Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 3, 1995 TAG: 9508040002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The new dynamic was on display Monday when President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole addressed the nation's governors. Both were playing defense against more radical proposals than their own - Clinton against Dole's proposal to dismantle the whole welfare system, Dole against Sen. Phil Gramm, who would dismantle the system and force states to cut certain groups off welfare whether the states wanted to or not.
Don't think that this particular range of views makes Dole a ``centrist'' on welfare. Such a conclusion simply shows the relativity of all political spectrums. Dole, Gramm and Clinton have all proposed more far-reaching changes in welfare than Ronald Reagan dreamed of doing. Liberals who once thought Clinton's reforms were Draconian would now be overjoyed if Congress contented itself with passing his original bill.
Moynihan has watched all this with occasional amusement and a good deal of sadness. In some ways, the welfare debate has moved his way. Yet mostly, it's moved way beyond anything he deems reasonable.
For example, when Moynihan started talking during the 1960s about how the collapse of the two-parent family was having a devastating impact on the life chances of poor, especially black, children, he was roundly denounced for ``blaming the victim.'' Now the problem has gotten much worse for whites and blacks alike, and almost everyone agrees that family breakup is a central public issue.
Thirty years ago this year, Moynihan and a group of dissenting liberals founded a journal called The Public Interest, whose purpose was to challenge certain liberal orthodoxies from the inside. One of the central ideas The Public Interest popularized was ``the law of unintended consequences'' whereby social policies - in welfare and many other areas - are inaugurated to achieve certain purposes and then have results that no one anticipated because no one thought through the effects the new policies would have on human behavior. Now, many of the founders of The Public Interest - but not Moynihan - have abandoned liberalism and the Democratic Party and embraced full-hearted conservatism.
This political and intellectual revolution has left Moynihan in a peculiar position. On the one hand, no one is happier than he that the two-parent family is politically correct. Yet Moynihan is one of the most vociferous opponents of various Republican plans, such as Gramm's, that purport to cut illegitimacy rates by cutting welfare benefits to various groups (such as mothers who have a second child while on welfare).
Moynihan argues - in good Public Interest fashion - that no one has the foggiest notion of whether such proposals would do anything at all to reduce single motherhood. The preliminary evidence from New Jersey, which has tried cutting benefits to the later children of mothers on welfare, is not encouraging. It suggests that the cutoff has marginally reduced the illegitimacy rate while increasing the abortion rate. What a perverse unintended consequence it would be if a social policy hurt poor children and increased the number of abortions without noticeably reducing the number of children born out of wedlock.
Moynihan also opposes both Dole and Gramm in their quest to turn Aid to Families with Dependent Children into a block grant. He worries about ``abandoning a national commitment to national responsibilities,'' in this case a commitment to a basic social minimum for poor children. And block grants will have an unintended consequence of their own, turning the Washington debate away from questions of national purpose and toward a series of regional battles over which states get how much from the feds. Politics as one big formula fight would not ennoble the country.
Moynihan's arguments raise the intriguing question of whether those who these days proudly declare themselves ``conservative'' are in fact conservative in any meaningful sense of the term, particularly on welfare. The core ``conservative'' social policy principles - (1) to beware of unintended consequences, (2) to oppose changes that might do harm and (3) to proceed cautiously in large endeavors - are all violated by the Republicans' radical welfare plans.
Conservatives also claim that personal values and cultural norms matter more than material incentives and government policies. Conservatives say that transforming the family structure in poor neighborhoods is central to improving the lot of poor kids. That is a defensible view, and it would entail a cultural revolution.
But the congressional conservatives want a revolution on the cheap - with politically popular welfare cutbacks that carry no risk for anyone except poor children. Serious conservatives, such as James Q. Wilson of UCLA, know there are no cheap cultural revolutions. That's why he has advocated serious initiatives such as family shelters in which children and teen mothers could get help over extended periods in safe environments and have a chance of breaking away from the chaos of their own neighborhoods. But such ``second chance homes,'' as policy analyst Kathleen Sylvester calls them, cost money, and the congressional conservatives seem willing to do anything for ``good values'' except spend money.
One of the core Moynihan complaints over the years, against liberal and conservative social policy-makers alike, has been that ``we do not know what we are doing,'' meaning that social policy is hard and dangerous. At heart, this is a conservative's lament. On welfare, it's one that conservatives ignore at the peril of the most vulnerable people in our society.
E.J. Dionne is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
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