The False Promise of Big Government, page 8
The fraying of civil society is particularly problematic for the “little guy” for whom the government expanders claim to work. That’s because the institutions of civil society generally offer the most effective help to the common person who wishes to advance his or her life condition.
For the vast majority of people, life is lived parochially and locally, not nationally. Local communities and associations give shape and meaning to our lives, as we are embedded in an intricate web of human relationships, associations, and cultural mores. At the local level is where most of the meaningful things in life happen: raising a family, working at a job, starting a business, interacting in social groups, volunteering in the community. Global and nationalized connections can become abstractions, whereas real civic self-government and genuine concern for others are possible in the communities in which people live. Because family, community, religion, social relationships, and work are crucial for meaningful living, the institutions of civil society promote human happiness more effectively than big-government programs can.
DID YOU KNOW?
Since the War on Poverty began, the percentage of men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who dropped out of the workforce has quadrupled.
Civil society and its institutions also act as a buffer between the individual and the state, limiting the power of government. This is one reason why big-government advocates ignore the effects of their favored policies on civil society. Broadly speaking, they hold a negative view of society—as Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center put it in a 2013 speech, they “tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it,” and government is their favored reform tool. Proponents of defined government, by contrast, see in society something positive that can help individuals elevate their lives—in Levin’s words, they “tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it.”
Over the past several decades, the government expanders have won out. Civil society has been weakened considerably, and countless Americans have suffered for it.
A BUFFER BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE
The nongovernmental institutions of civil society transmit to each new generation those virtues without which free societies cannot survive. When these institutions function properly, they help prevent people from becoming too dependent on government. They also unify people and empower them to control government.
When an expanding government crowds out civil society, all that connects diverse individuals in society is a rights-allocating government, with people having nothing in common other than a competitive struggle for government benefits and recognition. This struggle produces an adversarial culture that particularly hurts the poor, who need an assimilation culture that connects them to the rest of society.
In his book The Fractured Republic, Levin argues that many of our social problems reflect “a view of society as consisting only of individuals and a state,” which has “set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation.” At the same time, Levin writes, the federal government “now engages in more direct intervention… in the daily lives of Americans than it ever has in peacetime.” These two results—individual isolation and federal interventionism—are connected. The former occurs because the latter has weakened mediating institutions like churches and neighborhood organizations, which are powerful decentralizing forces that scatter economic, social, and political power too widely for any government to seize complete control of society.
Progressive elites claim that America’s strength lies in its diversity, and that its greatest challenges lie in the toleration of that diversity. But this is not right. The reality of America is diversity, but its greatest strength has always been its ability to unify the diverse. This strength, however, can be maintained only by a culture of commonality, by a society that means more than just a large number of individuals ruled by a big central government. Of course, the diversity touted by progressive elites is not the genuine diversity that emerges from the pursuits and values of a free, pluralistic civil society; it is a diversity coerced through a federally managed adversarial culture that divides people into groups of victims and oppressors.
Religious organizations are institutions of civil society that greatly influence quality of life, especially for the poor. To religious institutions, which strive to practice the virtues of charity and compassion, the poor are not just clients or program beneficiaries—they are children of God. So the work of religious activists is guided not by the job descriptions of government bureaucrats but by a higher duty. Unfortunately, the crowding out of religion from the public square has deprived the poor of committed activists who focus on individualized needs.
The ACA’s health-care mandates illustrate this crowding out. The law forced the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns that runs homes for the elderly poor, to violate their religious beliefs by having to offer contraceptive coverage for their employees. Until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned lower-court rulings, the Little Sisters faced $70 million in fines, which would have denied the elderly poor the compassionate care offered by the Little Sisters.
The fact that a private institution cited religious beliefs to oppose the program goals of a growing federal government seemed to incense federal officials to the point of vindictiveness. Even though the Obama administration let other organizations, like unions and congressional employees, escape the ACA’s mandates, it went after the Little Sisters and their religious beliefs, which dared to intrude on the social space that the federal government now claimed for itself. The administration paid little heed to the fact that religious organizations and other nongovernmental groups provided health and welfare services long before the government got involved. The Little Sisters, for instance, have ministered to the poor and elderly since 1839. A century ago, religious organizations had a prominent presence in the nation’s prisons. These organizations and their committed volunteers focused not on some generic bureaucratic blueprint but on the specific needs of the individual. But as the federal government expanded its role during the Great Society era, it monopolized social-welfare venues, such as prisons, and pushed out those private organizations.
