority on research methods and his intense advocacy of the Head Start program tolerates no discussion of its limitations (Hopping et  al., 2013, p.  8). Seligman (2011) writing about human relations moves the argument into spirituality and out of the realm of empiricism. All of the published material related to the program that seems to be an attempt at professional rigor and credibility was written by people connected to the program and its research institute.1 Eheart asks for suspension of disbelief in accepting the effectiveness of the program. She asserts that “it is not necessary to prove through formal program evaluation that a stable family and supportive community are good for kids” (Hopping, Eheart, Power, & Mitchell, 2013, pp.  7–​ 8) . However, the goals are not the issue; whether or not GHC actually achieves these goals is the issue. Resting the virtues of GHC on provision of greater equality—​environments of stable families in a supportive community—​presumably excuses the absence of rigorous tests of effectiveness if no overt claim is made for therapeutic or behavioral outcomes. After all, every child merits a good upbringing. Nonetheless, the obligation

1. That is, all the articles in Children and Youth Services Review (2001, vol. 23, nos. 9/​10) as well as Eheart et al. (2009) and the large amount of fugitive literature reported on GHC website http://​g hdc.generationsofhope.org/​. G e n e r a t i o n s o f H o p e C o m m u n i t i e s  [1 6 9 ]

remains to demonstrate that the promised conditions of greater equality are in place. In this regard, the program’s research fails to demonstrate that good families and supportive communities were provided. This is not a trivial criticism, since the foster care system itself has been routinely unable to provide stable families and supportive communities; indeed, it routinely provides abusive environments that harm foster children. Many, if not most, foster parents are in it for the money, and apparently both the families and the seniors in GHC are also motivated by financial considerations (Lindsey, 2004; Costin, Karger, & Stoesz, 1997). In this regard, sophisticated independent reviews of the physical, emotional, and social environment of GHC would seem to be a requisite, early step in a comprehensive evaluation process. GHC cannot sustain assertions central to its evaluation design: that its children were difficult to place and entered GHC with atypically serious problems, and that its volunteers provided effective communal supports. Yet GHC is in fact making constant, overt claims that its provision of stable families and supportive communities is instrumental to achieve desirable changes for its young wards, namely that the children benefited more than they would have in the customary foster care system. As it stands, little of the program’s research is credible. It has not demonstrated that it is effective, that its putative benefits for the children persist over time, and most importantly that GHC is routinely replicable. Its theoretical underpinnings are also suspect. The definition of community draws from Putnam’s discussion of social capital (2001). Yet social capital following Putnam reduces to neighborliness, if even this community so defined would seem to be more the therapy of nostalgia in pursuit of the mythical warmth of the small town than a serious compensation for social and emotional deprivation. Yet GHC fails to document the empirical value of social capital for foster children, or even that social capital was indeed provided to the program’s children by its volunteers. The program states that the retirees “deliver an average of 274 hours of volunteer activity every week, at an estimated value of more than $300,000” per year (Hopping et al., 2013, p. 5). This works out to about $21 per hour. Yet again, the program provides no persuasive evidence that the quality of the volunteering justifies the estimated value. Indeed, the general experience with volunteers in the personal social services over a long period of time usually falls back on its symbolic contribution to the civic spirit and the program’s popularity rather than its cash value as effective social care. Similarly GHC’s estimates of the emotional and social disabilities of the children and projections of their effect on placement [17 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

are unsubstantiated. As a result, it is impossible to assess the severity of need that the program addresses, and thus the possibility exists that the GHC children constitute a carefully selected (creamed) sample rather than being extremely troubled, as the program claims. PROGRAM EVALUATION

Any program that addresses the problems of the foster care system needs to test its effectiveness, especially when a program such as GHC is set up specifically to address the serious problems of youth and not simply to provide adequate families and communities. The test needs to handle a series of skeptical barriers erected by the nature of the foster care system. In this regard, it is obliged to employ sophisticated methods to ensure that the research outcomes are related to the program, rather than there being plausible alternative explanations, including researcher bias, creamed samples, differential attrition, reactive measurement, demonstration effects, and many others. There is no substitute for randomized controlled trials, and GHC could have applied those methods. There was no ethical or legal impediment to their use in this instance. GHC has accepted into the program a relatively small number of youths, and the pool of available youth is immense. Thus, the program could have defined a large acceptable sample and then randomly selected a number for inclusion; those not selected would have constituted the control. The difference in outcomes between the control group and those in the program would assess the program’s success or failure. The fallback position would have been to establish matched controls, but this is a very difficult procedure that often provides little valuable comparative information and can come along with subtle debilitating biases. In the event, the program did neither, but rather went to great lengths to avoid rigorous evaluation. Contrary to Eheart’s assurances that much is known about handling the problems of youth and foster children, little has proven to be effective over the years if anything. The nation has emerged from more than 200  years of foster care without scientifically credible evidence that its periodic enthusiasms for handling the caseload have worked (Lindsey, 2004). A  large part of the absence of good information relates to the absence of good research. A number of factors explain the virtual desert of research in foster care. Those factors suggest a priority of social values that devalues poor children. First, careful social research is expensive, and there is little money allocated by public or private sources to test the outcomes of foster care. When money has been allocated for the research, it is routinely butchered, and customarily in service to the researchers’ G e n e r a t i o n s o f H o p e C o m m u n i t i e s  [17 1]

stakes (Epstein, 1999).2 Further, and with profundity, the nation seems concerned only with finding relatively cheap ways of handling the problems of foster children and poor children generally. It seems blind to the possibility, indeed likelihood, that problems with youth and faulty socialization are systemic and remain unmitigated by inexpensive regimes of self-​help, good-​hearted volunteers, or inexpensive interventions by schooled professionals. But these are the very themes of policy romanticism that GHC plays up for its American audience. The issue of demonstrable, replicable effectiveness is the heart of the matter. Case studies, ethnographic research, and the rest of GHC’s self-​ serving library of program material justified as “developmental evaluation” could have been informative, but only as preliminary steps toward rigor. However, even as ethnography and case study, the GHC material—​ most authored by Eheart—​is weak. Moreover, when the inherently porous methods of developmental evaluation are graduated up to answer questions of outcomes and effectiveness, they constitute the gnostic certitude that has plagued the social service field. At best qualitative research is an early point in a coherent, consecutive evaluative strategy, but decidedly not evidence of progress, let alone programmatic effectiveness. Contrary to its boasting, GHC is not a work in progress—​a “complex and evolving” model that requires “new approaches” to evaluation—​but rather a step back from coherent objective evidence to the subjectivities of personal experience and practitioner wisdom. Eheart takes permission for weak research from Schorr and Farrow (2011), who confidently declare that when causal connections are more diffuse, intertwined, and otherwise difficult to establish, we need not give up on assessing effectiveness. Rather, we must agree that the value of many kinds of interventions can be assessed, weighed, understood and acted upon without having to be proven through experimental methods. (emphasis in original; p. iii)

Patton (2011), another of Eheart’s citations in support of developmental evaluation, details an enormous range of unreliable substitutes for scientific credibility: reflective practice, sensitizing concepts, action research, alien abduction research, retrospective developmental evaluation, engagement practices, diverse designs, adaptive methods, and on and on. They 2. In this regard, it is worth mentioning Epstein’s critique (2003) of Chapin Hall’s sanctioned study of Families First in Illinois, conducted by leading lights at the University of Chicago’s school of social work. Deficient as it is, the Chapin Hall study is one of the best-​ ever evaluative studies performed in social work. [17 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

are common sense—​K ant’s “defiance without insight” —​and, in the end, no better than the conventional blandishment to think through problems. Yet their inherent weakness is politically useful in reinforcing the prevailing social consensus and in defying the strong observation that every departure from truly rigorous research adds proportionate uncertainty to conclusions. Developmental evaluation usurps the style of empirical rigor for mystical truths, epiphanies, and folk wisdom. It flatters weak programs as being sublimely insightful and magically effective while facilitating the obedience of social service programs to prevailing social dogma. These modern sources of gnostic truth do not dress up like Merlin and seek wisdom from ancient texts or crystal balls. Rather, they put on academic robes and write research manuals that assure society that its quests for the authentic are fruitful. GHC is an instance in the long, unfortunate romantic tradition of social service that rejects objective coherence in mistaking obedience to social values—​cultural symbolism—​as program effectiveness. As the social drama unfolds, a well-​meaning amateur or an astute professional develops a program that attracts community enthusiasm in large part because of its low costs, its social passivity, and its obedience to stereotypical American values. The program expresses the heroic beliefs of the culture in the power of individual will, a triumph of self-​discipline and brilliant insight that, against all odds, achieves monumental outcomes with few resources. Its virtues are manifest; one comes to believe in the program as a revealed article of civic faith. Skepticism is heresy. Yet if the program persists, it does so usually for its ritualistic value more than the ability to achieve professed goals. This process, enshrined in movies, television, novels, and indeed in the culture’s sense of itself, is to be lamented, not praised. Democratic populism, which employs the excuse of policy romanticism, is probably the reason that so little progress has taken place in social services for deprived, disadvantaged, and troubled Americans. It is perhaps the reason that in spite of enormous and growing inequality and the devastations of the Great Recession, the society has been so quiescent. Americans blame themselves for their misfortunes, with the result that systemic remedies become less likely. GHC thwarts the tradition of the Enlightenment. Despite its protestations, GHC is neither evidence-​based, research-​based, research-​informed, best practice nor any of the rest of the excuses for research in the social welfare field and more generally in American society. GHC takes inspiration from the 19th-​century tradition of transcendentalism and its current expression as postmodernism rather than the empirical impulse that incubated the social sciences. G e n e r a t i o n s o f H o p e C o m m u n i t i e s  [17 3 ]

EFFIGIES OF CONCERN AND TOTEMS OF BELIEF

By and large, personal social services in the United States are elaborate fictions—​social myths that dramatize and materialize widely accepted, long-​persistent cultural values. In a democracy as open as the United States, established social welfare programs, notably including personal social services, are consensual institutions of tradition. Year Up, Communities in Schools, and Generations of Hope are typical personal social services inspired by and realizing the customarily untested platitudes of the self-​help literature. They similarly offer to service recipients, staff, volunteers, and board members little more than quests for authenticity suggested by the monotony of mentoring, counseling, and psychotherapy of one sort or another. Their material provisions of food, housing, clothing, employment, education, health care, and mental health care are frankly and pervasively inadequate compensations for the insufficiency of public programs. The programs’ quest inward for meaning celebrates the autonomous will that lies at the heart of policy romanticism. It subtly affirms the specialness of a heroic and largely contrived American experience that reinforces the primacy of gnostic truth over the coherent objectivity of pragmatism. As solutions to social and personal problems, the personal social services proselytize self-​transformation and individual responsibility, which diminishes the importance of greater equality and the relief of poverty. The works of Milliken, Eheart, and Chertavian are vulgarizations of Emerson, Jung, and Freud. Their attempts at program evaluation mock science, but the programs’ cloying sincerity, zealotry, and melodramatic childishness mock their own heroic ambitions. Yet the consistent choice of a rhetoric of intuition and emotion reflects the expectations and values of the intended audience—​the American masses—​in the same way that television, radio, and the commercial mass media in general play to popular tastes in the competition for market share. Indeed, personal social services are a form of mass media. A few personal social service programs seem to have succeeded—​as examples, the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Quantum Opportunities Program in Philadelphia, and perhaps the Abecedarian Project. However, they have rarely been replicated since the conditions of their success are too unusual to be routinely copied—​extraordinarily talented, charismatic, and dedicated staff, and sometimes lavish funding, as in the case of the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school; perhaps too, accidents of time and place. Yet extraordinary staff cannot put in the same energy over time, and the skills they apply are not easily transferred through selection, training, or professional education. Moreover, the cost to institutionalize [174 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

these programs would be astronomical. Programs that seem reasonable in practice turn out to be quite problematic when the close supervision, unusual motivation, and other unique conditions of the demonstration period lapse into routine oversight and common organizational practice. The essential message at the core of most personal social services, and indeed even most public welfare services, has changed little over the years in the United States. The individual remains largely responsible for his or her troubles; the society is just and its institutions work well and fairly. These truths are known through the spirit rather than through reasoned, objective tests of outcomes. The romantic choices of Communities in Schools, Year Up, and Generations of Hope are repeated throughout the culture with patriotic intensity. The privileged endow private social service programs with the mission to improve the character of deprived populations, while denying them access to the very conditions of family, community, and education that accounted for their own economic and social successes. On the one hand and with few exceptions, personal social services are pervasively dishonest concerning their service roles. On the other hand, they are true to their roles as ceremonial affirmations of romantic values. The evaluations of social welfare programs are rarely intended to function as accurate estimates of production functions, that is, the extent to which programs achieve their ostensible goals. Rather, the evaluative material embraces a variety of biases and meanders from rigorous social science practice by way of validating core cultural myths. In addition to the common foibles of self-​evaluation, the community of social service scholars and the society itself fail to consider the overarching problem of decline effects undercutting the authority of even sophisticated program assessments. A  growing literature across many fields documents the inability to replicate positive experimental findings (Cronbach, 1975; Lehrer, 2010; Schooler, 2014). The plausibility of decline effects is generally ignored, except perhaps in academia, but even there it languishes as a curiosity that does not intrude on prevailing social science practice or interrupt the relationships between intellectuals and their sources of supplementary income. Decline effects can be explained in a variety of ways. Regression to the mean is the most innocent; that is, the initial positive findings emerge from fortuitous samples and subsequent sampling produces more-​t ypical subjects and thus less-​positive findings. However, in consideration of the evaluations of Year Up, Communities in Schools, and Generations of Hope, decline effects in subsequent iterations of the programs are ensured by the biases of demonstration programs run by true believers and the ambitious, who corrupt evaluations or who G e n e r a t i o n s o f H o p e C o m m u n i t i e s  [17 5 ]

consciously distort outcomes. More importantly, the limitations of the evaluations are themselves indicative of underlying social stakes in the appearance of program success, which reinforces social values. The motive to obscure the failure of personal social services may be embedded in the services themselves, imposing an implicit obligation on the evaluative enterprise to conform to social expectations. Ceremonial affirmation triumphs over substantive achievement as the reality of the personal social services yields to public relations, hype, and accommodation with policy romanticism. The American people have not been hoodwinked. The personal social services are deeply consensual expressions of culture in the same manner as commerce, family, community, religion, education, and the rest of the nation’s social institutions. The many misleading evaluations of social service outcomes conducted by highly trained professionals who stray from standard scientific practice could be interpreted as part of the drama of accommodation by which expressive forms stay consistent with embedded social preferences in maintaining their broad political and social sanctions. The corruption is not personal, but an extension of the national ethos. It would not be much of a stretch to critique social services as performance art rather than production functions that address the deprivations of the needy. As totems of national preferences, the personal social services pay homage to Thomas Nagel: “the human will to believe is inexhaustible” (2012, p.  128). Policy romanticism seems capable of persisting even past the time that the nation is overwhelmed by the perils it has created.

[17 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

CH A P TER   8

The Food Stamp Program

F

ood is as basic as it gets, more primal than housing, clothing, or medical care. Yet the food stamp program in the United States (retitled the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, since 2008) remains as it always was: a pitiful thing with monstrously complex rules of participation and administration. It remains convoluted, inadequate, and frequently unfair even after more than half a century of priority concern on the part of a number of presidents, as well as congressional attention recorded in thousands upon thousands of pages of heartfelt panels, investigations, hearings, and reports. For all its wealth, it is not clear that the United States has assured access for its citizens to “a nutritionally adequate low-​cost diet.” It is also not clear that this goal can be achieved in isolation from handling poverty itself. It is clear, however, that taken as an antipoverty measure, the food stamp program fails even in conjunction with other programs, in particular Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Yet the inadequacy of the program and American social welfare in general does not testify to the oppression of the poor by controlling elites of one sort or another, or to the momentum of tradition that lags behind need—​the trap of institutional inertia. Rather, as a prominent instance of American public welfare, the food stamp program reflects romantic American values, often shared by the poor themselves, that have shaped American responses to deprivation and inequality. The impetus for broadened eligibility and improved benefits continued from 1964, when the program was given its current form, until the Reagan administration. However, the improvements in coverage and access were small and inadequate in spite of apparent attention to poverty and hunger. The few years of expansion were circumscribed by the romantic policies that are embedded in American society and continue to dominate the design of the nation’s public and private welfare programs. Those values

explain the retrenchments in programs for the poor, including the food stamp reductions of 2013–​14, which occurred amid the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. There have always been sizable groups that endorse substantial public and private initiatives to address poverty and inequality. However, they are too weak to blunt American antagonism to those in economic need. Even as a compromise among competing American preferences, the food stamp program largely preserves the nation’s distrust of poor people and the suspicion that they are complicit in their difficulties. Thus the program’s inadequacies are designed on the chassis of the nation’s extreme individualism, maintaining material deprivation as a spur to industriousness and personal responsibility. The nation reaches these conclusions out of an abiding assurance of their correctness and the nearly Divine provenance of American values. Rather than the voice of a nefarious, ruling elite; an autonomous federal government; or unrepresentative special interests, the food stamp program is fashioned from the same broadly popular values that account for both America’s social welfare policies and by extension its social and economic stratification. Congressional statements accompanying legislation and much of the testimony before its committees accurately reflect national preferences. The U.S. Congress is better interpreted as the conduit of American preferences than as an independent authority. American democracy works; private values determine public laws. Unfortunately, the values that define the impetus of democratic populism are romantic rather than pragmatic, generous, and humane. THE FOOD STAMP PROGRAM IN 2013

The food stamp program has been acknowledged as an antipoverty program, but it is still tied to the goal of nutrition, ignoring the priorities of the poor themselves. It makes the assumption that nutrition can be separated from poverty and that ensuring a minimally nutritious low-​cost diet largely fulfills the nation’s obligations to poorer people. Mainly as a result of the recession of 2008, the budget for the food stamp program more than doubled between fiscal years 2007 and 2013,1 while the average number of recipients increased by more than 80% (USDA, 2012b). In federal fiscal year 2013, the food stamp program was the largest federal program for poor and low-​income people, spending $76.6 billion

