The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  The premise of such politics is that identities, and rights, should derive from group membership, and special rights are owed to grievance groups composed of America’s myriad and ever-multiplying victims. A corollary of this theory is “categorical representation,” the idea that the interests of particular groups can be understood and articulated only by members of those groups. Such thinking has produced racial gerrymandering and other facets of a racial spoils system, a detour on the road to more genuine equality of opportunity. Progressives steeped in identity politics are not convinced that people can be readily reached by reason. Rather, progressives regard people as defined by, and enclosed in, their race, ethnicity, class, or gender. This leads to a contraction of the ambit of the democratic politics of persuasion. The vacated social space is filled by the brokering of identity-group interests in the name of a spurious equality of opportunity.

  The creation of “minority-majority” congressional districts expresses the ideology of identity politics: You are whatever your racial or ethnic group is. But that ideology, promulgated by political entrepreneurs with a stake in the racial and ethnic spoils system, is false regarding the facts of human differences, and bad as an aspiration and an exhortation. Furthermore, such congressional districts are bad for civic health because they reduce the incentive for politicians to form coalitions by reaching across racial lines. Such gerrymandering is the quintessential “outcome-based” racial policy. And it is a provocative political entitlement. The purpose of drawing lines to create districts in which minorities constitute a majority of the voters is to assist, virtually to the point of ensuring, the election of minorities to offices to which they are entitled by virtue of their race or ethnicity. The result is “political apartheid,” to use Justice O’Connor’s phrase from the 1993 ruling invalidating a North Carolina districting scheme that produced a 160-mile-long district that straggled down Interstate 85 and for most of its length was no wider than the highway.25 Other racially concocted districts have shapes like roadkill—like raccoons that have had run-ins with eighteen-wheelers. All such districts rest on the assumption that people of a particular race will and should think and act alike. This assumption undergirds the doctrine of categorical representation.

  Although racial gerrymandering is another example of cures that exacerbate diseases, the most important news about America’s race problem is that there is so much good news. To appreciate how far and fast America was transformed in the twentieth century, consider some events that occurred during the lives of grandparents of Americans now living. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which is generally known as the Chicago World’s Fair, named as its poet laureate a well-named Mississippian, James D. Lynch, whose most well-known poem celebrated the Ku Klux Klan. On the exposition’s designated “Colored People’s Day,” 2,500 watermelons were distributed to attendees. That same year, at the Paris, Texas, fairgrounds, a black seventeen-year-old accused of a crime was burned in front of a crowd of perhaps 15,000, which had been assembled with the assistance of railroad companies that scheduled special trains to accommodate those eager to enjoy the spectacle. A year earlier, a mob had seized from the Texarkana jail a black man accused of raping a white woman. He was skinned before being burned alive. In 1894, a black man accused of raping a white St. Louis woman was hanged from a bridge over the Meramec River. There were one hundred witnesses. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.26

  America then was often barbaric. It is not anymore. The velocity of moral change has matched the velocity of change in material conditions, and both kinds of change influence how we think about enlarging equality of opportunity.

  We are surrounded by products, from computers to smartphones (computers in our pockets) to pharmacological marvels that were unimaginable fifty years ago. One hundred years ago, a three-minute telephone call from New York to California cost ninety hours of the average worker’s labor; today it costs ninety seconds. As Deidre McCloskey writes, “Andrew Carnegie despite his wealth could not buy a cure for the pneumonia that killed his mother.” And Lewis Thomas, dean of the Yale and New York University medical schools, who was known as “the father of modern immunology,” estimated that “until the 1920s going to a doctor lowered your odds of survival.”27 But the most remarkable change in American circumstances has had nothing to do with applied science in technology and medicine. Rather, it has to do with American attitudes, which have proven to be amazingly impermanent and improvable.

  In 1955, Adlai Stevenson, who was considered by advanced thinkers to be an advanced thinker, delivered the commencement address to those he called the “gallant girls” of Smith College. He said they had “a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy.” He urged them “to restore valid, meaningful purpose to life in your home” and to address the “crisis in the humble role of housewife.” He said they could do all this “in the living room with a baby in your lap, or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hands” and “maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television.”28 Any speaker talking like that even just fifteen years later would have been hanged from a branch of one of the campus’ stately elms by an enraged regiment of women. Fifteen years can be a long time in modern America. Watch a southeastern conference football game—say, Alabama against Mississippi—and watch an African-American referee imposing penalties and generally bossing everyone around. For Americans of a generation now passing from the scene, a generation that remembers when this was unimaginable, it is a reminder of this: Because America is a creedal nation, when Americans become convinced that certain practices and the attitudes that sustain them are discordant with the creed, they change both.