WHERE GOVERNMENT CAN’T HELP
Poverty is not only material. Its most debilitating deficits are behavioral and social; its most serious deprivations are cultural. Poverty accompanies a living environment of chaos and harshness. Even if the poor get financial sustenance, they will continue to struggle if they lack social relationships or have no direction to their lives.
The unemployed poor suffer in ways that go beyond economic injury. They suffer from all the deprivations caused by a failure to work. There is dignity in earning a livelihood and providing for one’s self and family. Work fosters virtues that can come from nowhere else—virtues like self-reliance, diligence, dependability, and personal responsibility. Correspondingly, unemployment can be demoralizing and dehumanizing.
Being poor today is not like being poor in 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression. The material poverty was much worse in 1936, but it did not have the generationally debilitating effect that poverty today is having. The poor in 1936 became the middle class in 1956. That is in large part because, in 1936, the larger culture supported the fundamental goals of life: to live dignified lives, to be law-abiding and hardworking, to be faithful to one’s family, to uphold the ideals of decency. This cultural direction prevented the poor from falling into a pit of chaos, desperation, and dependence, out of which they or their children could not climb.
Materially, the situation for the poor has actually improved. According to data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office, the average after-tax household income for the poorest quintile of American households increased 30 percent between 1979 and 2010, from $14,800 to $19,200 (both numbers reported in 2010 dollars); the second-poorest quintile saw after-tax income rise 31 percent, from $29,900 to $39,100. Many people living at the lower economic levels of society have iPhones, computers, and flat-screen televisions. Still, inequality is getting worse, as the poor fall further behind and have a harder time entering the middle class. Their lives are in a downward spiral, as they are cut off from a culture of responsibility and self-discipline that government spending programs cannot create. So a vicious circle ensues: the more the federal government drains the energy and independence of the social mediating institutions, the more that individuals become increasingly atomized and separated; and the more individuals become disconnected, the more a centralized government steps into the void.
THOUGHTS ON BIG GOVERNMENT
“Government can help or hinder. But it is finally a task for the overlapping, plural associations of civic life in which citizens build and pass on those formative institutions—families, schools, churches, unions, and all the rest, including state and local governments—without which there is no democratic culture and, indeed, nothing for the federal government to either correct or curb or serve.”
—Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago
Government is inherently limited in its ability to fight poverty. Government spending cannot provide the poor with the social and cultural support systems that flourished generations ago. It cannot provide the social capital they need to improve their lives. This social capital includes such virtues as self-discipline, delayed gratification, ambition, and respect for authority. These virtues can be inculcated only through the institutions of civil society, which are more responsive to individualized needs than is government.
As the social scientist James Q. Wilson demonstrated in Two Nations, family structure, not income, is the best indicator for all kinds of problematic behaviors, from delinquency to dropping out of school to out-of-wedlock pregnancy. There is no area of life in which children who grow up in broken or never-formed two-parent families do as well on average as children who grow up with both parents.
Government’s inability to teach behavioral or cultural norms is evident in the field of job training. In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs because of automation. A decade after MDTA’s inception, the General Accounting Office reported that the MDTA was failing to teach valuable job skills and was more concerned with filling its program slots than with what trainees actually needed to learn.
Congress replaced the MDTA in 1973 with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). Despite tens of billions of dollars put into this program, it did a terrible job of training, focusing more on what the government agency wanted to do than what the individual trainees needed. An Urban Institute study concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in “significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women.”
After CETA became a well-known failure, Congress replaced it with the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). This new program likewise failed. According to the Labor Department’s inspector general, young trainees were twice as likely to rely on food stamps after JTPA involvement as before. In 1993 a Labor Department study showed that participation in JTPA “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths” by 10 percent.
So the federal government replaced the JTPA, too. In 1998, Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act (WIA).
That’s four separate federal initiatives in a span of thirty-five years, all of which didn’t help their intended beneficiaries and in fact hurt them.
