Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine… As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left and my mother a Greenwich Village folkie by way of the bus from Jersey. And so I grew up with endless New Deal and Great Society nostalgia —
Beautiful post. I love your opening lines: "As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers.." I encourage you to do a full post on your upbringing even if just a slice of a few months or years period that you feel meaningful. Thank you for the documentary recommendations.
Thank you! My upbringing has been a running theme throughout, the contrast between what I was raised to believe and what I've found in trying to pursue that as a career. Here's another piece I did about my time as Bill Moyers' research assistant: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/magical-sorkinism
A measure of how pervasive leftist groupthink has become in the university-educated professional classes. I am retired now but in my careers - first in Education and then subsequently in Architecture - I never had one solitary colleague who was not somewhere on the left of the political spectrum.
We had National Review in our house and I remember “Firing line”. I have always respected Moynihan as being intellectually honest, a trait that is vanishing from our culture.
Whatever hope there is for successful, sustainable policy lies in responsible public servants having intellectually honest discourse and sadly there's been less and less of that over the years. There are a lot of basically well-meaning partisans who earnestly believe politicians can tell some little white lies to get programs over the hump, and then the experts can swoop in behind the scenes and finetune the agency. But there are no shortcuts, and when promises fail to come true people tend to want to blame the opposition rather than look in the mirror.
A big part of the problem with the project that Moynihan and others championed was they apparently did not understand what they had done. They seemed to have believed that the core of the success of the New Deal was the establishment of social programs designed to remedy social ills. I argue that those who worked on the Great Society programs were witnessing the destruction of what the New Dealers had created due the administration's decision to both cut taxes and embark on a war.
I don't doubt that program bloat is a real problem. But I point to the income gains made by black men relative to white men over 1940-70 under the New Deal economy, much of it done without special programs. And these programs do seem to have helped in the early years when the cultural momentum of the old economic regime continued on after its end in 1971. By 1980 it was petering out and the establishment of a new "shareholder-primacy" economy after 1980 has served to prevent further gains. As a result, a culture of failure for lower class people has been reinforced by the economic environment, which when coupled with the lower starting position for lower class blacks pre-1970, has been particularly pronounced for them.
It is definitely important to include the contexts of globalization and the financialization of the economy in assessing the downsides and/or unintended consequences of social programs, there have certainly been no shortage of pundits blithely declaring that welfare makes people not want to work without acknowledging that so many of the good jobs were structurally disappearing. It's very easy to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as the ground crumbles beneath them.
But I suspect ultimately even had Kennedy-Johnson been more fiscally responsible, and the economic regime changed less dramatically, organizational psychology and the bureaucratic imperative to grow and justify itself would eventually have led to something like the blob we know today, more concerned with maintaining itself than in empowering its clients.
But maybe not. Had the pro-worker economy been allowed to continue, fewer people would need programs . Also had the inflation been avoided, conservatives would have been unable to proceed with their tax cut policies. They would instead attack Dems on regulatory and program bloat serving a positive function rather than the destructive policy they actually pursued.
A non-sequitur first, but need to say it every time Pat Moynihan comes up.
The caliber and stature of US Ambassadors used to be so high earlier. Kennedy appointed John Galbraith and Nixon appointed Moynihan as ambassadors to India. Who is the ambassador today? (My point exactly)
Yes the role has itself diminished, but still one should be able to persuade a few of the Moynihans of today to take up the job!
And now a sequitur! You write:
"Moynihan’s vision relies on a critical mass of sufficiently thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest public servants, most especially toward the top, of whom I’ve seen painfully little evidence over the years"
(Other than ambassadorships!) the caliber of public servants especially at the federal level is quite high today. In any given cycle it may go up or down a bit, but overall these are top-notch. And when you compare with public servants in other countries it's not even close (excluding countries like Singapore, but the scale is so different it's a difficult comparison)
A handful of names, just off the top of my head:
Avril Haines (DNI)
Atul Gavande (USAID Deputy)
Gary Gensler (SEC)
Janet Yellen (Treasury)
Merrick Garland (AG)
Any other country would kill for this caliber of public servants. The Clinton Administration (imo) had the very best cohort of public servants, but I'd put the current lot up against any of the prior ones (FDR/JFK/LBJ/BHO).
Those were all sequiturs if you ask me… I certainly agree that the United States has a more credentialed/”educated” governing class than many other places where the position is something you bought or are given because you’re somebody’s in-law. (Although it does seem like that describes a ton of our ambassadors these days!) And there’s much less garden-variety corruption in the sense of skimming off the top for one’s direct personal enrichment.
The issue is how meaningful those credentials are and how substantive the education was/is. Unfortunately, vast swathes of the policy discourse are just vaporware – lots of jargon and abstractions and statistical regressions without grappling with fundamental questions of incentives and institutional dysfunction and human nature. Of course there are many excellent public servants conscientiously doing their best, but there are also many careerist apparatchiks primarily seeking to benefit their partisan allies and rise through the ranks. From my experience studying with, working with, and covering the governing class, I’ve come to doubt there’s enough of the first category to make up for the second.