1. Unless indicated otherwise, all years are calendar years. [17 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

and serving more than 15% of the U.S. population, 47.6 million people, of whom 72% were children; 17% of recipients had income above the poverty line but rarely more than 125% of the poverty line (Office of Management & Budget, n.d.). In FY 2012, the federal government spent about $63 billion on the Earned Income Tax Program, which benefited about 27 million people; about $50.5 billion on the Supplemental Security Income program, benefiting about 8.3 million people (U.S. CBO, 2012); and nearly $20.8 billion on TANF, to benefit about 3.8  million people (ibid.; U.S. DHHS, Administration for Children & Families, n.d.) In FY2013, all federal public assistance and related programs accounted for about $171.8 billion, approximately 4.7% of total federal outlays (OMB, n.d.). Additionally, in the same year, the federal budget laid out about $49.7 billion for housing assistance and about $80 billion in unemployment insurance, bringing the total of major programs for lower-​income people to about 8.2% of federal expenditures (ibid.). Tax expenditures for the refundable child tax credits came to $23 billion. Including about $141 billion for Medicaid, perhaps 12% of the federal budget is allocated for programs to assist low-​income and poor residents and citizens (ibid.). Yet in 2013, more than 62 million Americans lived below 125% of the poverty line (about $29,500 for a family of four) and more than 106 million Americans were below 200% of the poverty line (about $47,000 for a family of four; ibid.). A few of these programs, notably TANF and SSI, are reserved for people with income under the poverty line. However, many beneficiaries of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), food stamps, housing assistance, child tax credits, and even the social insurances among others are needy, lower-​income members of the society but with incomes above the official poverty thresholds. In contrast to programs designed for the lower-​income and poor, expenditures for Social Security (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) and Medicare—​about $670.9 billion and $590.7 billion, respectively—​ accounted for approximately 16% of federal expenditures in FY 2013. In the same year, Social Security served almost 58 million beneficiaries, and Medicare served nearly 50 million.2 The detail and complexity of the rules that govern benefits, eligibility, and the administration of public assistance programs, notably including food stamps, are rarely understood or appreciated. The baroque requirements approximate humor but are realized quite seriously, given the popular suspicion and antagonism toward those who need to rely on public assistance. 2. Except where indicated, the financial data in the three paragraphs are drawn from the Office of Management and Budget, http://​w ww.whitehouse.gov/​omb/​budget/​h istoricals, ­tables 1.1 and 11.3, retrieved on Feb. 3, 2014. T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [17 9 ]

Benef its

Food stamp benefits are calculated by subtracting 30% of an applicant’s net income from the maximum benefit, which is adjusted by family size. Benefits are not taxable, and purchases are exempt from sales taxes. The maximum monthly benefit amounts reflect the cost of a “nutritionally adequate low-​cost diet” defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Thrifty Food Plan, the cheapest of its low-​cost plans. States can choose to provide five months of food stamps as a transitional benefit to families leaving the program. The actual paper vouchers of the program have been replaced by plastic benefit cards, in large part to minimize fraud although they also may reduce the stigma of relying on public assistance. Food stamps are limited to purchasing food for home preparation from approved outlets, which include farmers’ markets, and seeds to grow food for home consumption. For elderly and disabled recipients, the program permits the purchase of prepared meals. Alcohol and tobacco products may not be purchased with food stamps. In FY 2013, the average monthly food stamp benefit was $133.07 per person, about $1,600 per year. The maximum benefit for a single person was $200 per month. The maximum benefit for a family of four was $668 per month. For a single person, the average benefit represents about 14% and the maximum benefit only about 19% of the 2014 poverty line; for a family of four the maximum benefit represents about 31% of the 2014 poverty line. The sizeable falloff between the maximum amount and the average amount is due to other income, usually public assistance but also income from work and unemployment insurance, since many receiving food stamps are employed or have other minimal sources of income. In FY 2011, food stamps when added to gross income raised only 13% of recipients above the poverty line, but when added to net income—​a better measure of purchasing power—​their effect was apparently much smaller (USDA Food & Nutrition Service, 2012a). Eligibility

The food stamp program is one of the nation’s few programs for poorer people with almost universal coverage. Income remains the abiding criterion for eligibility. Unlike TANF, the food stamp program serves single people and married people without dependent children. In 2008, the bulk of recipients had no dependent children and were younger and more frequently unmarried than TANF recipients. In FY 2011, 45% of recipients were children or the elderly, 30% had at least some earnings, and 41% [1 8 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

lived in households in which there was at least one worker: “The majority of [recipients] did not receive cash welfare benefits. Only 8% … received TANF benefits, and another 4% received state general assistance benefits. Over 22% … received Social Security, and 20% received SSI benefits” (USDA Food & Nutrition Service, 2012a). Only about 17% of recipients had income above the poverty line, while 43% were in extreme poverty, that is, income less than half of the poverty line (ibid.). Recipients of TANF, SSI, and general assistance (local relief, which is both rare today and usually very minimal) are automatically eligible for food stamps. As previously noted, the standards of receipt for TANF vary by state, while eligibility for other programs is established locally or by the federal government. Those not receiving other sources of public assistance go through the same process of scrutiny and often case management. Food stamp eligibility is determined by both gross monthly income and net monthly income. Households with elderly or disabled members have only their net income counted; thus they benefit from a more generous income test for food stamp eligibility (Committee on Ways and Means, 2008). 3 In order to receive food stamps, the monthly gross income of households without an elderly or disabled member that are not also recipients of TANF, SSI, or general assistance cannot exceed 130% of the federal poverty standard adjusted for household size (ibid.). Gross monthly income includes a household’s cash income minus 15 types of exclusions. These include infrequent income “up to $30 per quarter,” income tax refunds, income earned by young school children, expense reimbursements that do not raise net income, postsecondary student aid, “the cost of producing self-​employment income,” and many others (ibid., pp.  15–​18). Net income is computed by reducing gross monthly income in consideration of additional costs for households without elderly or disabled members. These reductions include a standard monthly deduction “set at 8.31 percent of the annually indexed federal poverty income guidelines for each household size, 20 percent of any earned income, child support, dependent care expenses related to work and training, shelter expenses that exceed 50% of net income,” and others (ibid., pp. 15–​19). Except for automatically eligible households, food stamp recipients cannot have liquid assets above $2,000 (FY2008). For households with an elderly or disabled member, the asset limit is $3,000. Liquid assets include cash, bank accounts, lump-​sum payments, and others, as well as recreational property. States by and large set limits on the value of cars. 3. Except where noted, the program descriptions here and below are summarized from 2008 Green Book (Committee on Ways and Means, 2008). T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 8 1]

In the manner of other welfare programs, notably TANF, the food stamp program sets work requirements as a condition of participation. To receive or maintain eligibility, most able-​bodied adults must: (1) register for work (typically with the welfare agency or a State employment service office); (2) accept a suitable job if offered one; (3) fulfill any work, job search, or training requirements established by administering welfare agencies; (4) provide the administering public assistance agency with sufficient information to allow a determination with respect to their job availability; and (5) not voluntarily quit a job without good cause or reduce work effort below 30 hours a week. If the household head fails to fulfill any of these requirements, the entire household may, at State option, be disqualified for up to 180 days. Individual disqualification periods differ according to whether the violation is the first, second, or third; minimum periods which may be increased by the State welfare agency, range from 1 to six months. (ibid., pp. 15–​17)

In addition, most able-​bodied adults between 18 and 50 without dependents are ineligible for food stamps “if during the prior 36 months they received benefits for 3 months while not working at least 20 hours a week or participating in an approved work/​training activity” (ibid., pp. 15–​12). Thus many single adults without work or the prospect of work are ineligible for food stamps, which restricts the coverage of the program during deep recession. Moreover, a number of groups are categorically excluded from eligibility, among them strikers, many noncitizens, full-time postsecondary students, and people living in institutions. Still, at State request, [the rules concerning the able-​bodied without dependents] can be waived for areas with very high unemployment (generally, over 10  percent). Moreover, States may, on their own initiative, exempt up to 15 percent of those covered under this work rule. (Committee on Ways and Means, 2008, pp. 15–​17)

Administration

The food stamp program operates throughout the nation and its territories, guided by federal regulations that permit a substantial amount of state discretion. The federal government picks up all of the cost of providing benefits to recipients who conform to its eligibility criteria. States must pay for other groups that they decide to cover (e.g., able-​bodied single adults whose work exceeds federal standards, and ineligible noncitizens). The federal government also pays about half of the state’s costs to

[1 8 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

administer the program and allows them to retain between 20% and 35% of fraudulent payments that they recover. The states typically administer the program through their welfare offices. The states certify eligibility, verify the accuracy of applications, and calculate benefits. They also perform a large role in training and employment programs, while exercising broad discretion through federally mandated options. The options cover many areas of eligibility, notably including the handling of assets, exclusions, verification procedures, and others. Some states favor options that increase participation; others apparently seek to restrict the numbers who receive food stamps even while very little, if anything at all, is saved in state budgets by denying food stamps to poorer people. Most of the options seem to be neutral steps to simplify administration—​ as examples, online applications, call centers, program integration, and broad-​based categorical eligibility—​which automatically qualify recipients of TANF, SSI, and GA for food stamps (USDA, 2012). However, a number of popular options apparently increase benefits or eligibility for food stamps; for example, 37 states exclude the value of all vehicles in calculating eligibility. In contrast, other options seem to reduce eligibility or benefits. Only 20 states incorporate transitional food stamp benefits “to help support families as they move off TANF” (ibid., p.  4). Transitional food stamp assistance can be provided for up to five months at full benefits. Only 16 states exclude child support payments in calculating eligibility; 35 states refuse to employ a simplified process for determining the cost of self-​employment. Fully 32 states opt for sanctions greater than the mandated minimum for recipients who violate the program’s work rules, and 32 states impose either a lifetime ban or modified ban on recipients convicted of a felony drug offense. The USDA’s quality control research contradicts the popular suspicion that the program is poorly run, providing food stamps to many ineligible applicants and making frequent errors in calculating benefits. In FY 2012, only 2.77% of benefits were overpayments, and only 0.65% of benefits were underpayments (USDA, 2013, p. 3). The research suggests that states are responsible for two thirds of the errors and recipients one third. Additionally, “Most errors are mistakes (and not intentional violations). The most common errors are related to establishing expense deductions and households’ income correctly and meeting program requirements as to reporting household circumstances”.4 (Committee on Ways & Means, 4. The issue of incentives for work participation—​t hat is, moral behaviorism—​is fundamentally ideological. Rewards and sanctions are imposed more as ceremony and symbolism

T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 8 3 ]

2008, pp. 15–​19). Only about 1% of payments seem to have been fraudulent (ibid.). Yet in FY 2007, fully 10.9% of decisions to deny or terminate eligibility were errors (ibid., pp.  15–​16). In FY 2012 fewer than 1% of recipients were ineligible (USDA Food & Nutrition Service, 2013). Food stamps appear to be spent on intended purchases. The rate of trafficking—​individuals selling food stamps for cash—​has declined from about 4% in the 1990s to about 1% during 2009–​2011. However, about 10.5% of all stores authorized to accept food stamps engaged in trafficking (USDA, 2013). Far fewer than all who are actually eligible participate in American public welfare programs. Typically fewer than 70% of those who are eligible for food stamps received them. Though the number of recipients increased during the Great Recession of 2008, the participation rate of those eligible for food stamps does not seem to have changed much. In a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Cunnyngham, Sukasih, and Castner (2013) estimate that of the 50.7 million people eligible for food stamps in 2010—​the depth of the Great Recession—​75% participated, while only 65% of the working poor participated. The rates were 66% and 53% respectively in 2008, the beginning of the Great Recession and typical of prerecession years, and rose temporarily to 83% in 2011 (U.S. DHHS, 2014, table 4b, pp. 11–​19). Nonetheless, though only 75% of the eligible population received food stamps in 2010, the program distributed fully 94% of its total allocated budget. The disparity is explained by the fact that “the neediest individuals eligible for higher benefits participated at higher rates than other eligible persons” (USDA Food & Nutrition Service, 2012b, p. xi). The falloff in participation by those who would receive smaller benefits, that is, largely the working poor, may be caused by the stigma and humiliation that attend reliance on public welfare—​the assault on American pride—​and perhaps too by the inconvenience of applying, given its daunting complexity. POLICY ROMANTICISM AND FOOD STAMPS

The bizarre complexity of the food stamp program in the manner of nearly all U.S. programs for low-​income and poor citizens pays tribute to moral than as a rational strategy to achieve enumerated goals. In fact, there is scant evidence that any welfare or social service program achieves its goals (Epstein, 1997). The ambiguity of reality—​t hat is, identification of the true causes of social failure and want—​is not the issue, or American responses to poverty and need would be far more tentative, exploratory, and pragmatic. Instead, the nation has clearly stated its preferences, no matter the rational standing of the problem. Indeed, it makes little effort to discern effective interventions. [1 8 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

behaviorism—​the use of material incentives to promote socially acceptable behavior. As a consequence, the program’s role in supplementing the income and nutrition of poorer citizens in combating poverty and inequality is only partially realized. However, its ceremonial function of enacting the nation’s romantic values exacts a penance for failed individualism through inadequate benefits, as well as the difficulty and often the humiliation of applying for public relief. Case management and burdensome documentation of income often embolden inappropriate administrative discretion and limit participation. A mania for work participation even when it is unlikely—​as with the disabled, children, and the elderly, and during recessions for the able-​bodied—​is enacted as inadequate benefits, restrictive income eligibility, and narrow income exclusions, all presumably in place to encourage work. However, the work incentives created by providing inadequate benefits and restrictive eligibility reduce the ability to handle both poverty and inequality. Indeed, the difference between public relief and wages measures the classic definition of work incentive. 5 In a pervasive sacrifice of adequacy to the romantic notions of extreme individualism and self-​reliance, U.S. welfare policy has typically maintained work incentives for poorer groups by offering low public benefits rather than by raising wages. Why hasn’t the nation simply combined its many cash and voucher programs in favor of a negative income tax, which would extend the EITC to everyone and thereby more effectively address poverty? It would save billions in administrative costs, promote social cohesion by minimizing both the humiliations of the application process and the stigma of public assistance, increase participation, and in sum reduce material deprivation. Many conservatives, notably the Nobel economist Milton Friedman, and liberals (such as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan) pressed for it. The conventional explanation holds that liberals were against the proposed NIT programs under President Nixon and then President Carter because benefits were too low, while conservatives opposed it as too expensive (Burke & Burke, 1974). Perhaps a more likely and more basic explanation is that the nation did not wish to give up on moral behaviorism and the isolation of the morally impaired from the virtuous. The convoluted regulations of food stamps and other categorical welfare programs, TANF and SSI in particular, codify the extreme individualism of American policy romanticism, insisting on self-​sufficiency without much evidence that it is either desirable or routinely possible. Rather than rational support or even 5. This definition may be theoretically obvious, but it has not been consistently true in practice. Even when work pays less than welfare, many prefer to work, perhaps in anticipation of a brighter future but also for reasons of social conformity and psychological stimulation. T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 8 5 ]

reasonable testimony, the complexity of American welfare is sustained through the faith of the nation in the correctness of its values: a sense of chosenness confused as patriotism that is impervious to doubt and mutes dissent. Presumably the behavioral web of the food stamp program’s complexity is created to reinforce or induce prosocial behaviors such as work, independence, self-​invention, and the rest of the romantic values of the culture. Microeconomists, experimental psychologists, and the many practitioners of applied theology, social work, counseling, psychotherapy, and the management disciplines compete to invent the perfect social conditioning box to change miscreants into productive, tax-​paying citizens. It is all to be done at low cost, avoiding deep investments in families, schools, jobs, and supportive services. Yet it seems beyond the capacities of modern behavioral reformation to consider that living wage employment is the mysterious positive reinforcement that is ignored. Unfortunately, a full employment program at livable wages is expensive. The ecstatic intelligence of policy romanticism denies redistributive social policy in favor of civic and personal elevation at the end of the individual’s search for authenticity, a journey impelled by the meager provisions of food stamps and welfare and cheered on by the American public. Since welfare behaviorism has produced few measurable advantages if any, the suspicion persists that the inadequacies of food stamps and American programs for the poor and near poor persist as tests of virtue. If the poor succeed, it is due to the stern necessity of welfare. If they fail in spite of public provisions, it is evidence of people’s character imperfections and thus justifies their continuing want. The viciousness of the double bind is not purposefully designed by a malignant elite, but rather the natural consequence of deeply embedded social values that rise through the infinitude of citizens’ daily choices and are enacted into law by true representatives of the people. For all its attachment to work, policy romanticism is concerned with the idea of work as discipline, penance, and moral suasion more than as the actual vehicle for providing a living. Work confers social identity and moral value; it is the end point in the pursuit of authenticity. If indeed work were sincerely intended, then social welfare policy would provide full employment and training for every capable citizen to fulfill a job of social value. Work without these supports remains a test of moral virtue, a ceremony of degradation and humiliation for the unemployed and the poor. Romantic work is a distorted notion deeply held and sustained by the mysticism of American tradition and its sense of inherited correctness. The administrative regulations of the program and its benefits are not arrived at by experiment or evidence that they achieve program goals. [1 8 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

Rather, they are the codified gnostic wisdom of the nation certified by assurance of America’s chosenness and tested by conformity with national values. In fact, the food stamp pilot programs of the early 1960s were intended largely to test whether the sky would fall if people were fed. It didn’t, and agricultural markets and farm income grew. Yet participation was very low because of a purchase requirement; beneficiaries were obliged to “purchase” in cash what the program defined as their customary food expenditures in order to obtain “bonus” stamps (King, 2000, among many others). Expressed in testimony both before the U.S. Congress and in its legislative justifications, policy romanticism has dominated the design of the food stamp program, including its precursors, the food stamp effort during 1939–​1943 and the pilot programs of the early 1960s. The initial Food Stamp Act of 1964 established the program as a permanent element of federal welfare. The food program had in mind two immediate benefits: as agricultural policy to raise farm income and obviously “to improve the nutrition of low-​income households.” The increased utilization of foods in establishing and maintaining adequate national levels of nutrition will tend to cause the distribution in a beneficial manner of our agricultural abundance and will strengthen our agricultural economy, as well as result in more orderly marketing and distribution of food. (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, 1964, p. 12)

However, the food stamp program was not frankly acknowledged as an antipoverty measure until decades later. Indeed, Congress clarified its preference when it gave legislative responsibility for the food stamp program to the agriculture committees in both houses, and administrative responsibility to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The initial legislation of 1964 continued the practice of the earlier pilot programs and the temporary program of 1939–​1943. It required food stamp recipients “to pay an amount consistent with their normal food expenditures” for food stamps, which provided a “bonus” to increase their access to food. Their normal food expenditures were seen as inadequate to purchase a “low cost nutritionally adequate diet.” The forced rebudgeting of poor households also assumed that the government’s estimates of normal food expenditures were accurate. Yet many poor families sacrificed food for clothing, shelter, medical care, educational support for children, and other expenses. Thus, requiring an artificial contribution of presumed “normal food expenditures” reduced the contribution to other areas that the poor deemed more important. The voucher system of food stamps also assumed that the poor, if given the cash equivalent, would spend the money unwisely. T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 8 7]