These failures illustrate the point that a distant and impersonal federal government cannot change individual behavior or motivation and so cannot help people build better lives for themselves. The complexity of social ills plaguing low-income communities requires direct, hands-on intervention by civic organizations that can help people escape the forces holding them back. Government dependency, on the other hand, just continues the breakdown of civil society and families.
REJECTING CULTURAL VALUES
Eliminating the disciplining restraints of cultural values may sound appealing at first, but in reality that only works for the elite, because only the elite have the financial resources, educational background, and connections to go their own way. The elite do not need, or think they do not need, the strength of the family to protect them from economic storms. The elite do not think they need the guidance of religion to lead them to happy, fulfilled lives. The goal of the elite is to be freed from the inherited authorities of family, community, and religion, because those institutions may impose values that restrict the ability to experiment in lifestyles.
The lifestyle liberation promoted by the elite comes as a kind of trade-off for ways in which the government has restricted other types of freedom. Even though the political elite has greatly diminished economic freedom through the federal government’s pervasive regulation, that elite has still tried to claim the freedom agenda by promoting cultural freedom or lifestyle liberation. But this cultural freedom has not worked well for the poor. Take state-sponsored gambling. It is sold as an exercise in personal freedom and a release from the traditional moral criticisms of gambling. And so the state subsidizes it, promotes it, and profits from it. And the wealthy and political elite praise it as an example of lifestyle liberation, because gambling produces substantial licensing and tax revenues—revenues that would otherwise have to be paid through income taxes on the wealthy. Instead, through gambling, it is the poor and working class who foot the bill for government.
As Christopher Lasch demonstrated in his 1996 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, elites have spent decades attacking the moral, social, and religious underpinnings of the middle and working classes. Sixteen years later, Charles Murray documented the results of this elite campaign in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Murray shows that elites have maintained their own social systems and supports, adhering to ideals like religion, marriage, industriousness, and honesty.
The problem, Murray says, is that elites are unwilling to “preach what they practice.” The rich may still live in traditional marriage settings and participate in religious organizations, but they do not defend marriage or religion as foundational standards for the rest of society. In fact, they often denigrate traditional cultural values in public discourse. But they quietly (and selfishly) pass on those standards to their children in gated communities, while undermining the common civic culture and separating the lower classes from America’s core cultural institutions.
As a result, Murray argues, we have seen for the first time “the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values.” In a world increasingly dominated by big government, the lower classes have built their lives around the empty models of single parenting, rejection of religious belief, and social isolation.
Substituting values-void big government for the values-inculcating institutions of civil society has been nothing short of disastrous for the poor and working classes. Since the War on Poverty began, out-of-wedlock births have grown sixfold, and the percentage of men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who have dropped out of the workforce has quadrupled, even though American men in that age group have never been healthier.
What has crippled the poor today is the disappearance of their social and cultural support systems. Economist Thomas Sowell has observed, “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.” And the late senator Daniel Moynihan once wrote, “It cannot too often be stated that the issue of welfare is not what it costs those who provide it, but what it costs those who receive it.”
THE TRUE COST OF BIG GOVERNMENT
Since the dramatic government expansion of the Great Society era, big-government advocates have tried unsuccessfully, and often destructively, to effect a massive economic redistribution toward the poor. But what these advocates have succeeded at is bringing about a moral and cultural redistribution away from the poor, thus further widening the inequalities in society.
The poor are falling further behind and having a harder time entering the middle class. This is because the social and cultural poverty of the current age has much more devastating consequences than just the economic poverty. In pushing out the values-inculcating institutions of civil society, big government has neutralized or even undermined the values on which these institutions rest. This has not produced a flowering of freedom. Instead, it has robbed working-class America of social capital. It has weakened families, gutted public education, increased out-of-wedlock births, turned neighbors into strangers, heightened crime, and produced a fragmented and isolated citizenry. Human freedom will further erode when government must pass even more laws and create even more bureaucratic programs to try to replace all the social guidance and support once provided by families, communities, schools, and religions.
It is no surprise that the incidents of corporate greed, financial misconduct, and unethical professional behavior are continually rising, despite the fact that more and more laws are passed to combat those occurrences. It is no surprise that child abuse and classroom violence and fatal interactions between police and individuals are escalating, despite all the government programs and education policies. What controlled and guided human behavior for centuries has been cast aside for big-government rules that command no allegiance. Big government has proved incapable of being a reliable moral compass.
