Chris Powell is the managing editor of
the Journal Inquirer in Manchester and writes a regular column for the paper.
In the course of our conversation on poverty and social disintegration, Powell
made reference to a column by Mona Charen that fairly summed up his general
feelings.
Charen's column details some
complacency-shattering statistics: “The illegitimacy rate among all Americans
has been rising for decades. In 2012, we reached a grim milestone: The majority
of births to women under the age of 30 are now outside of marriage. Among
blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried
mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it's rare in the
African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married. (In
1960, it was 61 percent).”
Pesci: What you call “social
disintegration” and others on the left call “poverty” is particularly insidious
in cities. My own feeling, though you may disagree, is that even liberals tend
to shy away from such terms as “social disintegration,” perhaps because
preferred terms such as “poverty” suggest easier solutions to painful problems.
And, of course, Republican politicians, especially here in Connecticut, have
been frightened away from even casual references to social disintegration. One
rarely hears it mentioned. The poverty problem is solved when money retrieved
from socially unconscious malefactors of great wealth is transferred by means
of a political distribution system to the poor. Social disintegration is a
harder nut to crack. Here is Powell writing on a proposal to cap Connecticut’s
gross receipts tax:
“Just two days before it complained
about cheap gas and sprawl, the Courant reported the arrest of three Hartford
Public High School students for raping a 15-year-old girl at the school during
school hours. The much-lamented ‘achievement gap’ between city and suburban
schools has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with such social
disintegration.
“If Connecticut's cities were ever
habitable for those aspiring to the middle class and seeking safe and sound
upbringings for their children, people would jump at the chance to live there
and to save on gas. But as long as the cities are the centers of social
disintegration, people will pay almost any gas price to live somewhere else.”
For you, social disintegration is a
bridge issue that touches most if not all urban pathologies AND most if not all
legislative proposals. Tell us what you mean by social disintegration.
Powell: I mean breakdown in the basic
social norms of decent behavior --boys and young men behaving like predators
and girls and young women behaving like prey because of lack of parenting;
adults unable to support themselves because they have not obtained any
education and not learned any marketable skills; a lack of participation in
community life so whole jurisdictions become unmanageable except by police, who
immediately come to be considered outsiders, or by gangsters. I think most of
this comes about because government coddles and subsidizes childbearing outside
marriage, in the mistaken belief that doing so is less expensive than taking
custody of the neglected children. The mistake is a matter of faulty
accounting. Insofar as fewer government employees have to be involved in
direct, face-to- face care, it may seem cheaper to leave a newborn in the care
of an unmarried, unemployed, unskilled woman who already has three children by
three different fathers and who is getting no substantial support from any of
them. But it's not cheaper if you count the broad social costs imposed by those
neglected kids as they grow up, fatherlessness correlating overwhelming with every
anti-social behavior. Demographics in Connecticut are almost entirely a matter
of middle-class people and people aspiring to the middle class trying to get
away from the slob culture of fatherlessness.
Q: This downward death spiral apparent
in the cities, but also seen more frequently in suburbs as the victims of
criminality move away from anarchic environments, has been analyzed to death.
Your analysis is probably sharper than most. Let’s assume it’s right: Urban
pathologies are related to fatherlessness and the breakdown of core cultural
values. I think the values have broken down everywhere, but the consequences
are more severe in cities – and more pathetic because the pathologies are
passed along from children to children uncorrected by the wider society.
Studies show that the presence of a father in the home, for instance, is
directly related to intelligence in male children. We cannot say that people
have been indifferent to the normal yearnings of young people for peace,
security, good schools and mediating institutions that are the hallmarks of a
sound and nurturing culture. The war on poverty has been fought for a long
while, and nothing is more obvious than that the enemy has won. Healthy
societies produce cultural antibodies to ward off social pathologies. Where are
they? How does it happen that when we act to make things right, everything
becomes worse? After years of fatherlessness in cities – many potential fathers
are in prison or dead or ought never to have been fathers in the first place – how
do we restore the missing cultural antibodies and change this path of
generational destruction? What is right and what is wrong about the usual state
agency response to cultural genocide?