Implicit in the initial legislation and continuing forward is a profound distrust of the poor to make decisions in their own interests and to conform to socially appropriate values. Indeed, the mistrust further suggests that the conditions of want that lead people to apply for food stamps and more generally to rely on other public welfare programs result from their own character flaws—​lack of discipline, laziness, promiscuity, foolishness, and so forth—​rather than from the profound defects of the nation’s social system and economy. The initial legislation also reflects distrust of the poor (as well as a broader concession to localism and state’s rights) by allowing the states to determine eligibility for food stamps as they did for other cash welfare programs, notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC was the precursor to TANF). Moreover, it provided the states with the same broad discretion that they exercised in administering other welfare programs for “the certification of applicant households in accordance with the general procedures and personnel standards used by them in the certification of applicants for benefits under the federally aided public assistance programs” (Food Stamp Act of 1964, PL 88-​525). Presumably, local jurisdictions are in a better position to judge need and moral worth than the federal government, while a universal welfare program with only income eligibility would lose the opportunity of close supervision of those in need. Yet broad discretion in assessing eligibility and administration has historically tolerated bureaucratic abuses of the poor, including inappropriate intrusions into personal lives, capricious denial of benefits, and enormous geographic inequities. The fact that those abuses and inequities seem to repeat local preferences for racism and degradation of the poor does not make them any more palatable by being democratically chosen. The political swapping (“logrolling”) between agricultural interests and urban interests that facilitated enactment of the program is not proof of government autonomy, as some would have it (Ferejohn, in Wright, Rieselbach, & Dodd, 1986; Finegold, in Weir, Orloff, & Skocpol, 1988). Rather, the compromise of the food stamp legislation expresses national values that sustain the vitality of food production along with the desirability of feeding the poor (but under numerous constraints). The compromise was eased by the fact that food stamps were spent in local stores, replacing commodity distributions of little benefit to food retailers. Indeed, although the national Chamber of Commerce opposed the legislation as unnecessary welfare, the Helena-​West Helena Chamber of Commerce, located in a poor rural section of Arkansas, with 50% of its population receiving food distributions, endorsed food stamps enthusiastically because “the small retail food merchant in this area cannot long

[1 8 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

continue to endure the abnormal distribution of food to his customers” (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, 1963, p. 103). At the same time, farm interests competitive with grocers preferred the commodities program, which more directly sustained price supports. Under the food stamp plan, many of these surplus foods would not be utilized and would continue to pile up in ever-​i ncreasing surplus. This would, of course, affect the growers and processors of the 2 billion pounds of food now being usefully utilized. (p. 100)

The 1964 minority report in the House, a dissent by all the Republican members of the Committee on Agriculture, opposed the program on the grounds that it was expensive, duplicative, and unnecessary and that it threatened economic prosperity. The national Chamber of Commerce amplified the House minority’s position with laments that the secretary of agriculture’s discretion over the program should appropriately be given to local jurisdictions. Even more to the point, the National Chamber of Commerce argued that inadequate nutrition was a minimal problem and usually the result of bad personal choices rather than poverty. Practically every person in the nation falls short in some degree of consuming an adequate and properly balanced diet. Among these are a good many, almost regardless of their income, whose poor food and diet habits lead to inadequate nutrition that impairs their health and well-​being. It includes also many whose health is impaired because their diets are such that they do not eat the foods that their own individual body metabolism can assimilate and utilize. Because of extensive private and public assistance now in effect, the number whose health is impaired in any important way through inadequate nutrition because of low income is relatively low. (p. 101)

At least superficially, the progressive impulse won. After all, a food stamp program was institutionalized nationally by the 1964 legislation and has continued for more than 50 years. Yet the victory came along with very low benefits and the perpetuation of an enormous number of encumbrances that limit eligibility and participation. The victory also appeared to be largely ceremonial rather than substantive, especially against the backdrop of resurgent national attention to deprivation and hunger and the nascent War on Poverty. The progressive impulse won, but only an inadequate and constrained program (Epstein, 2010). The values expressed in the 1964 minority report seem to have prevailed, seriously limiting the program and anticipating the consistent decline in general welfare benefits over the next five decades.

T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 8 9 ]

Yet commercial support for the food stamp program, when it exists, is nearly devoid of any attention to hunger and poverty. To be sure, proponents of the program who address hunger and deprivation often invoke the same values that inspire the commercial and farming sector, although they come to different conclusions. The typical testimony argued that the program improves nutrition, but it is also clear that food stamp purchases improve the economic conditions of recipients. Even the National Sharecroppers’ Fund endorsed the value of food stamps to farming and commerce, while the AFL-​CIO made a point that food stamps would “enhance the self-​reliance” of recipients (US Senate, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, 1964, pp.  61–​62). Neither challenged the requirement that recipients purchase food stamps with their presumed allotment for food. The usual testimony of support soft-​pedaled the degradation of public welfare in arguing for a national program, and probably to sustain or at least acknowledge the regnant social values that sanctioned the humiliation of welfare recipients and distrust of the poor. In contrast, Representative Blatnik’s testimony was unusual in its understanding of poverty and sympathy for the unemployed and needy. [Recipients] like the food stamp program because it respects their individual freedom of choice –​allowing them to buy what foods they want, where they choose to shop, and when they need the food. This program looks to the human dignity of these people, many of whom are in desperate need because of the serious unemployment situation in Minnesota. It protects good people, whose misfortune is not of their own making, from suffering the humiliation of the breadlines, the existence of which gave pathetic testimony to the plight of many of their parents back in the 1930s. (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, 1963, p. 60)

However, Blatnik’s support seems strained and excessive since the rules of the program, especially before ATM cards replaced paper stamps, did in fact come along with much humiliation. Nonetheless, the typical testimony repeats a common set of themes—​among them benefits to commercial interests, self-​reliance, work—​that both proponents and critics of the program addressed in their comments and by their repetition tacitly acknowledged as embedded national values. The balance in testimony was not an aesthetic consideration but a political one that spoke to policy romanticism. The nation, then as ever, viewed government competition with business as intrusive and a threat to economic growth, if not actually socialist heresy, public welfare as inducing pauperism and work as the essence of good citizenship. Blatnik’s assumption of the situational nature of poverty and sympathy for those in need have had little ability to dispel [1 9 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

the romantic American illusions of heroic individualism and extreme personal responsibility. In 1970, the House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture’s statement of intent, which blocked the repeal of the purchase requirement, characterized social attitudes throughout the duration of the food stamp program in the same terms that define American social welfare history generally. It also serves to explain why food stamps have not been cashed out in favor of higher welfare benefits. The Committee does not believe that the Food Stamp Program is a proper vehicle for the solution of all of our social assistance problems. While the Committee recognizes that there are those who think that food stamps without cost to the recipient should be used to provide not only food but clothing, shelter, furniture and medical services, and others who would provide stamps without any show of need or any requirement of self-​help whatever, it does not ascribe to this premise. A substantial majority of the Committee believes that food stamps should be used to supplement, not substitute for, the normal buying power of low income families. Further, the majority of the Committee feels that it is still desirable for those who can do so to work in order to support themselves and their families. (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, 1970, p. 10)

The 1971 amendments provided for uniform national standards of eligibility, but also included a draconian penalty for failure to comply with the law’s work requirements. An entire household would be barred from receiving food stamps if even one adult able-​bodied member of the household failed to register for employment or refused to accept what the law considered to be fair employment. Yet both unemployment and underemployment persisted at levels far below full employment, and the productive capacity of the American economy even as Congress and the American people weighed in against the able-​bodied who were unemployed. Furthermore, the purchase requirement did not substantially affect many, and its repeal in 1977 still left serious limitations on recipients’ freedom to budget their incomes. The nation’s romantic antipathy to poorer groups and its passion for extreme individualism triumphed over social reality. Subsequent modifications created only small changes in the program, but often against the progressive impulse. The testimony during congressional hearings and Congress’s intentions reinforced the consistent priority of policy romanticism over pragmatic inroads on poverty and inequality. The amendments of the 1970s expanded the program nationally and to American territories, but they also insisted on added work requirements. Furthermore, the elimination of the purchase requirement T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [19 1]

only took a small progressive step forward. Under the purchase requirement, the amount of food stamp benefits declined with income since the poorest were not obliged to come up with an income match. As the required purchase amount increased with income, the amount of free food stamps proportionately declined. Those with the most income who presumably shouldered the greatest burden for a match also received the smallest benefit of food stamps and thus a proportionately smaller inducement to bear the social and psychological penalties of participation. Yet even after the elimination of the purchase requirement, the amount of food stamp subsidy was still figured as the difference between a presumed amount of expenditure for food—​30% of net monthly income—​and the “thrifty food plan,” that is, the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of the cost of a minimally nutritious diet. In the end, the elimination of the purchase requirement in 1977 represented a somewhat greater trust in the ability of the poor to allocate their resources. However, the change was more symbolic than substantive, failing to increase participation in the program (Brown, 1988). Over the opposition of a considerable number of senators and representatives, the purchase requirement was eliminated in 1977, along with the explicit commitment to agricultural income. Yet the broader grounds for the opposition are largely maintained throughout the history of the food stamp program. Opponents wished to limit the expansion of the program, maintain a degree of control over the budgeting of the poor, and restrain eligibility. In 1977, the opposition succeeded in eliminating automatic eligibility for those receiving other welfare programs (e.g., SSI and AFDC) while restricting eligibility for students and aliens. But the core intent of the opposition was to prevent a general expansion of welfare and welfare entitlement. This desire has been realized in the refusal to both legislate a guaranteed annual income (e.g., a negative income tax) and cash out food stamps. The opposition’s success in spirit and fact—​even when its specific legislative items are rejected—​pays homage to the determinative influence of general American preferences. Rep. Charles Grassley, a conservative Iowa Republican, argued in opposition to eliminating the purchase requirement that poverty in this nation is defined in terms of the need for a nutritious diet, good housing, social services which help poor individuals to meet their own basic needs, and the like, yet the movement toward an all-​cash welfare system suggests that poverty should no longer be defined in terms of basic human needs but, rather, that poor people should determine what their basic needs are. It seems obvious that, in many cases, these needs as defined by the individual will not be in accord with what historically have been defined as basic needs. In other words, the American taxpayer will shortly [1 9 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

be asked to help “impoverished” individuals to purchase whatever they wish to purchase, whether or not these purchases fit into the categories of good housing, nutritious food, and the like. (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, 1977, p. 831)

A joint statement from three moderate Republicans who endorsed the elimination of the purchase requirement commented on the strengthened work provisions of the 1977 law including workfare. The workfare provisions encouraged states to require recipients to perform work as repayment for their stamp allotments. The biggest benefit to the Food Stamp program in our view is that “food for work” will stimulate work incentives and increase the career potential of able-​bodied recipients who have been unable to find adequate employment on their own. In the process, it will go a long way toward restoring public confidence in the Food Stamp program and bringing self-​esteem to recipients. (p. 834)

Another joint statement, from eight of the fifteen Republican minority members of the House Committee on Agriculture, reiterated national opposition to a guaranteed annual income, which had been defeated earlier during the Nixon administration. There is sufficient reason to believe that … the elimination of the purchase requirement brings us closer to the day of the Guaranteed Annual Income for the poor or near-​poor. So far, the road has led from a commodity program for the poor to a food stamp pilot program to an uncontrolled period of food stamp growth (the food stamp “stampede”) to elimination of the purchase requirement—​is the next step to be a guaranteed annual income? (p. 845)

The needs of the poor were not the issue; the presumed culpability of the poor in creating their own problems was. Conflicts over data were rare; both those for and those against changes to the food stamp program largely agreed on the effects of the early food stamp pilot programs and consistently agreed on the early program’s effects, including an unacceptable error rate and fraud. The differences were ideological and usually small. Congress closely reflected prevailing social attitudes toward poverty and personal economic failure, which largely placed the onus for dependency on character flaws rather than on social barriers such as racial discrimination and imperfections of the economy, including the unemployment and price instability that are created by the business cycle. The customary concern with an inadequate number of jobs rarely expressed itself in Congress as a jobs program, but rather as a series of penalties in T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [19 3 ]

existing programs that made unemployment ever more uncomfortable. Indeed, there has rarely been any serious threat to the prevailing romanticism nurtured and expressed by Tocqueville and Emerson among many others whereby people largely invent themselves and thus earn their social and economic positions. Evidence to the contrary has little standing as the American people and their congressional representatives accept romantic precepts of the social order as articles of faith in the nation’s exceptional destiny. Sen. Herman Talmadge, a staunch white supremacist and ardent advocate of states’ rights as governor of Georgia and then senator for 24 years, paradoxically endorsed an enlarged food stamp program in 1969: “there are millions of citizens who need more food assistance and are not getting it. The problem is basically one of insufficient funds” (U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, 1969, p. 132). His support would seem to be out of character except that he was endorsing an agricultural program to benefit the farmers and grocers in his state, and the benefits he supported were quite modest. His concern was limited to those who could not work—​the elderly, the infirm, and children—​but without ever mentioning the many who were unemployed by economic events beyond their control. Quite to the point, his comments reflect what he takes to be national values. Talmadge was not noted for his advocacy of social welfare as governor or senator, or for support of the War on Poverty programs during the 1960s, modest as they were in the context of need. Indeed, he and his father, Eugene, were pillars of the Old South. Nevertheless, he justified his support of an expanded food stamp program in terms of longstanding social attitudes that limit the public response to poverty by largely disregarding unemployment and inadequate wages resulting from imperfections of the nation’s economic system. I do not now, and I have never favored the dole or the handout. I have no patience with anyone –​man or woman –​who is able but unwilling to work. I bring no brief for able-​bodied people who fail, because of their own shiftlessness or lack of personal responsibility, to avail themselves of jobs that are offered, or educational and training opportunities within their reach. It is no secret that we have such people in our midst, and I guess we will have some for all time. But I do not bleed for them. I feel no compulsion –​and neither should American taxpayers –​to look after their care and feeding. If they are able to look after themselves, to take whatever action necessary to improve their lot in life, then they should do so. There is no room for them on welfare rolls anywhere in any State. State and local authorities should make sure such people do not become wards of society to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor, when they have refused to do anything themselves… . [1 9 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

Neither do I consider food assistance programs as a first step toward a national income maintenance system. I for one do not subscribe to the theory that it would be either practical or wise to establish any kind of national income maintenance program that would provide a certain standard of living for everyone whether he works or attempts to work or not… . This would destroy the individual’s dignity and self-​ respect. And this, after all, is the most fundamental need of our welfare recipients… . Second, and not the least consideration, such a costly giveaway program would eventually virtually bankrupt our economy. (pp. 131, 132)

Throughout subsequent decades, the food stamp program continued to improve its administrative efficiency with a variety of small changes regarding oversight, reporting, outreach, and application procedures. However, the resurgent romanticism that put Ronald Reagan in the White House also eventuated in changes that diminished the food stamp program by paring benefits and restricting eligibility, although not to the extent desired by the Reagan administration. The 1981 and 1982 legislative changes cut the food stamp program by reducing deductions and exclusions in computing net income, restricting the indexing of benefits to once per year, adding a gross income eligibility limit, and eliminating eligibility for strikers, along with a number of other computational devises that in the end may have reduced the number of recipients by more than one million (Wright et al., 1986, p. 247). However, the Reagan administration failed in its attempt to eliminate many more millions from the program by increasing the benefit reduction rate from 30% to 35% of net income. In addition, conservatives, notably Sen. Jesse Helms, were unable to reintroduce the purchase requirement. An inadequate program conforms to American preferences more closely than an eviscerated program that cannot address hunger at all. Put another way, the negotiations among competitive legislative interests reached a compromise on a meager bill that mirrors national preferences. The drama of powerful leaders vying with each other unfortunately ignores the mundane derivation of that power from their constituencies—​the masses of Americans. The 1982 changes also strengthened the workfare provisions that were introduced in the 1977 legislation as a pilot program and eliminated the proviso that prevented workfare participants from filling existing jobs or supplanting current workers. In addition, the 1982 changes gave greater autonomy to states to require recipients to work off their benefits at minimum wages. Further, the final legislation rejected the provisions of the House of Representatives to strengthen the 1977 protections for workfare participants: “to provide the same benefits and working conditions that are provided at the job site to employees performing comparable work for comparable hours” and by reimbursing the costs of transportation T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [19 5 ]

up to $25 per month (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture Report, 1982, p.  185). The then-​ contemporary attitude toward food stamps and welfare recipients generally was captured by Rep. George Hansen, an Idaho Republican, criticizing the proposed 1982 House amendments. The comments were coincidental with the deep recession of the early 1980s when the unemployment rate surpassed 10%. Wholesale numbers of American taxpayers continue to register increasing concern about this growth of food stamp outlay and the amount of people receiving food stamps. There is a strong perception that many individuals receiving benefits are by choice long-​term unemployed and may, in fact be deliberately failing to accept available employment. Certainly one must question the right of able-​bodied persons, who are not exempt from work-​registration and who do not want to work to receive food stamps… . Although there is recognizable difficulty in determining who is and who is not unemployed voluntarily, continued effort should be made to devise an efficient and effective method to separate the voluntarily idle from those honestly out of work. It is important that the Committee keep in mind that a tempest is brewing among many hard-​working Americans who do not believe it is right that wages from their work go to support others who choose not to work. (p. 198)

Requiring recipients of public welfare to atone for their benefits through employment at minimum wages or even less has long been popular in the United States. It is a form of public humiliation oblivious of the possibility that the work deprives others of the opportunity to compete for the position (assuming that the work is real employment that would exist without workfare), while it lowers overall wages by increasing the labor pool of low-​wage workers. The way out of putting the poor at each other’s throats has often been to create “leaf raking” jobs, that is, work with little market value if any but functioning as a ritual of obedience. Yet empty jobs underscore the intent of make-​work to humiliate recipients and discourage applications for relief. Still, the popularity of “food for work” in the 1982 food stamp legislation is usually reaffirmed with little debate and even less protest in subsequent legislation. A QUESTION OF WHO MAKES POLICY: THE NOTION OF  AN AUTONOMOUS GOVERNMENT

