One of the advantiges of being almost eighty years of age, at least in my case, is that you can recall from memory, the political controversies as they unforded on the Evenining News. The “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” of March 1965 is one of those memories. And that Bret Stephens resurrects the ghost of Mr. Moynihan, as some kind of arbeter of public/political morality, raised the hackles of a person alive, and sentient, at the inauspicious rise of Moynihan! The Reader might not need to wonder at the propinquity between Bret Stephens and Mr. Moynihan: Opportunism!
Editor: Mr. Stephens might have been inspired by this National Affaires essay number 61 • Fall 2016 ? At a brisk 4922 words this is political hagiography, read the final paragraphs
What, then, shall we make of Moynihan’s pungent critiques of liberals, critiques accompanied by his frequent praise of conservative thinkers ranging from Burke to Oakeshott, Kristol to Strauss?
This, after all, is someone who said that after the Great Society he “had considerably scaled down my expectations of what government could do about most things — in the early 1960s in Washington we thought we could do anything, and we found out different — and had acquired the discipline of not being too much impressed by clever-seeming people.” Liberalism in that era, he complained, “lost a sense of limits.” He lectured Democrats in 1968 — in a volume edited by a Republican congressman, and, to add insult, entitled Republican Papers — that “somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth, namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.”
Citations to conservatives, meanwhile, pepper his writings. Moynihan studied at the London School of Economics around the time Michael Oakeshott arrived there, and he appears to have attended at least some of the latter’s lectures. Significantly, he deployed Oakeshott against both parties, such as when he accused each of excessive scientism in the formation of social policy: “A larger possibility is that we are seeing at work in both ‘liberal’ Democratic and ‘conservative’ Republican administrations the demon that Michael Oakeshott has identified as Rationalism — the great heresy of modern times.” (Again the quotation marks framing “liberal” and “conservative” are suggestive.) He quoted Burke at least two dozen times in his writings. He invoked Podhoretz against liberal doomsaying.
Part of the explanation for all this is that he believed liberalism needed to be nourished by an internal critique from which, especially amid the moralism of the 1960s, it had insulated itself. About his 1976 run for Senate, he said, “I ran as a liberal willing to be critical of what liberals had done. If we did not do this, I contended, our liberalism would go soft.” Moreover, some conservatives have mistaken Moynihan’s capacious intellectual curiosity, which spanned not only a diversity of topics but also a diversity of perspectives, for political compatibility. Instead, his particular proclivity for associating with, reading, and quoting conservative thinkers arose from a suppleness and habit of mind that actively sought disagreement — an aptitude largely, and sadly, lost not merely among statesmen but among scholars, a similarly insular profession.
In assessing Moynihan’s relationship to neoconservatism, the issue of party is inescapable as well. Whether because the movement has shifted, because the major political parties have realigned, or both, neoconservatism is more monolithically Republican today than when Kristol wrote in 1976. There is also no question that the second generation of neoconservatives is less Burkean and more Wilsonian than the first.
But the explanation, ultimately, distills to this: Moynihan was neither a neoconservative nor a paleoliberal. Moynihan was Moynihan. He believed in government as an agent of good, but also in limitation as a condition of life. As he wrote in 1973: “Increasingly, it is what is known about life that makes it problematical….The unexpected, the unforeseen: the public life of our age seems dominated by events of this cast.” He believed in a politics rooted in empirical circumstance rather than theoretical abstraction. He championed the subsidiary units of society — family, ethnic group, neighborhood. He respected society’s complexity, but also believed some problems required political and national solutions.
I have called this “Burkean liberalism.” But if the issue of Moynihan and the neoconservatives comes down to labels, perhaps a time may come when individuals of a certain bent, with a certain combination of beliefs, will describe themselves as “Moynihan liberals.” This would be as good a time as any.
Pundits far and wide portray Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a prophet without honor, whose unpopular message carried great potential but went sadly unheeded. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The culmination of this shift came in 1970, when Moynihan—then a member of the Nixon administration—wrote a memo that called for “a period of benign neglect” in national discussions of race. While acknowledging that “the seeds of neoconservatism” existed in the original report, Geary nonetheless identifies a shift in Moynihan’s perspective. By arguing that “the main problem was not African American inequality, but intemperate discussions of race,” Moynihan left little room for his earlier call to “national action.” Geary portrays Moynihan’s turn to the right as the result of his desire for professional advancement and his thin-skinned attitude toward his critics, not as a sign of the affinity between his ideas and those of his more thoroughly conservative fans. This is, perhaps, wishful thinking. Further, while Geary bemoans the exhaustion of 1960s liberal reform—encapsulated in miniature in Moynihan’s own exasperation with his feminist and left-wing critics—he lays too much of the blame on the doorsteps of some of Moynihan’s most incisive and unforgiving critics.
Advocates of Black Power were some of the earliest and most forceful critics of Moynihan’s “pathological” view of black family life. Stokely Carmichael’s insistence that “the reason we’re in the bag we’re in isn’t because of my mama, it’s because of what they did to my mama” cut to the heart of the Moynihan Report’s failings. Geary suggests that the Black Power movement, with its focus on reclaiming black cultural power and self-determination, not only undersold the report’s progressive call to address black unemployment but also abandoned the radical economic proposals of the civil rights movement. He laments the “unfortunate and largely unintended consequence of the Moynihan Report controversy” that “Moynihan and many of his critics shifted debate about inequality away from political economy,” identifying Black Power as one of the principal culprits of this turn away from economic issues and toward questions of identity, self-representation, and cultural worth.
