Changing the Dialogue on Social Welfare

-- By JulianAzran - 08 Apr 2013

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with my grandfather, Leon, that disturbed me. I have a deep and profound admiration for my grandfather, whose family traveled to this country when he was 11 after escaping from a concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Throughout my life, he has always offered me guidance and I cherish our relationship very much. We were speaking about social welfare, a topic that we have always disagreed upon. Like countless others, his political views have been largely shaped his own by his own life experiences.

Learning English

As we discussed entitlements and social safety nets, he recounted sleeping on a couch in a one-bedroom apartment with his parents, as he struggled to learn English and succeed at his Brooklyn high school. Leon had the good fortune to learn this new language from a fiercely dedicated uni-lingual teacher. His father, a master tailor in Poland who was unwilling to be extorted by the local unions, had trouble finding work and eventually resorted to doing stitch work at a local dry-cleaner’s. Leon worked hard in school, and enrolled at the Pratt Institute. Years later, he was the chairman of a multi-million dollar company, making ties and socks for Pierre Cardin and Calvin Klein. The embodiment of the American Dream.

Changed Views

When it comes to politics, my grandfather, once an active member of the liberal grassroots organization Common Cause, is a hard-nosed conservative. He maintains "liberal" views on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion but on entitlements: 'I came from nothing, and nobody helped me." To a great extent, he is right, and in the face of his uplifting true story of what hard work can accomplish, it is hard to rationalize "helping those who can't help themselves." On the other hand, my grandfather had lots of help.

Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell has argued that the story that is usually told about extremely successful people is one that focuses on intelligence and ambition. Gladwell says that the true story of success, however, is very different and that we should spend more time looking at what is going on around very successful people if we want to understand how they people thrive.

Was my grandfather imbued with intelligence and ambition? Absolutely. Did he happen to enter the garment business at precisely the right time? Yes. The 1960s, 70s and 80s were a time when men still took pride in the clothes that they wore and invested in their wardrobe the same as they would in their education, both playing a pivotal role in their professional careers. Did having a father who knew how to make a perfectly tailored suit by hand from start-to-finish have anything to do with his success? Yes. How about that sympathetic teacher who stayed late after school to help him learn a second language when she only spoke one? All of these things contributed to his success, and as Gladwell would argue, it was most likely not improbable.

This is the sort of thing that Malcolm Gladwell might write: it's charming nonsense. You've just said that because his father was a "good" tailor, and because his teacher taught him well, he succeeded. This is neither true in the narrow sense (sons of good tailors well taught don't always succeed, through absence of intelligence or ambition among other reasons). Children of hapless parents ill taught sometimes succeed too, because of superior intelligence or ambition, among other reasons.

But what's really being said here, under the flashy form of argument that doesn't work? The social context in which people are embedded has much to do with their life's arc, some portion of which has to do with material success in supporting oneself. So? That doesn't either validate or undermine your grandfather's belief in the "fairness" of leaving people to fend for themselves. It explains only that had he grown up in other circumstances he might well have held a different idea. As you do.

Disconnections

Being a successful product of one's environment has much do to with one's own ability to succeed, but just as importantly, one has to be at the right place at the right time. As I was arguing with him over the mechanics of welfare, I was unable to put together this argument together cogently. However, I suspect that he would not deny its truth. The problem in connecting this importance of environment to the need for social welfare, is due to the changed nature of the game, meaning that many people in this country and throughout the world are never given the chance to succeed.

My grandfather did not live in a government housing project, where security cameras keep watch of the hallways. He did not live in an area where the public school teachers were unwilling or unable to dedicate their time to students who needed extra help. His family did not live on food stamps, nor did they need to resort to illicit activities. His father was a trained craftsman who could provide for his family, although at times they scraped to survive.

Surely you have not forgotten that he also grew up in the Lager?

It is therefore unremarkable why he was unable to see the benefits of social welfare in this country. Although on the surface it may seem as though they, my grandfather and the poor, shared similar experiences in their formative years, the nature of the game has changed.

Which years are formative? What about your great-grandparents? Why would we think of your grandfather's character and outlook as unrelated to the emotional as well as material circumstances of his parents? And why no reference to the sociology of survivors of Shoah more generally?

There has been an enormous expansion of poverty and a likewise contraction of opportunity in this country. Income inequality has risen significantly since the early 1970s. The difference is that my grandfather had bootstraps to pull himself up by, whereas most of the poor living in America today have no boots to pull themselves up by.

Surely you do also recognize that the material circumstances of "the poor" in the US now are in many respects superior to those of non-poor Americans a generation ago? There has been vast material progress affecting everyone in every direction since the end of the Depression and the War. Your argument seems to be based on an assumption of an absolute worsening of conditions that is untrue.

Of course, Barack Obama is an excellent example of someone who was given the chance to succeed by the help of others. President Obama’s maternal grandfather, a veteran of World War II, was only able to attend college because of the GI Bill. The President himself was able to pursue higher education with the help of student loans and scholarships.

Going Forward

This is not about attacking the successes of the wealthy. Emphasizing the role that one’s surroundings played in achieving success is not meant to detract from the hard work and ambition of my grandfather and many others. But these necessary conditions to achieving upward social mobility are no more important than living in an environment where one has the chance to succeed in the first place. Modern social welfare programs serve as vital safety nets that allow the poor to focus on educating themselves, and other ways of self-fulfillment, rather than having to worry about where their next meal will come from. Perhaps if we are able to bridge this gap of understanding between the young and old, we can forge a new dialogue on social policy.

Maybe so, but the force of the preceding argument was solely in the direction of having your grandfather adopt your ideas. You didn't, in the end, propose to budge by a millimeter from your own assumptions.

The problem is that you're trying to solve a problem instead of understanding a person. That your grandfather's world and your own are completely different is not primarily about a policy disagreement: it's about the emotional and psychic structures that he doesn't want to speak directly about, and that you don't recognize as something you are afraid to approach. Put aside what he thinks about whether we should take care of people neither of you knows. His great meaning in the next phase of your life will come from what you gain in understanding about him, as a human being, while you can.

As a policy question, outside this particular human relationship, why would you need to argue with someone who thinks that "takers" should be left to take care of themselves? Such a view is never going to prevail in a democracy, in the Aristotelian sense: the poor want the poor taken care of, and when they rule, taking care of the poor is not regarded as requiring a moral defense. The Ayn Rand faction cannot actually rule in a democracy: Allen Greenspan could never have been elected dog-catcher anywhere.

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