Last month the NYTimes front page featured an article by Jason dePerle titled “A Quiet, Dramatic Blow to Childhood Poverty”. The article touted the unqualified success of the anti-poverty legislation passed during the Clinton administration: a 59% decline in child poverty and reduction in the number of welfare recipients. On the same day, David Leonardt wrote in the Times’ The Morning newsletter Clinton’s controversial bill tightened the rules around welfare eligibility and made many welfare benefits conditional on work. His critics on the political left predicted terrible effects and a few members of the Clinton administration quit in protest. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted “devastating increases in child poverty” and the New Republic proclaimed, “Wages will go down, families will fracture, and millions of children will be made more miserable than ever.” Despite this pushback from his party and a Congress controlled by the GOP, both parties hammered out a bill that ultimately yielded positive results.
After providing an overview of dePerle’s article which included human interest stories that illustrated the “very wrong” predictions of those on the left, Leonardt noted that in retrospect the 1996 welfare law turned out to be “a case study of different political ideologies combining to produce a result that was better than either side would likely have produced on its own.” As it turned out, poor single mothers fared far better in the job market than many liberals expected and their success in the workplace contributed to decline in child poverty since then. But the bill also included an expansion of government aid, which was an anathema to conservatives. And that also contributed to the decline in childhood poverty as did other government initiatives like expansion of the earned-income tax credit, food stamps, and increases in state-level minimum wages.
Leonardt noted that his colleague, Jason dePerle observed that, “It is odd that such a big decline in child poverty has gone almost completely unnoticed.” Leonardt attributed this lack of attention to this positive consequence to bad-news bias, noting that journalists and academic experts are often more comfortable reporting negative developments than positive ones because they are fearful that they will “come off as blasé or Pollyannaish” if they report good news.
But Leonard overlooks one sad reality that underlies the bad-news bias when it comes to covering politics: neither party seeks to celebrate a government success.
The GOP would be reluctant to champion a successful government program having spent decades amplifying Ronald Reagan’s premise that the government can’t do anything right. According to the GOP, government regulations stymie innovation and entrepreneurship, government workers are incompetent and lazy, government projects are fraught with waste and corruption, and the taxes the government collects at all levels are confiscatory. The GOP would rather attribute the reduction in childhood poverty to economic growth than acknowledge that aid from the federal government, a government program, or new government regulations played a role because ANY government success undercuts their core message.
Meanwhile, the Democrats seem timid about offering support for any program that might alienate any middle-of-the-road voter anywhere in America.
Despite the well documented impact wealth inequality has on the economy, Democrats are reluctant to champion tax increases for the wealthiest wage earners for fear they will be tarred as socialists. Despite the benefits of regulations for consumers, workers, and the environment, Democrats are loathe to promote the enforcement of regulations for fear they will be seen as advocates of the Deep State. Democrats prefer to define themselves as “not Republicans” rather than promoting government programs that support women’s rights, equal opportunity, government-funded health care, or improved government services.
And as it stands now, neither party celebrates the value bi-partisan problem solving or the success that such bi-partisanship yields.
The failure of either party to embrace compromise or celebrate the success of bi-partisan government legislation like the Welfare-to-Work bill undercuts democracy which requires people of differing ideals to find common ground on the rules that will govern them in their town, their state, and in their nation. As it stands now both parties define their agendas as “we’re not THEM”, and this mutual demonization forecloses any debate over principles, any consideration of legislation proposed by “the other side”, or any way to resolve complicated issues like climate change that will require sacrifice on the part of voters.
Democracy is not a winner-take-all form of government. If we ever hope to enact the kind of bi-partisan legislation where “different political ideologies combine to produce a result that was better than either side would likely have produced on its own” both sides have to listen to each other, compromise, and trust that voters will celebrate the middle ground they discover.
Wayne Gersen live in Etna.