The
holidays are a time to reflect on the year past and to hope for peace and
happiness in the year ahead. Christmas, as an official holiday, came late to
the United States…
The
first Christmas tree in the White House was the inspiration of one of those
Presidents of the 1880s whose sequence I can never keep straight. This was
imported behavior, Prince Albert having introduced the custom to Buckingham
Palace a generation earlier. But it was not until 1894 that Grover Cleveland,
perhaps responding to his political experiences among the German folk of
Buffalo, gave the civil service the day off. The occasion has been, in that
sense, sacred ever since. The Capitol shuts down, and becomes rather a private
place. For once, all is calm. It is possible to think.
Daniel P. Moynihan, Newsletter to constituents,
December 26, 1981[1]
Pat
Moynihan enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past year. Partly this was
due to the fact that 2015 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Moynihan Report,
an occasion which led to a modest flurry of controversy over its legacy and
that of its author. That report, and its impact, was the focus of Daniel
Geary’s acclaimed Beyond Civil Rights:
The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy.[2]
Moynihan himself was the subject of an intellectual biography, Greg Weiner’s American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of
Pat Moynihan.[3]
These follow on the heels of Stephen Hess’s The
Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, published last year. He also featured as an off-screen character in The Wire creator David Simon’s HBO
miniseries, Show Me A Hero (making,
it should be acknowledged, a less than heroic contribution to the plot). As the
lad himself notes above, these twilight days of the year are an opportunity for
reflection, a time when reviews and round-ups proliferate, and so we thought
that we would offer our own review of the year in Moynihan.
[DISCLAIMER:
Your convenors entirely reject the notion that we are bandwagon-hoppers.
However, we are delighted to find the bandwagon we have been riding for some
time so crowded, and pleased to have this opportunity to introduce you to some
of our fellow passengers.]
Moynihan c. 1976, in a typically conciliatory mood
The
Moynihan Report – or to give it is proper title, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action – was an internal
memorandum prepared in 1965 by Moynihan, then an assistant secretary in the
Department of Labor in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson and responsible
formulating policy for the War on Poverty. The report argued that the legacy of
slavery and centuries of white prejudice and discrimination had warped the
structure of black families. A ‘tangle of pathology’ (unemployment, crime,
educational failure) perpetuated a black underclass and only forceful government
intervention could break that cycle. Moynihan was a co-author of Johnson’s
commencement address at Howard University that same year, “To Fulfil These
Rights,” in which the president declared that ‘freedom is not enough’ and
committed America ‘not just [to] equality
as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.’ By
this point, however, the internal report had begun to leak piecemeal and met
with a ferocious response. Some of the criticism was legitimate and some based
on garbled misunderstandings of Moynihan’s argument. ‘[W]e are sick unto death
of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same
evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended,’ was the
response of James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE). Psychologist
William Ryan coined the phrase ‘blaming the victim’ for a 1971 book he wrote
explicitly to refute Moynihan’s conclusions in his report. Moynihan left the
Johnson administration in 1965 to run for the presidency of the New York City
Council. After a dismal campaign, which ended with him as the only member of
the Democratic ticket not elected that year, a wounded Moynihan retreated to a
professorship at Harvard.
Moynihan
and his report were major features in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ astonishing and vital
cover story in the October issue of The
Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/). Coates
characterized Moynihan as a ‘conservative radical’ whose privileging of the
male-headed black family as the proper focus for federal anti-poverty efforts,
‘bombastic’ language, and lack of concrete policy recommendations in the report
was at least indirectly and partially responsible for the rise of the carceral
state in the latter half of the twentieth century, which has become, argues
Coates, the principal ‘social-service program’ for black Americans. To
accompany Coates’s story, The Atlantic
had produced an annotated edition of the Moynihan Report, written by Geary (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/).