  The American problem of enhancing equal opportunity necessarily begins with race, but hardly ends with it. Today, the problem involves the long reverberations from what began in 1964.

  Standing on—yes, on—the presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, Rhode Island, in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.”29 This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier at the University of Michigan. There Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would “rebuild the entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,” slaking “the hunger for community,” and enhancing “the meaning of our lives” by assembling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge.”30 In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time.” Today, fewer than 20 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

  In 1964, Johnson won a landslide victory that also reshaped Congress. After voters rebuked FDR in 1938 for attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court, Republicans and Southern Democrats prevented any liberal legislating majority in Congress until 1965. That year, however, when 68 senators and 295 representatives were Democrats, Johnson was unfettered. As a result, he remains, regarding government’s role, the most consequential twentieth-century president. Nicholas Eberstadt rightly says LBJ, more than FDR, “profoundly recast the common understanding of the ends of governance.” When Johnson became president in 1963, Social Security was America’s only nationwide social program. His programs, and those they subsequently legitimated, put the nation on the path to the present, in which changed social norms—dependency on government has been destigmatized—have changed America’s national character.

  Between 1959 and 1966—before the war on poverty was implemented—the percentage of Americans living in poverty, as the government measured this, plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, just slightly higher than in 2018 (12.7 percent). But, Nicholas Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels diverge significantly. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance, and oth
er entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare: “By 2011… average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the US average for 1980.… [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980.… DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them—amenities not even the richest US households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”31

  The nation urgently needs a sensible measurement of the poverty rate. This requires taking cognizance of non-cash government benefits (for food, housing, health care, and other matters), counting the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit, revising the Consumer Price Index to achieve a more accurate measurement of inflation, and a more realistic treatment of households composed of cohabiting couples. A more realistic measure of poverty as actual deprivation would give a better picture of well-being and might cut the poverty rate by two-thirds. This would, of course, be resisted by those in the interlocking and overlapping networks of anti-poverty institutions and programs, people who have a stake in measurements that maximize the estimate of the number of people in poverty. These anti-poverty officials are the reason Moynihan said that if one-third of the money that flows to, but not always through, such institutions and programs were given directly to poor people, no one would be in poverty. But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Moynihan coined this phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African-Americans. This tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”32

  Thirty-five percent of Americans—about 47 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Hispanics—live in households receiving means-tested benefits. And, says Eberstadt, “the proportion of men 20 and older who are employed has dramatically and almost steadily dropped since the start of the War on Poverty, falling from 80.6 percent in January 1964 to 67.6 percent 50 years later.” Work, which requires independence and self-reliance, is essential to the culture of freedom. So, ominous developments have coincided with Great Society policies: For every adult man ages twenty to sixty-four who is between jobs and looking for work, more than three are neither working nor seeking work, a trend that began with the Great Society. And what Eberstadt calls “the earthquake that shook family structure in the era of expansive antipoverty policies” has seen out-of-wedlock births increase from 7.7 percent in 1965 to more than 40 percent in 2012, including 72 percent of black babies. LBJ’s bifurcated legacy includes the triumphant Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965—and the tragic aftermath of many of his other works. Eberstadt asks: Is it “simply a coincidence” that male flight from work, and family breakdown, have coincided with Great Society policies, and that dependence on government is more widespread and perhaps more habitual than ever?33 Barry Goldwater’s insistent 1964 question is increasingly pertinent: “What’s happening to this country of ours?”34

  Half a century on, the nation’s mood is tinged with sadness stemming from well-founded fear that America’s new, post–Great Society government is subverting America’s old character. This government’s agenda is a menu of temptations intended to change the nation’s social norms by making Americans comfortable with dependency. And with the degradation of democracy by the practice of financing dependency by piling up public debt that forces unconsenting future generations to finance current consumption. America’s national character had to be changed if progressives were going to implement their agenda. To understand how far this has advanced, and how difficult it will be to reverse the inculcation of dependency, consider the data Eberstadt has gathered:

  Beginning two decades after the death of Franklin Roosevelt—who would find today’s government unrecognizable—government became a geyser of entitlements. In 2010, government at all levels transferred more than $2.2 trillion in money, goods, and services to recipients—$7,500 per individual, about $30,000 per family of four. Before 1960, only in two Depression years, 1931 and 1935, did federal transfer payments exceed other federal expenditures. During most of FDR’s twelve presidential years, income transfers were a third or less of federal spending. But between 1960 and 2010, entitlements exploded from 28 percent to 67 percent of federal spending. By 2010, more than 34 percent of households were receiving means-tested benefits. Republicans were more than merely complicit, says Eberstadt: “The growth of entitlement spending over the past half century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, to be sure, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential—but in any given calendar year, it was on the whole over 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.…The Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations presided over especially lavish expansions of the entitlement state.”35

  As evidence of the moral costs of this, Eberstadt cites the fact that means-tested entitlement recipience has not merely been destigmatized, it has been celebrated as a basic civil right. Hence the stunning growth of supposed disabilities. The normalization and then celebration of dependency help explain the “unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.” Since 1948, male labor force participation has plummeted from 89 percent to 73 percent. Today, 27 percent of adult men do not consider themselves part of the workforce: “A large part of the jobs problem for American men today is that of not wanting one.” Which is why “labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are demonstrably lower in America than in Europe.” One reason work now is seen as neither a duty nor a necessity is the gaming—let us not mince words: the defrauding—of disability entitlement programs. In 1960, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments; in 2011, 8.6 million were. This was more than four times the number of persons receiving basic welfare benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Nearly half of the 8.6 million were “disabled” because of “mood disorders” or ailments of the “musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue.” It is, says Eberstadt, essentially impossible to disprove a person’s claim to be suffering from sadness or back pain.36

  “In 1960,” Eberstadt says, “roughly 134 Americans were engaged in gainful employment for every officially disabled worker; by December 2010 there were just over 16.” This, in spite of the fact that public health was much improved, and automation and the growth of the service/information economy had made work less physically demanding. Eberstadt says collecting disability is an increasingly important American “profession.” For every hundred industrial workers in December 2010, there were seventy-three no-longer-workers receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the US economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs—but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a product of the Great Recession of 2008–2009: In the fifteen years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs—and 4.1 million workers went on the disability rolls. The radiating corruption of this entitlement involves the collaboration of doctors and health care professionals who certify dubious disability claims. The judicial system, too, is compromised in the process of setting disability standards that enable all this. America’s ethos once was what Eberstadt calls “optimistic Puritanism,” combining an affinity for personal enterprise with a horror of dependency.37 No longer.

  What Eberstadt calls the “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: A smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages twenty-five to fifty-four) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was still above 14 percent. The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half century. Th
is is a “work deficit” of “Great Depression-scale underutilization” of male potential workers. Since 1948, the proportion of men twenty and older without paid work has more than doubled, to almost 32 percent. This “eerie and radical transformation”—men creating an “alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job”—is largely voluntary. Men who have chosen to not seek work are two and a half times more numerous than men that government statistics count as unemployed because they are seeking jobs. What Eberstadt calls a “normative sea change” has made it a “viable option” for “sturdy men,” who are neither working nor looking for work, to choose “to sit on the economic sidelines, living off the toil or bounty of others.” Only about 15 percent of men twenty-five to fifty-four who worked not at all in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find work.38

  For fifty years, the number of men in that age cohort who are neither working nor looking for work has grown nearly four times faster than the number who are working or seeking work. And the pace of this has been “almost totally uninfluenced by the business cycle.” The “economically inactive” have eclipsed the unemployed, as government statistics measure them, as “the main category of men without jobs.” Those statistical categories were created before government policy and social attitudes made it possible to be economically inactive. Eberstadt does not say that government assistance causes this, but obviously it finances it. To some extent, however, this is a distinction without a difference. Largely because of government benefits and support by other family members, nonworking men twenty-five to fifty-four have household expenditures a third higher than the average of those in the bottom income quintile. Hence, Eberstadt says, they “appear to be better off than tens of millions of other Americans today, including the millions of single mothers who are either working or seeking work.” The US economy is not less robust, and its welfare provisions not more generous, than those of the twenty-two other affluent nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet America ranks twenty-second, ahead of only Italy, in twenty-five-to-fifty-four male labor force participation. This, Eberstadt says, is the “unwelcome ‘American Exceptionalism.’”39