INSTEAD, MOYNIHAN APOLOGIZED TO THEM:

Juan Williams Has Had Enough (GARY SHAPIRO, August 4, 2006, NY Sun)

[Juan] Williams said it was important to hear the alarms going off: with 25% of black America living in poverty and 70% of black children being born out of wedlock."The house is on fire, the train is going off the tracks, and we have to do something now as a corrective," he said.

He cited an array of historical figures whose examples could offer useful lessons for today. He began with Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, who were born into slavery and did not see themselves as victims.

He cited Booker T. Washington who observed one should never let grievance overshadow opportunity. Mr. Williams next brought up W.E.B. Dubois, who insisted on education, thrift, perseverance, and economic stability as the goals of all black leadership. He also praised Malcolm X for extolling images of black kings, queens, and warriors.

Mr. Williams drew a contrast with today and said, "This grievance culture that we've got going on now is taking us nowhere." He expressed his frustration at even hearing about reparations. He said Congressman Conyers has tried since 1989 to get a study on the subject, but gotten nowhere. "Every court in the land that has looked at it has said the statute of limitations has run out," he said. Yet, he continued, the best black minds — from Charles Ogletree to Johnnie Cochran — have invested time, money, and effort. "It's a movement that's going nowhere, gaining no momentum"

"I want you to realize that about 80 to 90% of white America oppose even an apology for slavery in America, and when it comes to reparations, the numbers are even higher." But he said the audience might be surprised to learn that a majority of black Americans say that they don't want reparations either.

He expressed dismay about statistics on achievement gaps in the classroom, and he sees how many youths equate academic excellence with "acting white" and "being a nerd."

He expressed disappointment at billionaire Robert Johnson, who founded BET, the first cable television network aiming at African-Americans. Mr. Williams said the network was short on positive images of African Americans, but long on beer ads and rappers.

Mr. Williams recalled how the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan decades ago expressed concern about the state of the black family and drew criticism for it. "If he were alive today, people would have to be apologizing to Moynihan," he said.

To the contrary, given the once-in-a-career opportunity to do something about the dependency state that he had long-warned Welfare created, the Senator voted against reform.

MORE:
Welfare: Moynihan's Counsel of Despair (First Things, August/September 1996)

In books such as Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding and The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, Moynihan chronicled the follies by which the federal government hemorrhaged literally trillions of dollars to "solve" the problem of poverty, only to have the country end up with millions of people in an ever more radically isolated underclass.

Moynihan's was not a strident polemic against poverty warriors, for he himself was an architect of some of the bungled efforts launched in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations. Rather, his was an ironic commentary on the improbability of government being able to do much of anything to change the way people live. Long before "family politics" came into fashion, Moynihan dared to point out the connection between poverty and the collapse of the black family, thereby making himself the target of armies of outraged academics and activists who attacked him for "blaming the victim."

But Pat Moynihan more than survived the attack. As Senator from New York he was for years respected by Democrats and Republicans alike as the congressional expert on welfare. When in 1992 Bill Clinton ran on the promise to "end welfare as we know it," and when in 1994 the Republican majority declared its determination to get serious about welfare reform, many thought Moynihan's time had come around at last.

What happened seems to have surprised almost everybody. Far from being a key player in the overhauling of the welfare system, Moynihan unleashed a series of complaints, ranging from the petulant to the apocalyptic. Sixty years of social policy, he says, is being mindlessly dismantled by "the monstrous political deception embodied in the term 'welfare reform.' " Millions of children will join the ranks of the homeless trying to get a little warmth by sleeping on the grates in our city streets. "The defenders of the old activism toward the poor," complains Moynihan, "surrendered willingly, with the shrugs and indifference of those who no longer believed in what they stood for." The Democratic minority that fusses over saving bits and pieces of the old welfare system is, he says, "literally arranging flowers on the coffin of the provision for children in the Social Security Act."

Moynihan does not defend the old system because it works. On the contrary, he is a master of the tale of good intentions done in by the law of unintended consequences. In an extended jeremiad in the Congressional Record, he says he does not disagree with James Q. Wilson's claim that any welfare program significantly funded from Washington will be run "uniformly, systematically, politically, and ignorantly." Further, he does not deny that conservatives are more clear-headed about these problems than liberals. "The great strength of political conservatives at this time (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this. I had hoped twelve years in the wilderness [the Reagan-Bush years] might have changed this; it may be it has only reinforced it." Moynihan, then, does not defend the welfare status quo because liberals are right and conservatives are wrong, and certainly not because it works. He defends it because he believes there is no alternative to it. When the time for welfare reform came around at last, Moynihan's ironic criticism had turned into despair.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2006 1:06 PM