Conservative Approaches

The U.S. welfare state and its relation to domestic labor markets changed dramatically at the close of the 20th century. A new group of conservatives shifted the terms of welfare debate away from the logic of need and the logic of entitlement, promoted by Democratic politicians and the social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to install a new social policy agenda that highlighted the obligations of citizenship. In 1996, after 20 years of political campaigning and policy advocacy, neoconservatives, supported by new conservative think tanks, succeeded in replacing the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program (AFDC), first enacted in 1935, with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF).

By crafting a synthetic reform program that would both buttress conservative social norms and limit access to public assistance that mitigated the pressures of labor market competition, the neoconservatives succeeded in mobilizing a powerful coalition of social conservatives and free-market proponents discontented with the welfare state expansions that had been enacted as part of the War on Poverty. In contrast to the Nixon administration, which had failed to pass a major welfare reform initiative because its Family Assistance Plan divided these two political factions, by uniting them behind a single reform agenda, neoconservatives were able to pass the Family Support Act in 1988 and then the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996.

Neoconservative authors dubbed the first publication laying out their collective reform program the New Consensus, suggesting that by 1987 the nation was ready to reach a new agreement on social policy to replace the previous consensus institutionalized in the New Deal programs of the 1930s. The neoconservatives' new consensus articulated an alternative vision of citizenship from that underlying the New Deal and the subsequent finding by the Supreme Court that the Social Security Act of 1935 had entitled poor, single mothers to public assistance. In contrast to the previous logic of citizenship, which considered entitlement to assistance necessary to protect individual freedom, the neoconservatives called on the state to use public programs to reinforce work and domestic norms that they reformulated as obligations of citizenship.

[Page 161]According to the “New Consensus,” social programs should discipline poor family members receiving public assistance to prepare them for incorporation within the polity. Poor single mothers should be required to assist government agencies to identify the biological fathers of their children, and fathers who do not pay child support should be subject to enforcement measures. To be eligible for assistance, poor parents should be required to attend school or to participate in work or work-preparation activities. Anticipating liberal objections to extending government regulation into areas of life that are protected from state intervention if citizens are not poor, neo-conservatives noted that once poor parents mastered the skills now considered prerequisite for citizenship, they, like other citizens, would be free to pursue their desires through the market. Neoconservatives also suggested that as the new paternalist poverty programs succeeded in preparing the poor for market entry and citizenship, the number of parents claiming public assistance would decline and the state would transfer fewer resources from taxpayers to poor families.

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