The similarities among the dissenting and supportive voices of the food stamp program as well as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA; see the next chapter) speak volumes about the American consensus, unless of course [1 9 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

government is autonomous from popular preferences. Indeed, much of the analysis of American policy maintains the impetus for decisive power in relatively unaccountable elites that presumably defy, form, or mediate popular wishes. In particular, the notion of an autonomous government—​the school of political analysis that wishes to “bring government back in” to the discussion of power—​reflects a broad preference to relieve the masses from responsibility for creating their own misfortunes (Evans, Rueschemeyer, & Skocpol, 1985; Rueschemeyer & Skocpol, 1996). If indeed, the new institutionalism distinguishes itself from the endless possibilities of sectarian academic theorizing, it lies in its argument for the autonomous state: “the importance of bringing much more explicitly into our explanations of social policy making the historical formation of each state, as well as the effects of the state’s institutional structure on the goals, capacities, and alliance of politically active groups” (Weir et al., 1988, p. 16). In this way, the state exercises a crucial, although partial, autonomy from society itself seemingly in defiance of national consensus and mass consent. Initially, the argument for the independence of government was made in support of progressive decision making, but the criticism of government’s independence has been taken over by conservatives, who have exaggerated state autonomy to the point of state tyranny. Nonetheless, the autonomy of government seems far less plausible than its negation: democracy in the United States and its public sector, especially in reference to longstanding social welfare policy, has been deeply loyal to popular wishes. Indeed, the openness of American society and the absence of coercion argue that longstanding policy is a definitive summary of social preferences. Two case studies of the food stamp program frame the program’s development in terms of the “new institutionalism,” that is, the theory of state autonomy. Finegold (in Weir et al., 1988) argues that the seniority system in the U.S. Congress and the independence of the executive branch played crucial roles in developing a food stamp program geared to maintaining farm prices and “a paternalistic system of labor control” (p.  232) that compromised with interests in providing food for the hungry. In turn: Administrative arrangements determine whether policies formulated in Congress can be implemented effectively…  . Control over the language of debate and the techniques of implementation has allowed experts within the administrative organization to reshape policy in accordance with their own collectively developed and articulated preferences. (p. 233)

Finegold goes on to explain changes in the food stamp program as a result of the changing political environment, which largely reflects T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [1 9 7]

congressional and administrative adaptations subsequent to elections. According to Finegold, those adaptations seem often to be autonomous of the elections, largely reflecting sectarian agricultural interests in the case of food stamps. The decision to acknowledge those interests is apparently a tribute to state autonomy: “the institutions of state and party that come between farmers and the policies that shape their lives” (p. 234). A similar argument to Finegold’s focusing only on the U.S. Congress, Ferejohn’s case study (1986) details the congressional compromises that he claims created the food stamp program. The logrolling of disparate interests is offered as insight into the congressional committee system, “a complex structure of internal decision making institutions to which [Congress] has delegated substantial authority,” that is, autonomy (p. 224). The case study contends that the food stamp program developed because it was desired by committee members but did “not enjoy widespread support” (p. 226). Without the underlying theory of the strong influence of state autonomy, both case studies become trivial and arbitrary, mere descriptions of the food stamp legislation and the mechanics of enacting legislation. They gain importance to the extent to which they demonstrate a nondemocratic dimension to public policy making—​the extent to which the state operates on its own institutional imperatives beyond the consent of citizens. The core tenets of the new institutionalism, though conceding the contributions and plausibility of alternatives, place the heart of decision making in the institutions of the state. The “institutional-​political process” of state formation “includes constitution-​making, involvement in wars, electoral democratization, and bureaucratization—​macropolitical processes, in short, whose forms, and timing have varied significantly in capitalist-​industrializing countries” (Weir et al., 1988, p. 17). However, neither case study handles embedded social attitudes toward the program; rather they assume that Congress is acting autonomously. In fact, the initial legislation and changes over the years seem to be remarkably reflective of embedded popular preferences, that is, the romantic assumptions of American society. The logroll simply fused two dominant strains of popular political interests—​support for agriculture and a minimal response to economic deprivation—​w ithin a package of regulations that enacted suspicion toward the character of those in need and a demand that work participation and the appearance of work participation take precedence over addressing need. Rather than being autonomous of public values, the Congressional committees appeared to enact them. Nonetheless, the new institutionalism still concedes importance to the traditional range of influences on the development of society and the state. Contrary to Almond’s telling critique (1988) of the new institutionalism, [1 9 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

it seems to reach the point of accepting almost all possible influences, thus reducing its argument to pointlessness.6 Understanding of the patterns of American social provision can be improved from an institutional political process perspective. First, the historical particularities of US state formation, when understood in relationship to capitalist economy development, urbanization, and transformations of liberal values, explain the distinctive rhythms and limits of American social policy making more effectively than do socioeconomic or cultural processes abstracted from the institutional contexts of national politics. Second, as an alternative to overemphasis on zero-​sum class struggles between capitalists and workers, pinpointing ways in which class and other social relations have intersected with the organizations of the state and political parties greatly improves our ability to explain the complex political alliances that have sustained or opposed social policies in America. Finally, probing for the feedback effects of policies on subsequent politics reveals how changing policy agendas and alternative possible alliances emerge not only in response to new socioeconomic conditions but also on the basis of—​or in reaction to—​previous policy accomplishments. (Weir et al., 1988, p. 17)

Yet the programmatic research fails to live up to its billing for credibility, that is, for rational authority based on conformity with scientific 6. In fact, Almond also neglects the role of mass preferences, in deference to the traditional political science concerns with “political parties, interest groups, the media of communication, and the like” (Almond, 1988, p. 82). The response to Almond’s critique by Nordlinger, Lowi, and Fabbrini (1988) attempts to soften the bite of Almond’s critique of the statist argument, but it similarly pays little attention to mass preferences while reiterating the preferences of a number of political schools. In the end, the attempted refutation of Almond creates a muddle of arbitrary definitions without offering a telling empirical test to identify cause, a task that may be impossible to complete. Almond and Verba (1988) come close to acknowledging the power of democratic populism, but in seeking the conditions of stable democracy they idealize civic culture. Their concern with political culture as the essence of civic culture, especially when defined as a population’s attitudes toward essential social behaviors, begins to consider democratic populism but then backs away in deference to “pretheoretic categorizations” that seem the ideological choices of the authors more than an attempt to identify what actually determined social policy. Unfortunately, Almond and Verba rely on reported attitudes rather than freely chosen social behaviors that emerge as institutionalized political choices. Attitude polling is a problematic and often unreliable descriptor of behavior. Moreover, Almond’s hugely inclusive definition of political culture (in Almond & Verba, 1988, pp.  27–​2 8) testifies to the quite understandable inability of political science to get past ideology and actually perform science that tests the determinants of social policy—​whether policies are freely chosen or in some sense dictated. Then again, the literature might own up to the impossibility of applying credible science to politics and frankly embrace the fact that political theory can only be illustrated. It is nearly impossible to test, except by the balance of evidence, usually a very weak fallback position that remains arbitrary and ideological. In typical fashion, the statist argument and its critics end up trivializing their perspectives by paying tribute to the wide, virtually nondiscriminating range of possibilities. Still and all, the discussion has largely omitted the plausibility that democratic populism prevails in the United States with a core of romantic preferences. T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [19 9 ]

principles of investigation. Historical peculiarities are difficult, if not impossible, to identify as causal agents. Explanation requires more than literary presentation, but none of the new institutional research holds itself to forecasting, which is the truest test of explanation. Urbanization, economic development, and transformations of taste are socioeconomic and cultural processes just like feedback effects, which as historical peculiarities defy easy separation from their context. The new institutionalism seems quite arbitrary, stopping at convenient links in causal chains and refusing to retreat a link or two back to something that might refute its contention of autonomy. As a prominent example, Katznelson (2013) builds an argument on the autonomy of Congress in shaping New Deal legislation that rests on the racism of the congressional committee chairs and thus their ability to protect the South’s systematic policies of white supremacy. However, Katznelson ignores the fact that much of the nation shared those views. Though not supportive explicitly of American apartheid, the nation outside the South did not concede equal standing to blacks in education, employment, or housing. The New Deal legislation was certainly not as progressive as many in President Roosevelt’s policy circle had hoped. However, the compromises of the legislation probably conceded much to prevailing national sentiment. Maney’s book-​length study of the food stamp legislation (1989) is loyal to the new institutionalist argument. It counts an enormous number of many contending interests but refuses to consider that the final compromise has held largely in place for decades because it does, in fact, represent the national consensus. In contrast, King (2000) lays out a rare argument at least acknowledging the plausibility of popular consent in the design of food stamps. His point is that the nation is antagonistic to the provision of substantive justice through generous programs of income support. Still he does not resolve the issue of American pluralism: whether interest groups fairly represent American interests, or whether the poor are largely barred from the halls of power (see in particular pp. 233–​36). He too tends to ascribe interests to the poor rather than seek their own definition of their preferences, while he assumes that interest group politics is the crucial process of democratic governance. Even so, none of the literature has the methodological capacity to analyze the separate contributions of every possible influence except by very speculative historical inquiry. Bringing the state back into the analysis of policy formation may have produced little more than an extensive scholarship undercut by its own theoretical commitments in arbitrarily emphasizing one set of influences over another. In the end, the elegant qualifications of the argument may do little more than camouflage sublime ignorance. [ 2 0 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

On his part, Domhoff’s crippling critique (1996) of the new institutionalists replaces autonomous government with a power elite—​“the new corporate rich”—​that controls the policy-​making process, but without a compelling clarification of the determinants of policy making. His analyses certainly identify corporate elites in positions of power that appear to dominate social policies in the Progressive Era and the New Deal. However, in the manner of the state autonomy theorists, Domhoff ignores the complicity of popular consent, particularly during the New Deal, and frequently assumes that the interests he ascribes to the masses—​t hat is, policies he believes would be beneficial—​a re in fact the interests that motivate them. He refuses to abide the possibility that the mass of Americans endorse the corporate structure of the nation’s economic system, and perhaps even more so since the Great Depression. Indeed, the argument is as plausible as his that the modern economic and social systems of the United States developed out of the population’s pervasive romanticism rather than as a usurpation of national trust. Congress’s intentions for many decades closely reflect national priorities. The congressional logrolling that preceded enactment of the early food stamp program was an expression of national preferences, not wily, backroom, cigar-​smoked, wheeling-​a nd-​dealing for private interests. Indeed, the analytic decision is itself suspect as ideological or self-​serving when it stops with the state. The analytic enterprise could easily take a causal step or two back to consider other possibilities, or at least to describe more basic determinants such as embedded popular values, or to make the reasonable assumption that in a society as open as the United States, popular values percolate up to legislation, or the even more reasonable surmise that how people live in an open society—​t heir daily choices—​e xpresses the micro decisions that build social institutions and thus consent for them. The fact that this is rarely done should lead into a discussion of the limiting blinders on American intellectual life, the tendency of intellectuals to choose convenience and their careers over the possibility of a less agreeable reality, namely, that their high-​m inded insights and assurances have little effect on the society.

T h e F o o d S t a m p P r o g r a m  [ 2 0 1]

CH A P TER   9

Food Stamps and Public Welfare

T

he political and social meaning of the food stamp program is inseparable from the romantic certainties that gave rise to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). The PRWORA rolled back many of the progressive gains of the previous 30 years in public welfare, including the food stamp program, to a point that was more consistent with America’s traditional policy romanticism. In the spirit of welfare reform, the food stamp program was cut back, although not as severely as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which reemerged as TANF. Food stamps remained a federal responsibility, and proposals to transform it into a block grant to states were rejected. The PRWORA reduced maximum food stamp allotments and curtailed eligibility. Able-​bodied adults without dependents who were working fewer than 20 hours per week were limited to three months of food stamps every 36 months, and most legal immigrants lost their eligibility. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WORK OPPORTUNITIES RECONCILIATION ACT OF 1996: PROGRAM AND POLITICS

The PRWORA was introduced as part of the Republicans’ Contract with America subsequent to the 1994 elections, which gave them control of both houses of Congress. The Democratic administration of President Clinton and the Republican opposition both sought to increase the work attachment of welfare recipients, but without actually creating jobs. Still, the Democrats hoped to reduce poverty, while the Republicans aimed to cut dependency on public welfare in pursuit of “independence.” For the Republicans, conservatives, and generally for the nation, poverty itself,

presumably as a spur to industriousness, is often seen as the solution to the problem of dependence and inadequate character. Yet both sides accepted the logic that motivation to work increased proportionate to the disparity between what welfare paid and what work paid. However, the initial proposals of the administration sought to make work more attractive by increasing the return to labor, through provision of day care and health insurance, while the Republicans sought to make welfare less attractive by limiting benefits and eligibility. The Republican proposals prevailed over two presidential vetoes. President Clinton finally signed the legislation in August 1996, in tribute to the broad popularity of the Republican legislation with Americans and to Clinton’s impending campaign for reelection a few months later. The president’s signing statement was politically just so:  a masterful politician’s concession to the dominant values of his constituents. Although phrased as judicious and compassionate and even as an heroic defense of service for the needy, Clinton reaffirmed the nation’s romantic attachment to self-​reliance rather than demanding a plausible solution to the problem of deprivation. The statement confirmed the power of belief over reason, compassion, or fairness. While far from perfect, this legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility and family. This Act honors my basic principles of real welfare reform. It requires work of welfare recipients, limits the time they can stay on welfare, and provides child care and health care to help them make the move from welfare to work. It demands personal responsibility and puts in place tough child support enforcement measures. It promotes family and protects children. (Clinton, 1996, para. 1–​3)

The Clinton administration’s objections to the PRWORA and its counterproposals, detailed by Donna Shalala, then the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, softened some of the PRWORA’s edges but differed little on essential points: the emphasis on work and personal responsibility, but also the inherent suspicion of poorer people. The Clinton administration’s proposals were even somewhat disingenuous, especially in offering only meager efforts at job training and child support and by ignoring the insufficient number of jobs for people who were unemployed and desired to work. Indeed, the goals, rhetoric, and often specific program elements of the Clinton administration were indistinguishable from the PRWORA, with much talk of independence but little attention to poverty reduction.

F o od S ta m p s a n d P u b l ic W e l fa r e  [ 2 0 3 ]

Rooted in the bedrock American values of work and responsibility, the central focus of our approach to welfare reform is a few simple goals: The first is to move parents off welfare and into jobs as quickly as possible so that they can support themselves and their families. The second is to require absent parents to meet their responsibilities and pay child support. And the third is to reduce teen pregnancy… . The President’s approach to welfare reform emphasizes three important values: Work, responsibility and reaching the next generation. I think these are widely-​shared values—​A merican values—​values that built this country in the past and are critical to our future… . Welfare must be about earning a paycheck, not collecting a welfare check… . Time limits [on the receipt of welfare] will ensure that welfare is seen as a hand up, not a handout… . We are committed first and foremost to ensuring that everybody who can work does work. The American people want a government that honors their values and rewards people who play by the rules… . More “something for nothing” is not the answer… . Work is the answer. (Statement by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, pp. 64–​65)

While largely endorsing the PRWORA’s provisions for case management, time limits, work training, child support enforcement, mandatory work, and “the toughest child support system ever,” Secretary Shalala then went on to detail the Clinton administration’s minor differences with the PRWORA:  more flexibility in exemptions from the work rule, preferences for keeping young children with their young mothers, more reasonable application of paternity rules and other small differences. In the end, many of the Clinton administration’s preferred options were incorporated into the PRWORA. Yet aside from the failed attempt at universal health coverage, the Clinton administration made no proposal for deep changes. Its early proposal for job training—​a billion dollars for a million trainees—​was insufficient to provide even minimal marketable skills. The Clinton administration also failed to propose a jobs program, large increases in day care for poor working women, or steps to raise wages at the bottom. Moreover, the Child Support Enforcement Program has never been successful and may even be counterproductive and harmful.1 The enormous 1.  It is worth speculating on the possible harms, aside from degradation itself, created by forcing poor mothers to identify the fathers of their children for purposes of recouping public assistance payments:  fathers abandoning their children to escape collections, and possible violence to the mother. Yet these possibilities are mitigated by the ease with which applicants often evade identifying their children’s fathers. The program ends up largely performing a ceremony of family solidarity and personal responsibility that carries along potential harms. It is more than simply ironic that until 1994, when AFDC/​TANF collections from noncustodial parents reimbursed the public sector for the costs of administering the program, absent parents were paying the public sector to ritualize their responsibility. [ 2 0 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

increase in total collections—​f rom about $1 billion in 1978 to more than $26.5 billion in 2010 (but only $3.5 billion in 1978 dollars, that is, a much smaller growth than the House of Representatives prefers to report)—​ was due to voluntary participation in the program rather than payments from recalcitrant absent parents. Census data document actual declines between 1993 and 2009 in the number of custodial parents awarded support, the percentage awarded support, the percentage owed who received any payment, child support received, and percentage of amount due actually received. The small increases over the same period of time that the 2012 Green Book presents in the average child support due and the average child support received become large declines when adjusted for inflation, about 32% for each. Most tellingly, between 1993 and 2009, the child support deficit increased by about 13% (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways & Means, 2012). The program’s performance would look even worse if the period of analysis were carried back further into the 1980s. By enacting the PRWORA, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress obediently acceded to embedded American values, trading inadequate public welfare for inadequate jobs, the romantic notion of personal responsibility for greater equality and fairness, and the illusion of family solidarity for family support. Poverty and inequality became lower priorities of the American people and their attentive representatives. The dissent from the Contract with America on the part of the Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee was considerably more forceful and pointed, but it was still as toothless as the conciliatory demurrals of the Clinton administration. They argued that the tax provisions of the Contract with America were fiscally irresponsible, economically unsound, and unfair to lower-​income citizens. In particular, they were incensed that tax cuts for the wealthy would be paid for by program cuts for poorer groups. Yet these arguments, probably accurate, largely failed. As one example, the Democratic members of the committee pointed to the effects of the Republicans’ tax cuts: On average, those with incomes of $200,000 or more would enjoy tax cuts of $11,270 while those with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 would receive $570 and those with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 will get about $1,000, a mere one-​ eleventh of what the wealthy will get. (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways & Means, 1995b, p. 275)

The Democratic minority also charged the Republicans with political dishonesty for hiding the true costs of their proposals from the American people. F o od S ta m p s a n d P u b l ic W e l fa r e  [ 2 0 5 ]