As
with his earlier cover-story on reparations, Coates’s deeply-researched and
provocative article provoked a lively debate. His use of the Moynihan Report to
frame his argument drew responses from those who felt his treatment of Moynihan
had been unfair. Greg Weiner offered a spirited rebuttal in the Huffington Post, suggesting that Coates’s
use of Moynihan as an ‘interesting literary foil’ had been ‘a case of putting
two unrelated topics next to each other and inviting the reader, by implications,
to associate them’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-weiner/in-defense-of-daniel-patr_b_8158876.html). Gil Troy –
author of Moynihan’s Moment: America’s
Fight Against Zionism As Racism (2012) – accused Coates of misunderstanding
Moynihan, dismissing the ‘Great American Crime Wave’ of the 1960s-1990s, and
offering a ‘[m]onocausal denunciation[…]’ of American racism (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/20/ta-nehisi-coates-gets-daniel-patrick-moynihan-all-wrong.html).
Not
all responses were hostile. Susan Greenbaum, writing for Al Jazeera, argued that Coates did not go far enough in anatomising
the pernicious consequences of the Moynihan Report, suggesting that it played a
key role in creating the stereotype of the ‘welfare queen’ and fed ‘the
narrative that poor people cause their own problems’ (http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/wheres-the-obituary-for-the-moynihan-report.html). Writing in the Boston Review in June, Stephen Steinberg
had been similarly critical of the Moynihan Report, arguing that its author was
‘ardently colorblind long before that idea had become a mantra on the Supreme
Court and the right’ (http://bostonreview.net/us/stephen-steinberg-moynihan-report-black-families-nathan-glazer).
Such
debates prompted an upturn in reconsiderations and reaffirmations of Moynihan’s
relevance to contemporary debates. In a lengthy and wide-ranging essay in the September
issue of Prospect (which is also a good,
brief introduction to Moynihan’s life and career for the neophyte), Sam
Tanenhaus wrote that ‘Moynihan towers before us a vanished, much-missed type,
the reform-minded traditionalist’ (http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/daniel-patrick-moynihans-tough-lessons-for-liberals). In another
contribution to the Huffington Post,
Greg Weiner asked ‘Where are today’s Moynihans …?’ and concluded that it is the
wrong question to ask. This post is also a handy primer on Weiner’s idea of
‘Burkean liberalism’ which he uses to characterise Moynihan’s political
identity in his recently published book (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-weiner/daniel-patrick-moynihan_b_6651868.html).
Drawing
on Weiner’s work, E.J. Dionne wrote that Washington today needs more ‘Burkean
liberals and Burkean conservatives’ like Moynihan as ‘an antidote’ to
polarisation (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-miss-the-unpolarizing-pat-moynihan/2015/04/08/b264dc4e-ddf9-11e4-be40-566e2653afe5_story.html). Moynihan’s
coinage of ‘defining deviancy down’ was recently pressed into service to argue
that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is having a coarsening effect on
American political culture (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/11/23/how-trump-is-defining-deviancy-down-in-presidential-politics/). And earlier this
month, Peter-Christian Aigner made the case for resurrecting the family
allowance (i.e. a guaranteed income), the defining policy concern of Moynihan’s
time in the Nixon White House (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/americas-need-for-a-family-allowance/420123/).[4]
Aigner is currently writing a biography of Moynihan for Simon and Schuster
which should be published in 2017. The bandwagon rolls on!
Happy
reading and happy New Year.
[1] Steven R. Weisman
(ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A
Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010), 440.
[2] Among other public
lectures, Geary spoke on his book at UCL’s Institute of the Americas in
November. A podcast of the lecture is available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/americas/ia-events/archive/beyond_civil_rights
[3] For a review of
Weiner’s book, see Roger Lowenstein, “The Sometime Liberal,” The American Prospect, August 20, 2015: http://prospect.org/article/sometime-liberal
[4] In another Atlantic article in April 2014, Aigner
pre-empted this year’s debates over the Moynihan report, arguing that the
modern American left and right have both misunderstood and distorted its
conclusions: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/what-the-left-and-right-both-get-wrong-about-the-moynihan-report/360701/
