Anxiety about America’s communal life largely concerns the intergenerational transmission of poverty in an underclass crippled by family disintegration. The process by which that class reproduces itself severely damages children, and there is no reason to expect the damage to be stopped by a spontaneous regeneration of responsibility, civility and commitment. Furthermore, says UCLA’s Wilson, there is disagreement about whether the problem arises from structural, rational or cultural causes.
The ““structural’’ explanation is that good jobs have moved to urban peripheries, leaving young men without the sort of work that provides money and self-respect. These men abandon both the search for work and the work ethic. The ““rational’’ explanation is that welfare benefits render the formation of stable two-parent families unnecessary. ““These benefits,’’ Wilson writes, ““have induced young women wanting babies and a home of their own to acquire both at public expense and have convinced young men that sexual conquest need not entail any personal responsibilities.’’ The ““cultural’’ explanation is that traditional family life organized around child rearing is a discipline subverted by ““a culture of radical self-indulgence and oppositional defiance fostered by drugs, television, videogames, street gangs and predatory sexuality.’’ The flight of middle- and working-class people drains cities of the social capital of attitudes, activities and commitments that are necessary to block the sweep of such pathologies.
All three explanations are pertinent, but Wilson warns that ““people define problems so as to make them amenable to solutions that they favor for ideological or moral reasons.’’ Liberals emphasize the structural explanation because it licenses social engineering by government – job creation, job training, even relocating the inner city poor to urban peripheries. Conservatives favor the rational and cultural explanations because they like the programmatic implications. The rational explanation points toward cutting or abolishing welfare or linking it to behavioral changes by recipients, such as acceptance of work. The cultural explanation encourages attempts to alter the inner city ethos by means of religious and other private redemptive movements. The government is relegated to a supporting role, perhaps providing, for example, group homes where at-risk children and their young mothers can be sheltered from the culture of the streets while receiving care and guidance.
The principal problem with a structural strategy is the thinness of evidence of a causal connection between the worsening of job opportunities and the weakening of families. Besides, cultural differences seem to account for dramatic differences among racial and ethnic groups regarding the readiness to search for jobs. Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, for example, are famously diligent. And the government’s worker training and job placement programs have had only slight effects on welfare rolls.
The rational strategy is supported by evidence that states with high welfare payments tend to have high rates of births to welfare recipients. And increases in welfare were strongly correlated with increases in illegitimate births from the early 1960s until about 1980. Then the value of the welfare package stopped rising, but illegitimacy did not. There are large differences in illegitimacy rates between racial and ethnic groups. For example, since the Civil War, blacks have had higher illegitimacy rates than whites, even though there were no federal welfare programs until 1935. However, black illegitimacy rates are low in some Northern states where welfare payments are relatively high, and black illegitimacy rates are high in the Deep South, where welfare payments are low. Cultural factors clearly are having consequences.
What, then, of a cultural strategy? Cultural regeneration cannot be legislated; least of all can it be skillfully implemented by the federal government. States are more promising sources for regenerative support, for two reasons. ““First,’’ says Wilson, ““there are 50 of them.’’ (Trust a past president of the American Political Science Association to notice this.) Therefore, the odds are better for electing a few smart and bold governors whose experiments might teach us something than are the odds of electing a smart and bold president. Second, because there are 50 states, they must compete – for residents, employers and good credit ratings. ““They cannot afford to attack crime and illegitimacy and gang warfare merely by grandiose rhetoric and the signing of bills in the Rose Garden.’’ If the salvation of children is the paramount objective, and it should be, then Wilson believes local jurisdictions might usefully revive the kind of boarding schools – they would serve more than orphans – that earlier in this century provided homes and education for more than 100,000 young Americans. By the way, does Ms. Clinton disapprove of Boys Town of Nebraska, and the many institutions around the country providing similar services?
Attuning child care to healthy communal voices is the central challenge posed by the great cultural change of this century. That change, says Wilson, is ““the emancipation of the individual from the restraints of tradition, community and government.’’ This emancipation has been hugely beneficial to most people, but has been ruinous to people made vulnerable by their lack of the internal restraints of good character. What can government or, for that matter, private groups do for character development? ““I do not know,’’ says Wilson, using a four-word phrase that would be a becoming addition to Ms. Clinton’s rhetorical repertoire. However, the first step toward progress in solving a problem is precision in the statement of the problem. This Wilson has provided.