The Republican positions succeeded not because of their wisdom or accuracy but because they closely realized national preferences that coddle the wealthy and the business sector while being hostile to and suspicious of poorer groups. The extreme individualism dominating the American ethos—​the idea that wealth is produced by those who are self-​reliant and industrious, and that business is the fount of the nation’s prosperity—​is a tenet of the American civic faith, and as such seemingly impervious to factual falsification. All of the data that the Democratic minority cited, as well as their extensive comments, were readily available in public documents. Of course, individual Americans were not broadly aware of the arguments and data, but this does not imply that their preferences were ignored or that the final legislation snubbed the will of the people. In fact, the multitude of organizations that are responsive to American preferences were intimately conversant with the information and debates surrounding the Contract with America. Their embrace of the Republicans’ position was made with the implicit consent of the American people in sustaining Lindblom’s insight that business enjoys a special privilege in American social policy (Lindblom & Woodhouse, 1993). Indeed, with little political and social dissent, tax and social welfare legislation has abided the growing and large inequalities of the nation’s stratification since the early 1970s. The Democratic members of the Ways and Means Committee also forcefully dissented from the welfare provisions of the Contract with America that were presented in the PRWORA. Yet the dissent was unaccompanied by more substantive steps to address the problems of poverty. For all of its steaming critique of the Republicans’ cruelty, the minority dissent often pressed for more stringent provisions, notably appealing to the nation’s insistence on work and workfare but, as ever, without actually creating jobs. In this regard, the Democrats did get their way in the final legislation, enforcing even more unreasonable and counterproductive provisions than the Republicans were initially putting forth, and in the end paying homage to the same embedded national romanticism of self-​invention that the Republicans appealed to. However, the Democrats did not offer proposals that could achieve their avowed goal: “a welfare system that expects parents to work to support their families but that protects vulnerable children” (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways & Means, 1995b, p. 363). The Republican bill is weak on work and tough on children. It takes families from welfare to nowhere … using America’s children as “crash test dummies” … The contract with America—​a nd this bill—​proposes a tough and mean welfare system. It [ 2 0 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

punishes children and does little to convert our check-​w riting welfare bureaucracy into an aggressive job placement service. (pp. 363–​6 4)

Nevertheless, the Democrats did not get past job placement services for the unemployed to confront the absence of sufficient employment for all who wished to work. They were as punitive as the Republicans, insisting that “real work requirement means that far fewer families will be exempt from work requirements” (p.  363). They also insisted on requirements for education, training, and support services but did not propose adequate funding to meet these ends. Even though they strongly opposed Republican cutbacks in existing but woeful provisions for children, the Democrats did not try to institute effective protections for the nation’s vulnerable youth. Still, their proposals were somewhat more generous than the Republican program reductions, but not nearly generous enough to achieve coverage for day care or protection for children, to secure adequate wages or to create a sufficient number of jobs. The separation that distinguishes Republicans from Democrats exists on the right side of the political continuum; it is a narrow space, separating the cruel yet indifferent from the slightly less cruel but still indifferent, inhabited by the popular range of American tolerances for public welfare. Those tolerances define work as an expression of character rather than a structural obligation of the American economic system, while undercutting the value of public welfare as a safety net during economic downturns. Americans have designed public welfare as the prod of a stern necessity to force the poor and unemployed into a relentless competition for an inadequate number of low-​paying jobs even during good times. Social welfare policy in the United States—​nurtured in the daily, consensual customs of citizens that build their social institutions—​realizes a romantic sense of personal responsibility, despite economic reality, for social and economic outcomes that minimizes public obligations for those who fail and require assistance. The Democratic minority’s alternatives to the Contract with America, except when simply ceremonial and small or even harsher than Republican proposals, were consistently rejected in the final legislation. Even more restrictive social welfare legislation that passed in subsequent years remains popular: “Democrats are not opposed to tax cuts… . [However], the Republican tax cuts are unfairly structured… . The Republican bill missed a major opportunity to correct inequities and to reduce the deficit… . The Republican tax bill is fatally flawed” (pp. 279, 283). Yet the Democrats then proposed only a variety of small differences over tax policies, with some tangential references to welfare policy and without F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e   [ 2 0 7]

offering any major initiative to provide public jobs, income supports, education and retraining, and so forth, which might be capable of addressing the nation’s enormous inequalities of income and wealth. In this way, the tepid opposition of the committee’s Democratic minority is best seen as an endorsement of the underlying principles enacted in the final legislation—​a political ceremony of opposition that brackets the narrow range of American preferences. Ending “Welfare as We Know It”

The PRWORA did in fact end “welfare as we know it,” making public relief worse by reinstituting some of the fictions of Elizabethan poor law, namely the fallacies of local settlement and personal responsibility for systemic failures. It elevated the primacy of work above all else, on the assumptions that most on welfare were capable of earning their way but chose not to do so and that jobs were available to all who were willing to work. Yet it did not provide jobs or address the serious impediments that kept families dependent on public relief. Its “tough child support enforcement measures” were fictions; in its decades of operation, the Child Support Enforcement Program has neither increased involuntary collections nor improved the conditions of mothers who are deserted by the fathers of their children. It has, however, succeeded in humiliating many mothers and frustrating the possibilities of responsible fatherhood. The PRWORA eliminated welfare as a right, returning principal authority back to the states to set the conditions of cash relief. It limited the amount of relief by rolling funding into block grants that terminated open-​ended appropriations, and by capping lifetime eligibility for most recipients to 60 months. By allowing the states to exempt only 20% of the caseload from the 60-​month eligibility limit and only 50% from the work requirement, the legislation ignored the pervasive disabilities of people on welfare. Worse yet, by urging welfare recipients into the labor market, it tended to protect low wages by enlarging the pool of low-​wage workers. Thus, legislation intending to make work more attractive tended to make it less so. The legislation also gave the states broad discretion over the block grants, which could be allocated to cash relief but now also child day care, transportation, and job training in support of work as well as other services previously funded by the states. However, the block grants were insufficient to increase cash benefits, which in 1996 had fallen to only about 35% of the poverty line for a family of three (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways & Means, 2008, p. 749). [ 2 0 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

Most tellingly, the PRWORA created a process of case management to closely supervise recipients. The case managers negotiated contracts with recipients that laid out their obligations to find work and the state’s support of those efforts. The take-​it-​or-​leave-​it contracts also included the sanctions that recipients would face for not cooperating with the contract, while the definition of cooperation was largely retained as an element of state discretion. Work and work preparation became a mandatory condition of receiving benefits. Although the legislation provided encouragement for states to help recipients find work, it failed to make provisions for public employment, additional funding for training, or adequate funding for child day care. The legislation also terminated Supplemental Security Income eligibility for drug addicts, noncitizens, and many children with attention deficit disorder. The legislation enacted further suspicions of poor people’s motives and character. It encouraged states to institute “family caps,” intended to punish recipients who gave birth to additional children while receiving benefits; the family caps sanction was guided by the assumption that some recipients would have children to maintain eligibility for welfare. It also terminated the provision of welfare and housing to teenagers who became pregnant while at home, this time assuming that they had children to escape their own parents. In enacting mandatory work requirements—​“workfare” provisions requiring a majority of TANF recipients to participate in work preparation or work activities in payment for their benefits—​the PRWORA was obedient to the widespread belief that welfare recipients were lazy and averse to work. Workfare was enacted over serious research that demonstrated its failures in numerous experimental sites. Even its most successful implementation, in Riverside, California, is dubious. Indeed, replications of the Riverside program would have probably been counterproductive. PROGRAM EVALUATION AS ROMANTIC PRACTICE

In explaining the value of Riverside, the most successful of the six experimental sites of Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), Judith Gueron, the president of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), testified: More than any other place I  know of, this program communicates a message of high expectations. When you walk into a GAIN office in Riverside, you are there for one purpose; to get a job. At orientation, job developers announce job openings; throughout, program staff convey an upbeat message about the value of work and F o od S ta m p s a n d P u b l ic W e l fa r e  [ 2 0 9 ]

people’s potential to succeed. If you are in an education program—​a nd about half of Riverside GAIN participants are—​you are not marking time, as you can in some locations. You know that if you do not complete the program or at least make progress in it, staff who are closely monitoring your progress will insist that you go for a job. (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p. 257)

Yet the success of Riverside was quite modest and questionable. GAIN enrolled welfare applicants as well as recipients. Applicants are presumably more motivated to find work than recipients are. Moreover, three years after leaving the program, the total earnings of Riverside participants exceeded the earnings of controls by only $2,600, about $20 per week. Riverside emphasized quick job placement rather than education; the relative success of Riverside was apparently due to aggressive job search and placement on behalf of staff—​“the active use of job developers to establish a close link to private sector employers and to help recipients locate work” (p. 257)—​rather than any special motivation or intense effort by those who were placed. In addition, GAIN subsidized employer costs for on-​the-​job training. Savings in welfare costs at Riverside were even more modest, $600 in the third followup year. Yet in the relatively high unemployment areas of the GAIN sites, giving priority to welfare applicants and recipients for jobs is not a net social benefit. Indeed, many of those who did not get the jobs were either ineligible for welfare or had to spend down their resources to become eligible. Thus, the welfare savings were taken at least in part from other poor people. Gueron was more accurate in describing the failure of other sites even while she continued to misinterpret the putative success of GAIN as encouragement to install mandatory work provisions in the PRWORA. Hard knowledge about workfare programs is limited and comes mostly from studies of small-​scale programs implemented during the 1980s. These show a mixed record. On the positive side, the studies suggest that it is feasible to get people to work for their grants, that they view work assignments as fair, and that they do real work. Furthermore, the value of the work produced offsets the cost (approximately $2,000 to $4,000 annual cost per filled slot, excluding the cost of child care). Thus, such programs provided an alternative way to support children. On the other hand, repeatedly, states have had trouble developing large numbers of work sites and have found that some welfare recipients were unable to work, with the result that programs were almost always much smaller than anticipated. The very limited evidence that is available suggests that, under these conditions, mandatory unpaid work did not develop people’s skills and did not prompt people to move more rapidly into unsubsidized employment or deter them from applying for welfare. (p. 258) [ 21 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

In fact, hardly anything at all, apart from the dubiousness of the research findings, should be concluded from MDRC’s efforts. When a program seeks to place the unemployed in a job, there is little reason to favor those applying for or receiving welfare, unless it also wishes to reinforce stereotypes of the poor and unemployed. This indeed was GAIN’s great success. The reality of its failures, extending the long history of similar debacles in coercing welfare recipients to seek work, did not give pause to the PRWORA in implementing “large scale, universal, ongoing work requirements” (p. 258). Those requirements were strengthened and made even more coercive and intense in the 2006 reauthorization of PRWORA, renamed the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), as though welfare recipients were threatening the economic foundations of the nation. The DRA embellished the stereotypes of poverty with a program to encourage marriage and another to urge men to take responsibility for their children. Not only were welfare recipients assumed to be shiftless, they were also seen as promiscuous, cunning, and irresponsible. In the end, this most popular legislation did little to increase the number of jobs, if anything, by way of addressing poverty. It did, however, vilify poor people in pursuit of an illusory independence from public subsidies. The romance of self-​invention and personal responsibility triumphed over any objective consideration of the reality of economic need in the nation. Support for the program was itself an expression of American exceptionalism, the insistence that good citizenship expresses itself in the chosenness of self-​reliance. MDRC is a cultural icon of rationalistic probity, although it is not much of a credible source of information. Initially funded in 1974 by the Ford Foundation and a variety of public agencies to apply randomized controlled trials—​the epitome of credible research methods—​to social welfare programs targeted on poverty, its board of directors is the quintessential blue ribbon panel of prominence drawn from public agencies, commerce, and academia. As such it continues to provide a powerful imprimatur of social acceptance for its staff’s conclusions. MDRC endorsed Gueron’s testimony and by extension American policy romanticism, rather than acknowledge the straitening conditions of life for poorer people including losses in welfare benefits since the early 1970s, the paucity of jobs, the lack of livable wages, the weaknesses of the American education, vocational preparation and family support such as day care, and growing inequality. An organization concerned less with Emersonian fantasies of self-​invention and more with poverty itself would have taken the opportunity of GAIN’s emptiness to reject universal coercion in favor of steps to enhance the attractiveness and adequacy of work through a national jobs program, livable wages, universal day care, improved public education, and other structural remedies for income insufficiency. Yet F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 211]

this latter strategy would have cut deeply against national preferences that endorsed existing social stratification and income inequality. Elite boards earn their social position through resumes of social obedience rather than acts of defiance. Lawrence Mead, an influential and prominent Republican intellectual then at Princeton University, repeated many popular notions of the poor and poverty in his support of workfare. Welfare needs radical change. The proposed eligibility cuts and time limits are certainly radical. It may be worth enacting them simply for this reason. But I have two cautions. We know very little about the effect of such changes… . There is [little] reason to think that time limits would deter illegitimacy… . My second caution is that eligibility cuts and time limits conflict with public opinion. According to polls, most Americans oppose ending aid if it would mean taking children away from mothers. And while a majority supports a two-​year limit on aid, they do so only if it is clear that the recipients could support themselves by working. Indeed, if the recipients work, most people feel that aid need not be time-​l imited. In general, the public would prefer to turn welfare into a work program rather than cut it back. None of this means the Republican proposals are mistaken. Government may need to underline the value of personal responsibility even if the deterrent effect is doubtful. Most states have capital punishment because people feel it is justified for heinous offenses, even though one cannot show that it deters crime… . I can only say that if government cuts or time-​limits welfare it should realize that the main effect probably will be symbolic. The effect of unentitling welfare is even less certain… . The leading challenge of America today no longer is to preserve the free economy, crucial though that is. Rather, it is to defend order against the social problems linked to the seriously poor—​crime, school failure, drug addition, as well as dependency. Ordinary Americans want values such as the work ethic and law-​abidingness upheld by public as well as private authorities. When they say they want government to work better, this above all is what they mean. (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p. 265)

It is notable that Mead endorsed the family cap and other provisions of the PRWORA as important symbolic acts of government that were unlikely to provide effective incentives to discourage out-​of-​wedlock births among other goals. Though he carefully documents the questionable programmatic wisdom of family caps, he simply asserts what he takes to be public opinion. In the event, the popularity of the PRWORA itself has become a true indicator of dominant social attitudes. Yet since the mid-​1980s and continuing through the 1990s, public attitudes toward welfare among whites, blacks, and welfare recipients themselves have been nearly identical and consistently negative. More surprisingly, attitude differences [ 212 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

between very wealthy and very poor respondents are small, on the order of only 25% (Epstein, 2004). Yet Mead, in the manner of dominant public opinion, interprets poverty as a personal failure of character and individual morality rather than as caused by systemic inadequacies of the economy, families, community, the education system, and so forth. After all, workfare is a work program rather than a jobs program. There was insistent opposition to the PRWORA, especially its punitive provisions toward the poor, but the opposition was often as effusive and undocumented as supporters of the legislation, notably in trying to sustain their assumptions of the causes of poverty and dependency on public relief. The telling difference was largely ideological, that is, based on differing intuitions about the poor and the society’s responsibility to them. The information put forward in support of any position was customarily weak and questionable. Differences also appeared in style, with supporters of the legislation frequently invoking morality and intuitive truths about reality—​in the manner of Charles Murray (1984)—​and opponents citing social science data that were more often than not weak and questionable—​in the manner of the MDRC and Mead. 2 Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, was eloquent in opposition to the PRWORA. Yet even his strong demurral was phrased in the rhetoric of popular sentiments. Arguing against block grants, devolution of authority to the states, and other limiting features of the PRWORA, Greenstein pointed out: These proposals appear to be based on two premises: first, that “welfare spending” is out of control and cannot be curtailed as long as the targeted programs retain their entitlement status, and second, that block grants are needed to accord states increased flexibility. In fact: (1) welfare spending is not one of the major factors in our long-​term deficit problems; (2) if Congress wishes to cut the cost of these programs, a block grant structure isn’t needed to do so; and (3)  a block grant structure isn’t needed to promote work and personal responsibility and providing added flexibility to states makes sense in a number of areas. But removing the entitlement status of the programs would have profound consequences and, I fear, serious unintended effects. (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p.104)

2. The many distortions of the conservative argument and its free way with data are nearly defining. One interpretation is that it misleads to curry favor with the business community. A second is that the distortions are made to sustain popular sentiments, that is, to please the masses of Americans through a theology in the style of social science—​belief giving rise to scripture. F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 213 ]

Greenstein then went on to describe the predictable (for him) consequences of converting the open-​ended welfare legislation, including food stamps, into limited block grants. The countercyclical effects of welfare would be lost, weakening both state and national economies. States hit hardest by a recession would not have adequate resources for their poor. The allocation of block grants would fail to reflect relative needs and financial capacities among the states. Throughout, Greenstein accepted the graven notion of moving welfare recipients toward self-​sufficiency, but he failed to estimate the increased provisions of jobs, education, child care, and others that would be needed to do so. In short, he questioned the shift to block grants and great state discretion without challenging whether self-​sufficiency was a reasonable goal in the context of the proposed changes. Indeed, even among critics of the legislation, there was little stomach to take on the preferences of the American public, which were realized in the punitive provisions of the legislation, its condemnatory assumptions about the poor and poverty, and the core insistence that people were responsible for themselves even in the face of systemic failure. Surely, Greenstein’s strategy was to address a narrow range of problems with the avowed goal of self-​sufficiency in order to avoid ancillary political debates about the broader intent of the society, as well as the propriety and fairness of the goal itself. However, this very choice pays homage to entrenched national preferences that prefer to inflict economic suffering on the poor rather than address practical solutions to dependency. Similar compromises were apparently made by other critics, whose comments again sustain a sense of the nation’s values made by people with astute political sensibilities. THE TRIUMPH OF EMOTION OVER REASON

The large number of those who testified against the welfare legislation of the Contract with America often pressed their minimalist assumptions about effective remedies for poverty and attendant social problems but consistently failed to provide credible evidence that those tepid proposals could be effective. In fact, both supporters and opponents of the legislation avoided addressing the structural factors that probably sustain poverty. Programs to address structural problems would have been very expensive and quite disruptive of customary social relations. In particular, the training programs for unskilled and troubled people did not create jobs, and the proposed social service initiatives were usually shallow, poorly funded, untested, and even a bit odious for making empty promises. Similar social services persist not because of their ability to achieve [ 214 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

defined goals but rather because of their ceremonial value, that is, their affirmation of cherished American notions of self-​reliance and personal responsibility. The history of American social welfare for deprived populations is a consistent story of failure and neglect—​piecemeal efforts to handle systemic challenges. This position was reflected in occasional testimony, but it did not prevail. From Sister Mary Rose McGeady (U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, 1995, p. 9): I am the president of Covenant House, the largest privately funded shelter program for homeless kids, runaway, and throwaway teenagers in this country. We have programs in seven states and have just begun one here in the District of Columbia… . What I tell you today reflects my own experience and that of the thousands of families with whom I have worked… . The national debate on welfare reform is extremely troublesome to me because of the tone of that debate, which is so punitive; troublesome because I see the growing feeling of frustration in the country which results in a negative attitude toward helping the poor. Poor people are not evil, they are just poor… . Our approach is to offer each young person who comes to us job training, a real job, day care for their babies if they need it, and strong counseling toward personal responsibility. I am happy to tell you, our system works… . Moreover, Senators, you and I know that there is not a job out there for everyone who is willing to work, especially for those who are untrained and unskilled. There must be some bridge to help people get from welfare to work.