This widely held idea, echoed by Geary, is a misrepresentation; in fact, he shortchanges Black Power’s own economic message. Carmichael and his collaborator, the political scientist Charles V. Hamilton, devoted most of their 1967 book Black Power to the economic and political obstacles to black mobilization and empowerment in the South and North. Carmichael and Hamilton emphasized that at the core of the problem of “institutional racism”—a term they coined—was the lack of “decent housing, decent jobs, and adequate education.” Furthermore, activists regularly invoked the signs and language of Black Power in a variety of local struggles, whether organizing against discriminatory union leadership in Detroit’s Chrysler plants or fighting for tenants’ rights on Baltimore’s housing board.
Like many writers on today’s left who are disappointed with modes of organizing based in marginalized groups’ demands for recognition, Geary disregards the power of collective consciousness to spark broad-based political action. One of the legacies of the sixties—captured by slogans like “Black Power” and “the personal is political”—is that the arenas of political economy and culture cannot be so easily disaggregated. Degrading representations are social facts, imbricated in the political economy of their day. By treating Black Power primarily as a shift from economics toward culture in the national debate on inequality, Geary unfortunately ignores its invocation in campaigns for fair housing, equal employment, and welfare rights.
The controversy surrounding the Moynihan Report is certainly a tangle of threads, and Geary skillfully unravels it, eloquently tracing each strand of debate. The report’s central legacy, unfortunately, seems all too clear. The Moynihan Report, by identifying the culture and family structure of poor black people as the cause of their poverty, has given ammunition to opponents of anti-poverty programs for decades. More broadly, it has contributed to the sadly common view that racism is a thing of the past—that we need to look elsewhere for the causes of contemporary inequality. Activism undertaken beneath the sign of Black Lives Matter has unsettled this willful blindness to the ongoing violence, discrimination, and economic deprivation directed at African Americans. If, as Geary argues, we still need “national action to ensure social and economic equality for African Americans,” we must acknowledge and support the independent black political action that has been, and remains, so crucial to realizing that goal.
Editor: the final paragraphs of Stephen’s ersatz Morality Play, with a telling fragment of Dostoyevsky…
…
There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.
“Man gets used to everything, the beast!” Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov observe in “Crime and Punishment.” That’s Trump’s insight, too — the method by which he seems intent to govern.
There’s a hopeful coda to Moynihan’s warning. In the years after he published his essay, Americans collectively decided that there were forms of deviancy — particularly violent crime — that they were not, in fact, prepared to accept as an unalterable fact of life. A powerful crime bill was passed in Congress, the police adopted innovative methods to deter violence, urban leaders enforced rules against low-level lawbreakers, bad guys were locked away, and cities became civilized and livable again.
Part of that achievement has been undone in recent years, but it’s a reminder that it’s also possible to define deviancy up. In politics, we can’t start soon enough.
Old Socialist
November 21, 2024:
Editor: Reader you will notice that both Stephens and Moynihan are/were tough on crime, the closing paragraph of the Moynihan essay is instructive about ‘the decline of the American civic order’!
Editor: the final paragraph is instructive about American Politics, since the end of the Civil Rights, era and the rise of The New Nixon and his epigones across party lines!
Mr. Stephens offer a link to the Moynihan essay here, its final paragraph
THE HOPE–if there be such–of this essay has been twofold. It is, first, to suggest that the Durkheim constant, as I put it, is maintained by a dynamic process which adjusts upwards and downwards. Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining thatweakens societal standards. Might it not help if we could all agree that there is a dynamic at work here? It is not revealed truth, nor yet a scientifically derived formula. It is simply a pattern we observe in ourselves. Nor is it rigid. There may once have been an unchanging supply of jail cells which more or less determined the number of prisoners. No longer. We are building new prisons at a prodigious rate. Similarly, the executioner is back. There is something of a competition in Congress to think up new offenses for which the death penalty is seemed the only available deterrent. Possibly also modes of execution, as in “fry the kingpins.” Even so, we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us. As noted earlier, Durkheim states that there is “nothing desirable” about pain. Surely what he meant was that there is nothing pleasurable. Pain, even so, is an indispensable warning signal. But societies under stress, much like individuals, will turn to pain killers of various kinds that end up concealing real damage. There is surely nothing desirable about this. If our analysis wins general acceptance, if, for example, more of us came to share Judge Torres’s genuine alarm at “the trivialization of the lunatic crime rate” in his city (and mine), we might surprise ourselves how well we respond to the manifest decline of the American civic order. Might.
Editor: The Reader might judge that the final sentence of the essay is reminiscent of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton’s hysterical predetors speaches!
Joe Biden:
User Clip: Joe Biden Senate remarks on “predators”
Note also the final florish of the Mr. Moynihan essay ‘…to the manifest decline of the American civic order’ which expresses the Neo-Conservate ethos of Bret Stephens, and The New Democrats in the Age of Trump!
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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