A: I blame public policy for what is
happening. People are usually dumb but they are seldom so stupid that they
can't figure out their immediate financial position. Brandeis said government
teaches the whole people by its example. Jack Kemp and others said that you get
more of whatever you subsidize. Government today doesn't tell people that
having children outside marriage is the most anti-social thing imaginable short
of murder; government says it's OK and provides a host of subsidies for it -- a
basic welfare stipend, housing vouchers, food stamps and WIC support, better
medical insurance than most working married couples can get, day care, and
such. It's not a luxurious life but in the chain of child neglect and abuse --
fatherless, uneducated, unskilled, unemployable children having children -- it
can look pretty good. The War on Poverty ended up destroying the family, not
poverty -- which doesn't discredit the objective of alleviating poverty. It
just discredits the means chosen. (Unlike most supposed conservatives, I
support what is derided as "Obamacare," insofar as it is the
conservative national medical insurance system proposed by the Heritage
Foundation as an alternative to "Hillarycare" back in 1993. Medical
insurance for all -- and there are perfectly market-based mechanisms for
achieving it -- will alleviate a lot of poverty.) But I think the biggest part
of an anti-poverty program is simple: Grandfather everybody who was made stupid
by government welfare policy and tell everyone else that, starting nine months
hence, everything changes -- no more subsidies for people who, outside
marriage, have children they can't support. The orphanages and group homes
would have to be ready but I suspect that the word would get around quickly and
behavior would change. I think that for the most part parents and strong families
are the missing antibodies you're looking for.
Q: Poverty may contribute to social
disintegration. The old bromides are true here. The best welfare program is a
job; to which one might add, the best social service department is a family,
and the best police department is a father. Over time, as fathers, families,
and jobs have disappeared, state proxies – police now posted in schools, social
service workers, and welfare bureaucracies -- have replaced these civilizing
and mediating institutions. As a result, we now find ourselves bumping up
against a political problem. The social configuration has changed for the
worst, yet everyone is invested in the new culture, however deficient. Another
way of saying this is that politicians, always a timid bunch, dare not follow
your prescriptions – cap subsidies and welfare payments and prepare nurturing
safe havens for children exposed to violence – because it would not be
politically expedient to do so. We are witnessing the opposite of a Babylonian
captivity, people rushing from normative institutions into the jaws of
artificial and insufficient replacement proxies, running from freedom into a
new slavery, all with the blessing of those who should be leading the captives
out of Babylon to a land flowing with milk and honey. My question now is: What
is the instrument of change to be? How do we get to the Promised Land?
A: Yes, exactly -- the government is
now about half the economy, and given the lack of public-interest participation
in civic life, the lack of participation by people employed in the private
sector, even a government that constitutes a quarter of the economy is probably
beyond control. In a column last year I asked and pretty much answered the
question: “Is Connecticut past the tipping point?”:
What can turn it around? Probably only
self-denial by the government class, which will never happen, or, over the
very, very long term, the economic collapse that will result from more growth
in government and the resulting departure of what's left of the private sector.
As many political columnists on the right have noted, the government class is
now a publicly financed, self-sustaining political machine beyond competition.
Under the Democratic Party the government overcompensates the public employees
and they kick back part of their overcompensation to the party and provide the
campaign soldiers to keep the racket going. When half the population is either
on the government payroll or has a close family member on the payroll or is
getting substantial transfer payments, it's mathematically impossible for an
independent public interest to assert itself politically. I keep at it only
because my ability to make a living is not transferable, entirely a matter of
my 50 or so years in journalism and public life in Connecticut, and, of course,
for spite. I would hate for certain people to think that nobody was on to them.
But it's not much consolation.
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