However, the progressive and liberal impulses that opposed the PRWORA did not prevail. Instead, the nation’s traditional attitudes and beliefs about poverty and public dependency dominated the design of the legislation. From Penny L.  Young, director of legislation and public policy, Concerned Women for America, Washington, D.C.: I am addressing you today on behalf of Dr.  Beverly LaHaye, the President of [Concerned Women for America] and also our over 600,000 members. Concerned Women for America [CWA] represents women who strongly support efforts to reform our current welfare system, for it is a system that has created the culture illegitimacy that has wrecked the lives of millions of women and children… . I have come to know and love many of these children personally. The devastating effects of welfare in their lives are clear. Fathers are nowhere to be found in these children’s lives because the government has paid them not to be there. We now have a generation of children who have never experienced a traditional two-​parent home. CWA proposes a two pronged approach to this overwhelming problem. First, the government must step back and then allow citizens to step forward. To begin, SWA F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 215 ]

applauds the House of Representatives for its passage of the [PRWORA]. The Federal Government must cap the growth of welfare and other spending. CWA supports the so-​called family cap, in which government stops encouraging out-​of-​wedlock childbirth and subsidizing irresponsible choices. The provision to end cash incentives to unmarried teen mothers and cap additional benefits to mothers having additional children while on welfare is necessary to break the cycle of dependency… . Funds should, instead, be sent to the States as block grants to be used in a morally sound and wise manner … for specific services such as adoption services, abstinence education, maternity homes, and to aid individual situations which are best understood at the State level and where accountability is more possible. CWA opposes government funding for abortion… . After the government steps back, it is time to give the freedom and incentive for private citizens, churches, community groups to step forward and take on the responsibility of combating poverty. (pp. 15–​17)

Representing the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector laid out the rationale behind the Contract with America and its imposition of harsh, punitive measures as the solution to dependency on public welfare and to poverty. His basic premise, following Murray (1984), asserted that the 1960s “war on poverty” and the “long history of bogus welfare reforms, all of which were promised to save money but did not,” far from reducing poverty actually created many undesirable outcomes, such as increased out-​of-​wedlock births and dependency on public welfare along with decreases in work participation and marriage (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p. 65). Rector and the Heritage Foundation favored remedies that would eliminate entitlement to welfare and Medicaid, collapse most means-​tested federal programs including food stamps into severely capped block grants to the states, impose serious penalties on welfare mothers for repeated out-​of-​wedlock births, and insist on the establishment of paternity along with workfare for most recipients. These were generally adopted in the final legislation, in apparent obedience to a paradox of class: the returns to wealthier socioeconomic classes seem derived in large part from lavish investments in education; the mutual support of family, friends, and community; readily available critical services such as health and mental health care; and substantial rewards for their work. Yet this lesson is ignored with poorer populations, who are denied the necessary investments either through direct family subsidies or through human services such as schools, health care, employment, and housing. The disparity is apparently legitimized by vilifying the character of poorer people and insisting that punishments rather than incentives are required for their reformation. Rector’s enthusiasms for putting the children of poor unmarried mothers up for [ 21 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

adoption or for “closely supervised group homes for young unmarried mothers and their children” were both ignored in the final legislation (1995b, p. 65). Michael Horowitz, representing the conservative Hudson Institute, endorsed Rector’s hopes for the devolution of welfare to the states through block grants and for the elimination of both national standards and entitlement to welfare. Horowitz echoes the states’ rights themes, which view the states and local communities as the “laboratories of democracy” and bulwarks against federal tyranny. Yet it is hard to imagine how the disparities in TANF benefits, which far exceed regional disparities in the cost of living—​in 2011, $170 per month for a family of three in Mississippi (11% of the poverty standard) and $753 per month in New York (48% of the poverty standard)—​enhance anything besides poverty and the exploitation of poorer people (Falk, 2013, p. 12). Still, variations in benefits and state control have long been persistent features of welfare policy, while the conversion of welfare from a national right to a local public charity increased the program’s popularity. The insistence on states’ rights recalls the depravity of American apartheid. Moreover, the belief that welfare for the poor creates poverty while investment in the wealthy creates social value converts the paradox of class into disingenuousness. The embedded national antagonism to public provision as the cause of “the manifest failure of our welfare programs” fails to ennoble belief as fact (p. 83). It only enacts laws that stymie the pursuit of greater social and economic equality through more adequate investments in education, jobs, and so forth. In social decision making, the facts of welfare weigh much less than national preferences, while the difficulty of pinning down the causes of poverty sustains the centrality of those romantic preferences. Marvin N. Olasky, who inspired the passion of President George H. W. Bush (1989–​1993) for thousands of charitable lights of private benevolence, testified in behalf of the stringent work provisions of the PRWORA. He captured well the passion of Americans abetted by their certainty of divine favor in emphasizing personal sin, mainly sloth and promiscuity, as the causes of poverty. Olasky refers back to Henry Raymond, founder of the New  York Times, for authority. Raymond argued against redistribution—​taxing the better-​off for the benefit of the less-​well-​off—​ as the way to end sin, which in this context means poverty and dependency on public welfare. Olasky quoted Raymond during the House Ways and Means Committee hearings: “Before a cure can be applied or devised the cause of the evil must be ascertained,” and that cause was “ ‘the sinfulness of the heart of Man…  . The heart must be changed” (Falk, 2013, p. 96). F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 217]

The tradition of translating poverty into sin was planted in the nation by its first European settlers. It flourishes over the centuries as the distorted belief that economic deprivation persists, in the main because of the refusal to work on the part of those capable of work. As the “compassionate” solution, work tests have been consistently tied to the receipt of welfare by private charities along with the desire to convert the “heart” of the poor. The public sector instituted work houses, and according to Olasky, the private, religious sector—​his “starry sky of charitable organizations”—​w ith its more celestial grounding offered “work tests”—​one of two major categorizing divisions [to determine worthiness for relief] of the late 19 th century compassion—​for the able-​bodied homeless: transient men willing to chop wood for an hour or two generally received two meals a day and a night’s lodging, while married men received food and money for rent and clothing. Women typically received seats in “sewing rooms”; garments made were donated to the helpless poor or to families suffering from the effects of hurricanes or tornadoes… . Is it, we ask, a very hard-​hearted thing for the public to require an equivalent of labor, from those who are able to give it, in return for the relief which they receive? Is it unchristian [sic]? Is it not in the sweat of his brow that man is to eat his bread? Is not the Commandment, “six days shalt thou labor?” (p. 97)

Olasky goes on to advocate investigation of the moral quality of welfare applicants, the second “categorizing mechanism”—​“often involving a home visit by an agent or trained volunteer to make sure the needs were genuine and relatives could not help” (p. 98). Abetting the ability to separate the worthy from the unworthy poor, home visits were an early and continuing justification for the professionalization of social work. Both work tests and investigations were deeply strengthened in the PRWORA, the former as workfare and the latter as the ever-​more-​stringent regulations of the Child Support Enforcement Program, among others. Yet the hypocrisy of class is elevated to a high art form of social self-​deception with the realization that welfare reform did not come along with a jobs program, and that the Child Support Enforcement Program has never improved, and probably cannot, on collecting financial support for children by their absent parents. Without real work at prevailing wages and in the face of many unemployed citizens looking for jobs, a work test is meaningless except as a ceremony of degradation. At the same time, intrusions into the privacy of poor people beyond the establishment of income do little more than demean them for being needy. In the perverse logic of welfare, the motivated and self-​reliant poor could invent jobs for themselves and proceed on a more virtuous path. [ 21 8 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

Both workfare and investigation are expressions of the romantic capacity of American culture to moralize issues of structural failure. In the manner of the most primitive pantheism of tribal illiterates, American culture understands society, Providence, and even natural disasters such as economic recession in the terms of virtue and sin—​mystical statements of the spirit world, the Divine, the unknown and unknowable. The superstition of welfare, recalling Jung, brings the soul back into modern life and, not coincidentally, chases out reason. In the end, moral impairment may be a defect of national character more than a disorder of the poor. William J.  Bennett, co-​director of Empower America and a former U.S. Secretary of Education, pressed the common argument that out-​of-​wedlock births signaled the rapid and massive collapse of family structure[, which] is without precedent among civilized nations. Our country cannot sustain it. No country can. No society has ever survived with single parenthood as the norm… . [T]‌he nation has taken a ruinous social slide over the last three decades…  . [W]e have become in many ways inured to the trauma… . Welfare has contributed a lot to illegitimacy. It sustains it and it subsidizes it, and what you subsidize you usually get more of. (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, pp. 156–​57)

In addition to indicting public welfare as the principal cause of family collapse, Bennett also argues that there is “overwhelming evidence” and agreement on two major points. The first is that welfare programs have created “an underclass which is much larger, more violent, more poorly educated and which consists of many more single-​parent families.” The second is that “an important moral principle:  having children out-​of-​ wedlock is wrong” (p. 161). As a solution to these problems, Bennett supported PRWORA to transfer “a radical devolution of power, that is, [to] return power, money and responsibility back to the States, those laboratories of democracy” (p.  158). The belief in localism is pervasive and dominant in the United States; community institutions such as churches, private charities, and even the proprietors of small businesses are appropriate arbiters of moral quality and have the discernment to adjust welfare to the particular needs of applicants. Yet Bennett’s testimony, quite representative of national sentiments and even many of the dissenting views as well, largely ignored the possibility that illegitimacy and family decline are less moral issues of personal choice than they are consequences of larger social forces. The Moynihan Report (U.S. Department of Labor, 1965) that Bennett made much of may have been correct in pointing to the problems of F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 21 9 ]

the black family. However, Moynihan erred greatly in isolating those problems from American racism and class. The principal systemic factors actively opposed by the legislation and by the American public are those social and economic circumstances that make marriage less possible and single motherhood a more salient choice. Teenagers without the hope of a reasonable future of work, family, and community are more likely to choose early and unfortunate motherhood. There is literally no objective and coherent demonstration, let alone overwhelming evidence, that welfare has much of an impact on family formation and dissolution (Epstein, 1997, especially its discussion of Bane and Ellwood, 1996). Alternatively, there are reasonable grounds to surmise that public welfare may mitigate the effects of unemployment, long-​ term disability, and social isolation from mainstream opportunities. American preferences have become ever more distant from the goal of providing greater social and economic equality, enacting a fruitless series of legislative changes that only serve to reassure the nation that its least-​ well-​off are morally corrupt and deserve punishment. By extension, the harsh legislation reaffirms the value of extreme individual responsibility and the embedded fiction that American stratification is also a stratification of moral deserts: those who do better are more personally responsible and deserve more. Even those who testified in opposition to the legislation and were likely to hold alternative values at odds with American romanticism (e.g., Greenstein, Shalala, and perhaps even Clinton) still paid tribute to dominant values by shaping their arguments in the terms of the nation’s policy romanticism. James Q. Wilson, a prominent professor of social policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, again captured national attitudes toward poverty and deviant social behavior. Wilson ties the growth of illegitimacy—​ being raised by a single mother—​to a variety of undesirable outcomes, notably poverty and crime. However, he attributes the large increases in out-​of-​wedlock births to a change in the level of stigma or shame that is attached to the idea of an out-​of-​wedlock child; I believe it is a result of a change in the commitment that the modern family, especially the modern young family, brings to the marital bond. I believe it reflects in part the availability of governmental entitlements. But I do not think that reversing the entitlements … can change all of the problems. (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p. 152)

Wilson attributes much of the problem, and notably the loss of shame, to the federal government. [ 2 2 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

We must recognize that we have always had at-​risk children. But when that 800 pound gorilla, the Federal Government, walked into the room with AFDC, it frightened away or pushed off into the corner many of the programs designed to help those children, and now we forget that they ever existed. For decades we have had charitable boarding schools where parents could voluntarily place children who needed care, For decades, we have had maternity homes, such as the Florence Crittenton homes, where young women could live shortly before giving birth and then for a year or so thereafter in order to learn how to take care of their children. We have had family shelters and group shelters, many of them now being operated by religious groups. It seems to me that it is incumbent on the federal Government in redesigning the welfare program to take advantage of those private initiatives and to encourage the States to experiment with these initiatives. The States should be encouraged to fund family shelters and maternity homes, to allow money to flow through churches, the Salvation Army, and other groups, for the purpose of providing an environment in which the next generation of children can grow up without being part of a world in which they learn from everything about them that they have no reasonable expectation of marriage, that sex is about action and not about commitment, and that fatherhood is less exciting than being a free floating impregnator. (pp. 152–​53)

Wilson strayed far beyond his data, or any coherent information, to certify by his beliefs and intuitions the impediments to the formation of traditional families which seat the problem in the immorality of poor women—​their lack of shame. Moreover, the failure of the private and religious communities to handle social problems over the centuries provides little warrant to recommend an increase in reform schools, shelters for single mothers, or other form of total institutions. In fact, the failure of American charity has itself given rise to public provisions, although often with little improvement in the quality of services for poorer groups. However, the philanthropic sector’s hypocritical obedience to social priorities rather than to a religious or noble sense of civic duty and justice underlines the charitable sector’s skill at stigma and shame, rather than any programmatic intelligence. Further, “free floating impregnator” reprises an unfortunate stereotype of the irresponsible black man that was pressed among others by George Gilder (1978) in his critique of American social welfare. The more telling point is that Wilson states a popular position while the gnostic certification of its virtues, wrapped in piety and a subtle class superiority, affirms the common emotionality—​inner wisdom—​that binds democratic populism to its convictions. The PRWORA gave the states the flexibility to institutionalize their miscreants, but few have followed this path, and probably because it is more expensive than the neglect implicit in TANF. The popularity of the PRWORA rests on the broad acceptance F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 2 21]

of Wilson’s assertions and his refusal to seek out less moralistic causes of poverty and public dependency in the social conditions—​the systemic failures—​that may create single parenthood and erect challenges to the socialization of youth. It is revelatory of national values whether single mothers and others needing public relief are portrayed as the devils of their own impaired souls or sympathetically as formed by social forces. In presenting the Contract with America to the Ways and Means Committee, Newt Gingrich, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, was eloquent in couching his arguments in the common preferences of the nation. Buoyed up by the 1994 midterm elections, which returned Republican majorities to both houses of Congress, Gingrich insisted that the Contract with America and notably the PRWORA responded to the wishes of the American people, offering a bipartisan agreement to reduce the welfare rolls and the cost by promoting independence through work. The overarching concerns that tied the various pieces together were to close the annual deficit and reduce the national debt by promoting growth. Growth was to be achieved by enhancing incentives for business through greater reliance on market solutions. “Centrally designed bureaucratic systems,” Gingrich said, “don’t work very well: market driven systems work better” (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, 1995b, p. 150). The PRWORA cuts welfare spending, it attempts to reduce illegitimacy, and it looks at restricting welfare for non-​A mericans… . The Governors, as you all know, are very excited, and have their ideas. I think in the next few weeks—​t he President has already indicated a strong interest in working together on this—​we should be able to craft a bold new direction on welfare reform and we should be able to start the move from dependency to independency and back to behaviors that work in America… . If you look at yesterday’s votes, I am very proud of the fact that on virtually every vote we had an enormous bipartisan majority. (pp. 17, 18)

The PRWORA was not a break with the past but rather a continuation of American tradition. Whether sincere, devious, disingenuous, smugly self-​serving, pious, or evincing some combination of the sins of vanity and ambition, as an artful politician Gingrich was indeed tapping into the truth of American beliefs and values: a mystical attachment to growth and jobs even at the cost of continuing economic suffering and growing social inequality. Gingrich’s rhetoric captured the dramatic assurances of democratic populism. It was also infused with the cant of the New Age quest inward for inspiration, innovation, independence, and economic growth. Much in the manner of the self-​help industry, the pursuit of authenticity [ 2 2 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

spurred on by reductions in welfare for the poor was justified as providing both the psychic rewards of self-​reliance and the material rewards of economic growth. The harsh reforms of the PRWORA and the food stamp program were somewhat softened after 1996 (some beneficiaries were restored, e.g., aliens who have been in the United States at least five years, among a few other groups). However, the 2006 reauthorization of the PRWORA, retitled the Deficit Reduction Act, intensified its punitive provisions. It also added funding for two questionable programs, both more ceremony than substance: one to promote marriage and the other to encourage responsible fatherhood. Scripted by the fantasy that structural problems often accumulate from the self-​inflicted character imperfections of individuals, the two initiatives were designed to succeed through exhortations to goodness by lectures, public service announcements, and counseling. Food stamp benefits were again reduced in late 2012 and once more in early 2013, in spite of the continuing Great Recession and high unemployment. However, the retrenchments of both welfare and food stamps have remained widely popular as they take on an increasingly condemnatory and suspicious sense of those who fall back on public welfare. As for TANF, mandatory work has succeeded in only the most superficial ways at favoring welfare recipients for jobs within the pool of the unemployed; it has not increased the number of jobs. Workfare as job sharing at the lower economic state simply reallocates unemployment to some who are ineligible for relief and to others who need to spend down their meager resources in order to quality for relief. Food stamps, a federal program, has indexed benefits to price changes in order to maintain purchasing power. In contrast, the value of AFDC/​ TANF, the principal cash welfare program for poor families whose benefits are set by each state, has fallen greatly since about 1973. Between 1969 and 2011, the real value of AFDC/​TANF for a family of three fell by about 45% (U.S. DHHS, 2014, table TANF 6). In 2011, well into the Great Recession of 2008, fully 83% of those eligible received food stamps. In 2011,TANF provided benefits to only 9.8% of the poverty population, compared with about 35% in each year from 1990 through 1994 and about 45% in each year from 1971 through 1978 (table TANF 2). In 2011, the participation rate of those eligible for benefits in AFDC/​TANF had fallen from over 80% in many of the years prior to the enactment of TANF to only about 34% in 2011. In the end, the PRWORA failed to reduce either poverty or the hardships of the poor. It is a curiosity of the American federal system and a rebuke to conspiracy theorists of American social policy making that state-​administered welfare programs such as TANF, presumably closer to the will of the F o od S ta m p s a n d P u b l ic W e l fa r e  [ 2 2 3 ]

people, have been far less generous and more restrictive than federal programs such as food stamps, which are presumably more amenable to elite control and influence by sectarian interests. Yet all of the 50 states have acted with symmetrical political support, employing the discretion of the TANF block grant to reduce cash benefits and the number of enrollees while diverting funds to social services. In the end, the states reduced pressure on their own budgets at the expense of poorer citizens (Schott, Pavetti, & Floyd, 2015). Those on the left, right, and center who argue that ridding the nation of illegitimate control by elites would open the floodgates of popular humanity might profitably face the possibility that the reverse seems more likely. American elites—​at least senators and representatives—​appear to be more generous than the American masses. Yet the inadequacies of both state and federal programs make the distinction a very small matter. THE AMERICAN CULTURAL TRADITION AS ROMANTIC