Beautiful post. I love your opening lines: "As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers.." I encourage you to do a full post on your upbringing even if just a slice of a few months or years period that you feel meaningful. Thank you for the documentary recommendations.
Thank you! My upbringing has been a running theme throughout, the contrast between what I was raised to believe and what I've found in trying to pursue that as a career. Here's another piece I did about my time as Bill Moyers' research assistant: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/magical-sorkinism
Thank you. I'll check it out.
This is awesome, and describes a lot of us. Thank you.
A measure of how pervasive leftist groupthink has become in the university-educated professional classes. I am retired now but in my careers - first in Education and then subsequently in Architecture - I never had one solitary colleague who was not somewhere on the left of the political spectrum.
We had National Review in our house and I remember “Firing line”. I have always respected Moynihan as being intellectually honest, a trait that is vanishing from our culture.
Whatever hope there is for successful, sustainable policy lies in responsible public servants having intellectually honest discourse and sadly there's been less and less of that over the years. There are a lot of basically well-meaning partisans who earnestly believe politicians can tell some little white lies to get programs over the hump, and then the experts can swoop in behind the scenes and finetune the agency. But there are no shortcuts, and when promises fail to come true people tend to want to blame the opposition rather than look in the mirror.
A big part of the problem with the project that Moynihan and others championed was they apparently did not understand what they had done. They seemed to have believed that the core of the success of the New Deal was the establishment of social programs designed to remedy social ills. I argue that those who worked on the Great Society programs were witnessing the destruction of what the New Dealers had created due the administration's decision to both cut taxes and embark on a war.
I don't doubt that program bloat is a real problem. But I point to the income gains made by black men relative to white men over 1940-70 under the New Deal economy, much of it done without special programs. And these programs do seem to have helped in the early years when the cultural momentum of the old economic regime continued on after its end in 1971. By 1980 it was petering out and the establishment of a new "shareholder-primacy" economy after 1980 has served to prevent further gains. As a result, a culture of failure for lower class people has been reinforced by the economic environment, which when coupled with the lower starting position for lower class blacks pre-1970, has been particularly pronounced for them.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution
It is definitely important to include the contexts of globalization and the financialization of the economy in assessing the downsides and/or unintended consequences of social programs, there have certainly been no shortage of pundits blithely declaring that welfare makes people not want to work without acknowledging that so many of the good jobs were structurally disappearing. It's very easy to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as the ground crumbles beneath them.
But I suspect ultimately even had Kennedy-Johnson been more fiscally responsible, and the economic regime changed less dramatically, organizational psychology and the bureaucratic imperative to grow and justify itself would eventually have led to something like the blob we know today, more concerned with maintaining itself than in empowering its clients.
But maybe not. Had the pro-worker economy been allowed to continue, fewer people would need programs . Also had the inflation been avoided, conservatives would have been unable to proceed with their tax cut policies. They would instead attack Dems on regulatory and program bloat serving a positive function rather than the destructive policy they actually pursued.
I did explore this idea a bit here.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-might-have-been
A non-sequitur first, but need to say it every time Pat Moynihan comes up.
The caliber and stature of US Ambassadors used to be so high earlier. Kennedy appointed John Galbraith and Nixon appointed Moynihan as ambassadors to India. Who is the ambassador today? (My point exactly)
Yes the role has itself diminished, but still one should be able to persuade a few of the Moynihans of today to take up the job!
And now a sequitur! You write:
"Moynihan’s vision relies on a critical mass of sufficiently thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest public servants, most especially toward the top, of whom I’ve seen painfully little evidence over the years"
(Other than ambassadorships!) the caliber of public servants especially at the federal level is quite high today. In any given cycle it may go up or down a bit, but overall these are top-notch. And when you compare with public servants in other countries it's not even close (excluding countries like Singapore, but the scale is so different it's a difficult comparison)
A handful of names, just off the top of my head:
Avril Haines (DNI)
Atul Gavande (USAID Deputy)
Gary Gensler (SEC)
Janet Yellen (Treasury)
Merrick Garland (AG)
Any other country would kill for this caliber of public servants. The Clinton Administration (imo) had the very best cohort of public servants, but I'd put the current lot up against any of the prior ones (FDR/JFK/LBJ/BHO).
Those were all sequiturs if you ask me… I certainly agree that the United States has a more credentialed/”educated” governing class than many other places where the position is something you bought or are given because you’re somebody’s in-law. (Although it does seem like that describes a ton of our ambassadors these days!) And there’s much less garden-variety corruption in the sense of skimming off the top for one’s direct personal enrichment.
The issue is how meaningful those credentials are and how substantive the education was/is. Unfortunately, vast swathes of the policy discourse are just vaporware – lots of jargon and abstractions and statistical regressions without grappling with fundamental questions of incentives and institutional dysfunction and human nature. Of course there are many excellent public servants conscientiously doing their best, but there are also many careerist apparatchiks primarily seeking to benefit their partisan allies and rise through the ranks. From my experience studying with, working with, and covering the governing class, I’ve come to doubt there’s enough of the first category to make up for the second.
“...a few of the Moynihans of today...”on that list. Not a one. I’ve tried to come up with a name I’d submit. I failed.