The beliefs that sustain the food stamp program and American social welfare in general are robust tenets of America’s cultural tradition. An exaggerated individualism and the mystical, magical, superstitious, and gnostic certitude of correctness—​the elements of policy romanticism—​ do not persist as instrumental values to achieve the general goals of social cohesion and political harmony. Rather, they form the essential social credo, embedded in the daily behaviors of the masses of Americans, that shapes behavior and guides national choices. As such, they are often impervious to objective social need and even the frequency with which social welfare programs contradict other formal, ostensible cultural values such as compassion and charitability. Put another way, the values that shape social welfare responses engender ceremonies. They are often more prized than the success of social welfare programs that address need among those who otherwise qualify as loyal members of the society. In this way, the characteristics of food stamp recipients and welfare recipients generally and the performance of welfare programs—​objective social need and response—​are less germane to the American people than their beliefs in virtue. Those beliefs are sustained by faith in an imagined tradition more than by social reality, or even the effects that those beliefs have on the conditions of need. In fact, most recipients of food stamps and TANF are children, not adults who are able to work. The programs operate efficiently with low error rates. Fraud, when it occurs in the food stamp program, is less an instance of insidious corruption and more a reflection of administrative complexity and the pressures on impoverished families to allocate their [ 2 2 4 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

limited resources to critical needs (e.g., shifting food expenditures to rent in order to avoid eviction). As recipients report, food stamps ease food hardships and assist them to meet other essential expenses by freeing up limited cash resources for rent, medical care, utilities, and other expenses (Shaefer & Gutierrez, 2013). Yet food stamp benefits, taken together with all means-​ tested welfare programs, are inadequate to routinely raise recipients out of poverty. Serious deprivation remains widespread. Because of the low and declining value of cash welfare benefits over the decades, the food stamp program has become distorted by its increasing role in supporting income under the guise of providing a nutritious diet. Indeed, there is some controversy over the adequacy of food stamps to provide food security. Clarkson (1975) argues that the problem of malnutrition among recipients results from their poor choice of foods rather than from the inadequacy of benefits; obesity is prevalent, hunger and starvation are not. With support from others, he argued for education rather than increased benefits (Leung, Ding, Catalano, Villamor, Rimm, & Willen, 2012; McFerren, 2007; Dammann & Smith, 2009, 2010). A  number of proposals would prohibit the use of food stamps for unhealthy foods such as sugar-​sweetened beverages (Barnhill & King, 2013), provide rewards for healthier choices (Richards & Sindelar, 2013), and attempt to bring fresh, healthy choices to “food deserts” (Smith, Butterfass, & Richards, 2010). All of the suggestions tinker with the problem of food adequacy rather than addressing poverty and inequality. Even among sympathetic analysts, there was apparent recognition that a comprehensive antipoverty strategy—​national programs to provide jobs, housing, sufficient public welfare, or longer-​term costly investments in health, mental health education, and training—​was both socially and politically infeasible. Still, as Devault and Pitts (1984) pointed out, food stamps offered only a partial solution to food insecurity, while the persistent issue of income inequality and poverty had become trivialized as one of diet. Food stamp benefits may be adequate to address nutrition—​assuming that recipients have access to healthy choices (i.e., that they live outside of food deserts), that they need not divert food stamps to more pressing needs, and that adequacy can be defined (Yaktine & Casell, 2014). Yet others argue that even under favorable conditions, food stamps are inadequate to purchase the Thrifty Food Plan for which the program was designed (Stewart & Blisard, 2006). An Institute of Medicine committee concluded from its review of the program that a food stamp allotment that is adequate for a household with sufficient time and skill to purchase and prepare many meals from scratch, with easy access to food stores, and living in a

F o od S ta m p s a n d P u b l ic W e l fa r e  [ 2 2 5 ]

relatively low cost part of the country, may be inadequate for a household without these attributes. (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2013, p. 2)

However, food stamp benefits are grossly insufficient to compensate for the large cuts in AFDC and TANF over the years. The food stamp program has simply become an adjunct to welfare, but one that brings along particular distortions by not being cashed out into a single program to address income insufficiency. However, the justification, as ever, for a separate food stamp program remains political rather than programmatic; it is easier to transfer public funds for food than for cash support (Clarkson, 1975). Two fundamental assumptions about the poor determined the initial design of the food stamp program. Poor people could not be trusted to allocate their budgets appropriately, and thus a special voucher provision was designed to ensure that they spend food stamps on food. Second, the society refused to provide enough income to impoverished families to permit an appropriate expenditure on nutrition. In turn, the low welfare benefits were justified by a series of beliefs:  the poor should work, and higher welfare benefits would discourage them from seeking employment, along with the related notion that poverty was by and large a result of immorality, and thus adequate welfare benefits would act as moral hazards, rewarding improvidence, promiscuity, irresponsibility, and sloth. Yet these assumptions are inconsistent with the economic and social reality of America. The need for welfare and food stamps grows as the economy fails; there are not enough jobs for those who wish to work; much employment does not pay enough to keep people out of poverty; the average work week has increased, and notably so among lower-​paid workers; inequality has grown substantially since the 1970s; and many, if not most, welfare recipients cannot work. Yet the nation prefers to convert the failures of the economy and society into character flaws rather than come to grips with its structural problems. The seemingly permanent emotional commitment to the illusions that define policy romanticism also sustains income and social stratification in the United States. Thomas Kinkade painted the nostalgic past for the romantic present, the way we are not and never were (giving a nod to Coontz, 1993). If the masses have been brainwashed, they have done the laundry themselves. On its part, the scholarship of social policy making is bankrupted by its search for reasonableness rather than reason. It tortures social science and historical analysis to avoid the conclusion that the American people have created the rules that they live by. Perhaps there is no control of policy making, and all is channeled from the infinitude and complexity of daily life. This is the nightmare of sleep paralysis—​being [ 2 2 6 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

aware, immobile, powerless, and entrapped—​w hich may need to be rejected for sanity. The links on the chain of social diffusion, from the more influential to the less so, may all be dependent on the underlying social consensus that positions actors in the drama of cultural coherence. Yet the strutting actors did not script their parts. In the face of intractable ambiguities of establishing the cause of events outside of laboratories, the decisive influence of mass preferences becomes a logical default position for explaining social policy making in the United States. It would also seem that in a nation so insistent on the reality of its extreme individualism, any alternative to the dominance of the popular will would appear to be heresy.

F o o d S t a m p s a n d P u b l i c W e l f a r e  [ 2 2 7]

Conclusion Social Adolescence

T

here may be some truth in the comment that “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”1 Underdeveloped, nostalgic, and often inattentive to the needs of its citizens, the society is stunted in adolescence by policy romanticism—​a chosen people’s delusion of Divine entitlement with an exaggerated sense of personal agency. Policy romanticism persists in spite of enormous social and economic inequality, but along with the apparent failure of 100 years of free, compulsory, universal public education, which fancies itself as objective, worldly, informed, practical, and humane. President Obama may have been more generally correct than he intended when he honored the heroic sacrifice of first responders at the dedication of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum: “nothing can change who we are as Americans” (Hudson, 2014). Unfortunately, policy romanticism is testimony to his comment, but this is not what he had in mind. Incorporating freely chosen, widely cherished values, policy romanticism remains antagonistic to liberal democracy, or at least to the Enlightenment hopes for social progress. As one among the multitude of critics who deny the force of democratic populism in the United States, Paul Krugman places responsibility for the nation’s problems

1. Sometimes attributed to Clemenceau, with similar versions attributed to others. http://​ quoteinvestigator.com/​2 011/​12/​0 7/​barbarism-​decadence/​ (retrieved June 15, 2015).

on an American oligarchy, in this case largely composed of corporation executives, whose income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only… . Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger? (2011, paras. 3, 13)

Yes, it can be denied. No oligarchy of the depraved and powerful has adequate control to impose on a reluctant nation unacceptable policy choices or induce conformity with antagonistic values. It is not the concentration of wealth in a few but the far broader permission to allow, indeed to endorse, minimally regulated markets that eventuates in enormous inequality. The warping of economic inequality is an outcome of the romantic warping of social consent. The problem is not democracy but its content. American society has made bad institutional choices. Americans are not innocent of American problems. The nation’s problems are created as the effects of consensual, embedded norms. In contrast, the control of social policy making by illegitimate elites is so improbable that mass preference and mass consent would seem to be a logical default position. Mass consent should be specifically refuted with hard evidence of conspiracies of one sort or another before considering other explanations. The political passivity of Americans signaling contentment or at least acceptance is a more reasonable surmise than the success of hidden evil forces in pacifying the population through a narcosis of liquor, drugs, and practically infinite diversions of numbing entertainment. One of the strangest improbabilities of policy romanticism and the weakness in Emersonian enchantment with self-​reliance lies in the preference to hold the individual responsible for social conditions that are obviously past the individual’s capacity to affect and that are more likely created by collective consent. In this light the ubiquitous self-​help regimens in the United States commit, as Anne Crittenden writes, “the fallacy that systemic problems can be addressed if we, as individuals, just try harder to fix ourselves” (2014, para. 15). Yet the fallacy of confusing the individual will with the collective will has not impeded American policy. “Government” as an actor is customarily separated from the speaker of the word, who rarely if ever acknowledges the powerful connection between what government does and what the society wants. Thus, it has become convenient for theories of policy making to separate the will of the citizen from the actions of the state. Yet government in the United States is a fair representation of “we” and carries the consent of the masses of Americans, and quite pointedly for longstanding policy. Bringing the Conc lus ion [2 29 ]

state back into consideration of policy making might profitably yield to bringing the society back into policy making. The reentry might better take place with only passing reliance on polling, but with renewed interest in the anthropology of everyday American life. Anthropology may provide better insight into the wellsprings of American policy than the discipline of economics. American culture speaking to itself and acting in its perceived interests is not creating propaganda but rather social institutions through its expressive forms of art, music, literature, theater, and movies, among others, and its infinite choices in living, which engender policy in both the public and private spheres. Propaganda is transitory and weak, but cultural pride—​in the United States the sense of a chosen people in an exceptional nation—​ seems impervious to reason. Frederick the Great of 18th-​century Prussia, who gave intellectuals free expression but only within the university, need not have been so fearful of ideas. Ideas only mediate change rather than create it; cultural change is ungovernable, generating appetites for mindless confirmation and even the ideas themselves. Heroic individualism in all of its self-​defeating manifestations persists not because it is reasoned and wise but because it is traditional and embedded in American culture. The national sense of destiny and God’s favor are the superstitious, magical, unreasoned inheritance of a society that takes pride in itself without much thought or compassion for its less-​fortunate members. Yet the fact that policy romanticism defines American social policy and is expressed through democratic populism is far easier to illustrate than finding the reasons it is so. The social ethos may in fact birth the economic system, rather than the reverse. Extreme individualism and its expression as self-​ help—​ w isdom acquired by aphorism, truism, and the reassuring circularity of the will isolated from reality—​have animated American social welfare policy as the knowing intent of the American population. The nation’s social welfare programs—​both private philanthropies and public programs—​have long existed to proselytize the social values of policy romanticism more than to remedy material inequities or to resolve pressing social problems. Year Up, GHC, and CIS as well as public welfare programs such as food stamps and TANF fail to achieve their stipulated goals. More profoundly, they realize general social attitudes as symbols of the society’s capitulation to policy romanticism. The romantic fallacy is not simply a problem of social welfare but rather a general problem of American society itself. The culture is deeply romantic, and as a consequence so are its institutions. Embedded social welfare programs are clearer windows into the nation’s intent and meaning than the uncertain, often falsified responses by citizens to the ambiguous questions of opinion polls. The United States [ 2 3 0 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

is more than wealthy enough to address problems such as poverty and to soften inequalities, but it refuses to do so. The population prefers to live with the more compatible fiction that people make the choice to be poor. American social welfare pays homage to the nation’s distinguishing dogma: that individual choices are largely independent of social conditions. In this way, citizens earn their position in the nation’s social and economic stratification, which becomes a measure of virtue. Policy romanticism and democratic populism are rebukes to the frequent claims the nation makes on rationality. The very openness and respect for free speech has not created a national dialogue that informs the wisdom of democracy with best information, or at least the most scrutinized policy options. The rational, the near rational, and even the reasonable are not compelling in a political system anchored by the romantic preferences of its citizens. The best and brightest seem quite content to make their fortunes and acquire social prominence by satisfying mass tastes in government, business, the arts, sports, and the professions, including academia. The American intelligentsia is more obedient than critical, careerist than independent, pampered than courageous. The complacency of the American citizenry would seem a logical outgrowth of the conceits of policy romanticism, especially the epiphany of Divine chosenness. It seems compatible with the idea of Americans as ends in themselves rather than as vehicles of objective goals. The notion of humans as means to ends is less abhorrent than the humanistic theory of people as ends in themselves would have it. As means, we become ennobled for being worthy of investment through the eternal belief in the capacity of each to contribute. As ends in ourselves, we become leaden funeral urns of self-​importance that accept the fiction of self-​creation. Lamentably, a scientific core of rational, or even near-​rational, pragmatism is impossible. Social decision making must remain necessarily political, without a routine ability to identify the causes of social problems and without sufficient resources to even test whether activities to address problems have succeeded or are worth their costs. Randomization procedures are often impractical, excessively costly, theoretically ambiguous, and unethical. Substitutes have similar problems, notably the difficulty of inferring cause from observational data. Moreover, even when rational tests are possible in principle, the society routinely suborns the independence of scholarly communities. If rationality and critical independence are unlikely, then a plausible pragmatic alternative to policy romanticism might start with the concession that democratic populism is unlikely to yield to democratic elitism or a tyranny of the just. The United States does not seem capable of electing philosopher kings. America is as good as the common run of its C o n c l u s i o n  [ 2 31]

citizens. In this regard, pragmatic wisdom might lie in extensive efforts to raise the quality of the common experience through deep investment in jobs, education, family, community, and greater social and economic equality. If indeed the nation is serious about its commitment to competition, then greater social equality, especially if achieved through intensive, broad, high-​quality public education, would increase the competition among those who are capable of great contributions. However, pragmatic alternatives to policy romanticism assume the unlikely receptivity of the nation to view social participation and its outcomes as determined by systemic conditions rather than the spectral forces of a metaphysical will. “Nothing can ever change who we are as Americans”—​noble heroes, but peevish adolescents as well.

[ 2 3 2 ]   Policy Romanticism and American Social Welfare

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INDE X

Abecedarian Project, 174 Adelson, Sheldon, 14 Adrienne, Carol, 109 Affirmative Action, 146, 150 AFL-╉CIO, 16, 190 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 68, 188, 192, 202–╉2 04, 221 and benefit cuts, 68, 202, 223, 226 Almond, Gabriel A., 198–╉199 alternative medicine, 73–╉75, 96, 102, 107 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 43 American Communist Party, 50 American Enterprise Institute, 26 American exceptionalism, 19, 22–╉23, 58, 62–╉63, 77–╉78, 211 See also policy romanticism and chosenness American universalism, 23 Americans for Democratic Action, 16 American stratification, xiv, 7, 10–╉12, 16, 18, 41, 60, 70, 78, 80, 125, 150, 178, 206, 212, 220, 226, 231 See also inequality American values, 9, 17, 23–╉24, 39, 145, 173, 177–╉178, 204–╉2 05 ceremonial reaffirmation of, 74, 81, 94, 98, 120, 123, 132, 161, 164, 166, 175, 185, 204, 215 Anderson, Joan, 106–╉107 anticolonialism, 23 anti-╉i ntellectualism, 48–╉50, as a product of gnostic belief systems, 73, 76 antipoverty programs, 12, 177–╉178, 187, 225

See also social welfare archetypes, 54, 89–╉90, 117–╉118 See also Jung, Carl G. Assange, Julian, 34 austerity policies, 15 authentic self, 59, 86–╉134 through psychotherapy, 86–╉111 through spirituality, 112–╉134 See also policy romanticism and authentic self, psychotherapy Baeck, Leo, 58–╉60, 79, 90–╉91, 114–╉116 Baker, Steven L., 34 Ban Breathnach, Sarah, 108, 110 Barlett, Donald L., 15 Beck, Aaron, 96–╉98 Beck, Glenn, 130 Beck, Judith. See Beck, Aaron. Becker, Ernest, 118 behavioral interventions, 92–╉98, 101 See also psychotherapy Bell, Larry, 33 Bellah, Robert N., ix-╉x, 40, 66–╉68 Belzer, Richard, 31–╉32 Benner, David, 116 Bennet, William J., 219–╉220 Berlin, Isaiah, 67 Biberman, Jerry, 121 Blatnik, John, 190 Blazey, Dennis, 71 Bloom, Harold, ix-╉x, 73, 104, 128, 146 Bowles, Samuel, 14 Boys and Girls Town, 93 Bruenig, Matt, 70 Buffet, Warren, 14 Burke, Edmond, 81 Bush, George W., 16, 50

Bush, H. W., 217 business, 4, 10–​11, 16–​17 and special privilege in politics, 5, 13–​15, 18, 28–​29, 38–​39 Carnegie, Dale, 101 Carter, Jimmy E., 50, 185 Castro, Fidel, xii Center for Positive Living, 102–​103 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 25, 213 Center on Philanthropy, 71–​72 Central Intelligence Agency, xiv Chamber of Commerce (national), 43, 188–​189 charitable giving. See philanthropy Chertavian, Gerald, 143–​150, 174 Chicken Soup, 128–​129 Child Support Enforcement Program, 203–​2 05, 208, 218 child welfare. See foster care Chomsky, Noam, 28–​30 Christianity, 114–​116, 126–​127, 132 and William Milliken, 162 Christian right, 13, 27 Christian romanticism, 53, 73–​74 Latter Day Saints, 128 civil rights, 84 reforms, 35 Clarkson, Kenneth W., 225–​226 Clinton, William J., 202–​2 05, 220 See also Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) Cloward, Richard, 11 Cognitive-​behavior therapy, 92–​98 See also psychotherapy Cohen, Jared, 34 Cole, Harriette, 108, 110 collective unconscious, 53, 84, 89–​9 0, 118, 146 See also Jung, Carl G. Communities in Schools (CIS), xvi, 152–​167, 174–​175, 230 description, 152–​154 evaluation of, 154–​160 romanticism of, 160–​167 Concerned Women for America, 215–​216 Contract with America, 202, 205–​2 07, 214, 216, 222 [ 2 4 8 ]   Index

Cook County, 16, 36 Cook, Fay Lomax. See Page, Benjamin I. counseling. See psychotherapy Craddock, Maggie, 125 Crittenden, Anne, 229 Darwinism, 54, 80, 87 Day, Laurie, 102–​103 Debs, Eugene, 11 Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), 211, 223 democratic populism, xv, 46–​4 8, 51, 77–​78, 80, 82–​85, 87–​88, 125, 138, 173, 178, 199, 221–​222, 228 and policy romanticism, 46, 52, 77, 167, 173, 178, 199, 230–​231 disabled persons, 9, 68, 70, 71, 170, 180–​181, 185, 208, 220 food stamp eligibility of, 180–​181 DeVooght, Kerry, 71 Dhiman, Santinder, 121 Dickey, R. A., 130–​131 Diego Garcia, 11, 30 Disraeli, Benjamin, 137, 144 Domhoff, G. William, 201 Dracula, 133–​134 D’Souza, Dinesh, 23–​2 4 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 69, 179, 185 Eberstadt, Nicholas, 39–​4 0 Economic Mobility Corporation (EMC), 139–​146 Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI), 159–​160 Edwards, Jonathan, 85, 106 Eheart, Brenda, 169–​172, 174 elections, 14–​16, 23–​2 4, 29, 31, 38 41, 46, 198 and fraud, 36, 38 and participation rates, 36–​38 and voter suppression, 35–​38 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 51, 60–​6 4, 84–​85, 105–​106, 110, 120, 174, 194 Emersonian self-​determination, 38, 211 Emersonian self-​reliance, 67, 79, 229 Emersonian universalism, 84 see also Romanticism Encyclopedia of Alien Encounters, 35 Enlightenment, 48–​50, 55–​56, 72, 81–​82, 109, 117–​119, 133, 173, 228

Farrow, Frank, 172 Ferejohn, John, 188, 198 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 53, 92 Finegold, Kenneth, 197–​198 First Amendment rights, 30 food stamp program, 177–​2 02, 214, 216, 223–​226 and 1977 changes, 191–​193, 195 and 1982 changes, 195–​196 and 1996 PRWORA, 202, 214, 216, 223 Food Stamp Act of 1964, 187–​188 purchase requirement, 187, 191–​195 underlying assumptions, 226 Fourth Reich, 32 foster care , 9, 44, 71, 93, 168–​172 subsidies, 70–​71 See also Generations of Hope Communities Foster, Vincent, 31 Fox News, 21, 33, 130 Frank, Thomas, 14–​15, 40 Frankl, Viktor, 128–​129 Frederick the Great, 230 Freedom of Information Act, 30 French Resistance, 18 French Revolution, 54 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 58–​59, 61, 88, 95, 97, 128, 174 Friedman, Milton, 185 Gaddafi, Muammar, xii Gandhi, Mahatma, 123 Gardner, Martin, 74–​75, 104 Gates, Bill, 14 Gaulden, Albert Clayton, 109–​110 Generations of Hope Communities (GHC), xvi, 168–​176, 230 Hope Meadows, 168–​169 program description, 168–​171 program evaluation, 171–​173 romanticism of, 174–​176 Giardina, Ric, 122–​123 Gilder, George, 221 Gingrich, Newt, 23 and welfare reform, 222 global warming, xiii, 33, 35 gnostic knowing. See policy romanticism and gnostic belief government, federal, 11–​12, 18–​32, 36 as accountable to popular preferences, 30

See also social policy making and autonomous actors Grassley, Charles, 192–​193 Great Depression, 37, 178, 201 Great Recession of 2008, 4, 11–​12, 15, 18, 31, 37, 70, 173, 178, 184, 223 Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), 209–​211 Greenstein, Robert, 213–​214, 220 Gueron, Judith, 209–​211 Hansen, George, 196 Harlem Children’s Zone, 174 Head Start program, 169 Hegel, Georg W. F., 52, 92 Heinrich, Carolyn, 138, 143 Helena-​West Helena Chamber of Commerce, 188–​189 Helms, Jesse, 195 Heritage Foundation, 24, 26–​27, 216 Hessel, Stephane, 18 Hitler, Adolf, xii, 32 Hofstadter, Richard, ix-​x , 48–​50 Horowitz, Michael, 217 Hudson Institute, 217 ICF International, 153–​160 See also Communities in Schools income inequality, xiii-​x iv, xvi, 3, 10–​11, 13–​14, 18, 26, 36, 38, 19, 83, 85, 143, 146, 162, 165, 173, 177–​178 185, 191, 205, 211–​212, 225–​226, 229 and the Gini coefficient, xiii-​x iv See also poverty individualism, ix, xii, xv, xvii, 17, 21–​22, 40, 44, 51, 57–​63, 66, 73, 79, 84–​85, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113–​114, 124, 128–​129, 133, 149, 167, 178, 185, 191, 206, 224, 227, 230 see also policy romanticism and heroic individualism Institute for Research on Poverty, 138 Institute of Medicine, 225–​226 Irangate, 31 James, Kat, 127 Johnson, Lyndon B., 36 Jones, W. T., 52–​53, 55–​56 see also Romanticism Jordan, Michael, 131 Index  [ 2 4 9 ]

Jung, Carl G., 53, 58, 61, 84, 88–​9 0, 94, 97, 109–​110, 117–​118, 120, 128, 174 and unconscious psyche, 88–​9 0 see also Romanticism Kant, Immanuel, 56, 58, 61, 74, 80, 89, 173 Kant’s noumena, 58, 92 Katznelson, Ira, 200 Kennedy, John F., 123 stolen election, 16, 36 assassination of, 31 Kennedy, Robert assassination of, 31 Kerry, John, 39 Keynes, John Maynard, 4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 27 King, Martin Luther, 31 King, Ronald Frederick, 200 Kinkade, Thomas, 226 Kreamer, Anne, 127 Krueger, Alan, 14 Krugman, Paul, x, 13, 228–​229 labor unions, 12, 23 see also labor movement labor movement, 16–​17 Lazarus, Arnold, 94–​96 Lee, Ilchi, 127 Legitimacy, 10, 16–​17, 23, 31, 35–​36, 38, 40, 41, 43–​4 6, 50 Lerner, Helene, 108–​109 Levoy, Gregg, 109 Lilienfeld, Scott O. 93, 96 Limbaugh, Rush, 22–​23, 33 Lindblom, Charles, 3, 5, 11, 14, 27, 206 lobbyists, 4, 15, 18, 32, 43, 178 Locke, John, 81 Lohr, Jeffrey M. See Lilienfeld, Scott O. Ludy, Leslie, 115–​116 Lynn, Steven J. See Lilienfeld, Scott O. Madame Blavatsky, 32, 96, 110 Maddow, Rachel, 30 Madsen, Richard, ix Maney, Ardith, 200 Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), 139, 209–​211, 213 Manza, Jeff. See Page, Benjamin I. Mao Zedong, xii Mari El healing, 102–​103 [ 2 5 0 ]   Index

market regulation, 11–​12, 15, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 39–​4 0, 43 Marques, Joan, 121–​122 Marrs, Jim, 32–​33 Marxists, 11, 50 Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 53 McCarthy, Joseph, 47 McCarthyism, 48–​49 McGee, Micki, 132 McGraw, Dr. Phil, 103 McGeady, Sister Mary Rose, 215 Mead, Lawrence, 212–​213 Mead, Margaret, 106 media, 10–​11, 13 and charges of liberal bias, 20–​21 and consumer preferences, 21–​22, 39, 42–​43, 90 and conspiracy with environmentalists, 33 Medicaid, 138, 179, 216 Medicare, 179 military, 10, 27, 30–​31 Milliken, William, 152–​153, 160–​165, 174 Mills, C. Wright, 11 Monroe, Marilyn, 31 movement conservatism, 13–​14 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 185, 219–​220 MSNBC, 21 multiculturalism, 22–​23 Murray, Charles, 19, 20, 21, 25, 213 Myss, Caroline, 117–​119 Nagel, Thomas, 176 National Academies of Science, 74, 226 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 16 National Association of Manufacturers, 43 National Education Association, 164–​165 National Organization for Women (NOW), 16 National Research Council, 69 National Security Agency, 31 National September11 Memorial and Museum, 228 National Sharecroppers’ Fund, 190 National Voter Registration Act, 38 Nazis, 29, 42, 58, 129 and conspiracy theories, 32–​33 Nepo, Mark, 108 New Deal, 13, 200–​2 01 new institutionalism, 197–​2 00

Nietzsche, 53, 92 Nixon, Richard M., 50, 185, 193 Noah, Timothy, 14 Obama, Barrack H., 14, 21, 23–​2 4, 27, 31, 228 Occupy Movement, 11, 18, 37, 50 Olasky, Marvin N., 217–​218 Old-​A ge, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), 7–​8, 43, 70, 77, 179, 181 Supplemental Security Income (SSI), 71, 179, 181, 183, 185, 192, 209 Open Society Foundations, 16 opinion polls. See polling Organicism, 53–​55 see also Romanticism Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), xiii-​x iv, 70, 147 organized labor. See labor movement Osho, 116–​117 Osho International Meditation Resort, 116 Page, Benjamin I., 6, 8, 40, 72 Pantheism, 54–​55, 219 see also Romanticism Paperclip Program, 32 parapsychology, 74 patriarchy, 16 Patton, Michael Quinn, 169, 172 Peale, Norman Vincent, 101 Pearsall, Paul, 99, 101 Peirce, Penney, 109 Peron, Juan, xii Perry, Bob, 39 personal responsibility, 19, 51–​52, 66, 68, 72, 77–​78, 85–​86, 98, 103, 111, 119, 124, 128, 138, 145, 160–​161, 178, 191, 194, 203–​2 05, 207–​2 08, 211–​213, 215 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), xvi, 196, 202–​224 and eliminations and changes, 208–​2 09 and romanticism, 209–​224 politics of, 202–​2 08

personal social services, 70, 74, 87, 137–​138, 152, 176 and decline effects, 175 See also social welfare Pew Research Center, 72–​73 philanthropy, 71, 138, 146–​149, 152 Pickett, Kate, 14–​15 Piven, Frances Fox, 11 policy romanticism, ix, xii-​x iii, xv-​x vi, 17, 46–​47, 64–​88, 90, 131, 137, 143, 149–​150, 152, 160, 166–​167, 172–​174, 176, 185–​187, 190–​191, 202, 211, 220, 226, 228–​231 definition of, 22, 52 and authentic self, 86, 131–​132 and chosenness, ix, xii, xv, 50, 54, 58–​59, 65–​6 6, 77–​79, 82, 87, 133, 138, 143–​144, 146, 150, 186–​187, 211, 231 definition of, 77 and gnostic belief, 65–​6 6, 72–​77, 82, 87, 133, 138, 149, 163, 172, 174, 187, 221, 224 definition of, 72 and heroic individualism, 17, 50, 53, 57, 65–​72, 77–​79, 82, 84, 87, 120, 125, 138, 149–​150, 191, 230 definition of, 66 precursors to, 48–​6 4 polling, xi, 4–​8, 13, 40, 199, 230 and ambiguous responses, 7 and design, 7 and participation rates, 7 and response falsification, 7, 13 positive liberty, 67 positive psychology, 99–​101 See also psychotherapy and pop psychotherapy postmodernism, 51–​52, 88, 173 Potter, Andrew, 132 poverty, 9, 24–​2 6, 44, 68–​71, 117, 191–​194, 202–​2 03, 205–​2 06, 211–​218, 220–​221, 223, 225–​226, 231 and nutrition, 225 and single-​parent families, 24–​25 and voting patterns of the poor, 37 and image of the poor, 44, 226 poverty line, 68–​71, 179–​181, 208 poverty rate. See poverty line Prager, Dennis, 20, 21 Index [ 2 5 1]

pragmaticism, 83–​88, 91, 93, 99, 103, 120–​121, 129, 132, 137, 149, 167, 174, as opposed to policy romanticism, xi, xvi-​x vii, 117, 132, 231–​232 privacy, 34, 218 loss through technology, 34 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 147–​148 pseudoscience, 73, 75 psychotherapy, xv, 54, 58–​59, 68, 78, 120, 126, 131, 133, 137, 155, 163, 174, 186, and the authentic self, 92–​93 mainstream psychotherapy, 94–​98 new age psychotherapy, 102–​104 pop psychotherapy, 98–​101 Ptolemy, 57 Puritanism, 63, 85 Putnam, Robert, 170 Quantum Opportunities Program, 174 Radziwill, Nicole, 127 Rand, Ayn, 25, 61, 67 Raymond, Henry, 217 Reagan, Ronald, 22, 50 and the Food Stamp Program, 177, 195 Rector, Robert, 24, 216–​217 Reich, Robert, 14, 18 religion, x, xvi, 22, 32, 48, 58–​6 0, 73, 76, 79–​80, 98, 104, 109. 112–​116, 120, 128, 132–​133, 146, 161, 164, 176 See also spiritualism Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., 53–​5 4 Robbins, Anthony, 122–​125 Robbins, Mike, 108 Robinson, Sir Ken, 104–​106 Rohr, Richard, 116 Romanticism, ix, xii-​x iii, 52–​6 4, 80, 201 definition of, 53 and imagination, 56–​57 and the inner experience, 55–​6 0 and works of Emerson, 51, 60–​6 4, 84–​ 85, 105–​106, 110, 120, 174, 194 and works of Jung, 53, 58, 61, 84, 88–​9 0, 94, 97, 109–​110, 117–​118, 120, 128, 174 romantic quest, 58, 134 romantic mood, 58–​6 0 see also policy romanticism Roosevelt, Franklin D., 200 [ 2 5 2 ]   Index

Rothkopf, David, 14 Ruiz, Miguel, 112–​113 Russell, Dick, 32 Salerno, Steve, 132 Schlesinger, Dr. Laura, 103 Schmidt, Eric, 34 Schopenhauer’s will, 55, 92 Schorr, Lisbeth B., 172 science, 21, 50, 55–​56, 66, 73–​76, 80–​85, 88, 91 as rejected by society, 65, 77 clinical, 92–​93, 97–​98 self-​help, 60, 91, 101, 104–​111, 120, 132–​133, 172, 174, 222, 229–​230 Seligman, Martin, 99–​101, 169 See also psychotherapy and pop psychotherapy Shalala, Donna, 203–​2 04, 220 Shapiro, Robert Y. See Page, Benjamin I. Shelby County v. Holder, 36 Shockley, William, 25 Silver, Nate, 36 Simmons, Rachel, 126–​127 Skinner, B. F., 101 Smith, Hedrick, 14 social policy making, x, xii, xv, 3, 8–​9, 40, 80, 227, 229 due to illegitimate elites, 3–​4, 8, 48 and autonomous actors, 3–​4, 27, 28–​34 and conspiracy theories, 34–​35 and opinions from the political left, 10–​18, 46 and opinions from the political right, 18–​27, 46 due to imperfect pluralism, 4, 8, 35–​38 due to mass preferences, 4–​5, 8, 10, 12, 24, 38–​47 and ecology of detached roles, 40–​45, 68 social problems, x-​x i, xiii-​x iv, xvi, 8–​9, 11, 20, 26, 33, 51 84, 98, 144, 161, 163, 168, 214, 221, 230–​231 social security. See Old-​A ge, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) social welfare, ix, xi, xiv, xvi, 9, 19, 21, 38, 40–​41, 44, 50, 60, 63, 65–​6 6, 68, 77–​78, 81, 83–​85, 87, 111, 139, 144, 149, 153, 160, 162, 173–​175, 186, 191, 194, 197, 206–​2 07, 211, 215, 221, 224, 230–​231

and program ineffectiveness, 25–​2 6, 68–​72, 81 See also social policy making social services. See social welfare Soros, George, 14 special interests. See lobbyists Spielberg, Steven, 14 Spirit Journey Academy, 102–​103 spiritualism, 79, 88, 95, 161 and the self, 112–​117 Stalin, Joseph, xii, 50 Stanton, Glenn T., 126 Steele, James B., 15 Stiglitz, Joseph, x, 11–​13 Stoker, Bram, 133–​134 Stone, Deborah, 9 Sullivan, William, ix Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP), 68–​69, 71, 177 See also food stamp program Supplemental Security Income program (SSI). See Old-​A ge, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Supreme Court, 16, 31 and Voting Rights Act decision, 36 Swidler, Ann, ix Taibbi, Matt, 15 Talmadge, Herman, 194 Tea Party, 12, 18, 27, 37, 47, 50 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), 26, 68–​70, 177–​183, 185, 188, 202, 204, 217, 221, 223–​224, 230 and benefit cuts, 223, 226 work requirements of, 209, 223 Terry, Robert, 121 Texas Association of School Boards, 74 Thomas, Gary L., 114 Tipton, Steven, ix Tito, Josip Broz, xii Toobin, Jeffrey, 31 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 40, 69, 194 transcendentalism. See Emerson, Ralph Waldo U. S. Army, 74 U. S. Census Bureau, 30, 68–​69, 205

U. S. Congress, 27, 178, 187, 191, 193–​194, 197–​198, 202, 205, 213, 222 U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 178, 180–​184, 187 Thrifty Food Plan, 180, 192, 225 U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 203–​2 04 U. S. Department of Labor, 30, 219 U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, 31 U. S. Food and Drug Administration, 127 U. S. House of Representatives, 23, 27, 216, 222 Committee on Agriculture, 187, 189–​196 Committee on Ways and Means, 68, 181–​182, 204–​2 06, 208, 210, 212–​213, 216–​217, 219–​220, 222 U. S. Senate, 27, 31, 36 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, 190, 194 Committee on Finance, 215 Velez-​M itchell, Jane, 130 Ventura, Jesse, 32 Vine, David, 30 voter suppression. See elections Voting Rights Act, 35–​36 War on Poverty, 189, 194, 216 Watergate, 31 Wayne, David, 31–​32 weapons of mass destruction, 31 Weber, Max, 66, 118 Wedel, Janine R., 15 Weekly World News, 35 Weinberg, Steven, 30 welfare programs. See social welfare welfare reform. See Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) welfare state, 13, 19–​2 0, 40, 72, 87 Whitman, Walt, 51 see also Romanticism Wikileaks, 34 Wilde, Oscar, 109 Wilkinson, Richard, 14–​15 Wilson, James Q., 220–​222 Winfrey, Oprah, 103, 106, 108 World War II, 18, 32 Wynn, Elaine, 153, 165–​166 Index  [ 2 5 3 ]

Year Up, xvi, 137–​151, 174–​175, 230 and the opportunity gap, 138, 141, 144, 146 and romanticism, 144, 146, 148–​151 evaluation of, 139–​142 program description, 138–​139

[ 2 5 4 ]   Index

Young Life, 161–​162 See also Milliken, William Young, Penny L., 215–​216 Zigler, Edward F., 169 Zweig, Connie, 109