The description by T. R. Marmor (p. 86) of the “intemperate and intimidating atmosphere in which the discussion of social policy has come to be conducted in America” acquired an added resonance for me the other day when I happened to read a paper entitled “The Assault on Equality” by Professor William Ryan, chairman of the psychology department at Boston College. This paper served as the call for two “action-conferences,” one in Boston and one in New York, sponsored during the spring by Social Policy magazine; and it is scheduled to be published as a guest editorial in a special issue of Social Policy devoted to the same theme. Given all this, it would seem reasonable to take Professor Ryan’s paper as being not only a personal statement, which of course it is, but also as reflecting the attitudes of a significant sector of what Mr. Marmor calls “the social-policy community.” As such, it perhaps tells us even more than the particular case Mr. Marmor selects for detailed examination—the reception of Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City—about the source of the hatred Banfield himself and several other writers have inspired in the very heartlands of that community.

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What it tells us, I would say, is this: that the utopians and the extreme environmentalists in the field of social policy, having in the past ten years been given a chance to put many of their ideas into practice and having failed to deliver on one promise after another, are now attempting to discredit every rival school of thought in the field in the hope of fending off the discredit into which their own general point of view is deservedly falling, not only in the eyes of others but evidently in their own eyes as well.

Consider: since 1963, federal spending on the new poverty programs which came in with the “Great Society” has risen from $1.7 billion to $35.7 billion. Unlike the $74.9 billion (up from $28.4 billion in 1963) which is now being spent on older programs like social security, welfare, and veterans’ benefits, and which largely goes to the beneficiaries themselves, this $35.7 billion of poverty-program money mainly goes not into the pockets of the poor but into services designed to help the poor in ways other than actually supplementing whatever income they may already command. Much of it goes, that is, into the financing of ideas conceived by professionals like the group around Social Policy magazine and then executed and run by people under their tutelage and influence.

The results, as almost everyone now agrees, have been negligible. Every week, it seems, another evaluation is published exposing the failure of yet another hopeful program; and now even the Brookings Institution, a principal refuge for architects of the Great Society, has issued an authoritative report pronouncing what the New York Times does not hesitate to call the “epitaph” of that entire effort.¹ No wonder, then, that the Times can talk of “the harsh disillusionment with federal social programs that has increasingly infused Washington,” invading even the offices of the poverty workers themselves. And no wonder that their teachers in the academic world should also be suffering, in the words of Professor Ryan, from “acute melancholia,” from an “epidemic of depression,” and from “despair and disarray.”

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To be sure, Professor Ryan does not attribute this terrible collapse of morale to any disillusionment his professional colleagues may be experiencing with their own ideas and works, or any sense of failure they might humanly be expected to feel at the failure of ideas and works for which they themselves were so largely responsible. In his view they are “on the run” because, in response to the “Equality Revolution” toward which they have been working, a “counterrevolution” has now developed. The leaders of this counterrevolutionary “assault on equality” are, of course, Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, but they are being furnished with ideological ammunition by such members of the academic community as Edward Banfield, Arthur Jensen, Richard J. Herrnstein, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel P. Moynihan. Much given to military metaphors, Professor Ryan exhorts all “intellectuals who are committed to the Equality Revolution” to “return at once from their cynical or anti-intellectual or countercultural trips and get back into uniform” so that they can take up the fight against “the ideological shock troops who are assaulting the idea of equality.”

In other words, instead of engaging in a period of reflection during which they might begin to reconsider some of the ideas that led them astray, the intellectuals of Professor Ryan’s party (or rather, army) are to devote their energies to “demolishing” everyone who has ever been so brazen as to challenge on any ground whatsoever the simplistic utopianism which dominated the discussion of social policy in the 60’s, or who has suggested that the problems of poverty may be more intractable than the conventional environmentalist wisdom of the period so confidently assumed. For the issuance of one such challenge or another is the only thing uniting the five very different writers who are marked by Professor Ryan for polemical assassination (the image is his—he even brags of being such an assassin himself) in the “big fight . . . ahead.”

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So much for Professor Ryan’s characterization of the situation in the world of ideas. As to the situation in the world of policy and law, it is certainly true that everyone is disheartened with the war on poverty and that some people are more or less secretly convinced that its failures are the fault of the intended beneficiaries themselves—just as, on the other side, the failures are doggedly blamed on underfunding. But fewer and fewer people, I think, are disposed to assign these failures to anything other than the leading assumptions on which the programs were designed and executed. That the Nixon administration shares in this estimate of the situation is reasonably clear. Yet far from being goaded by it into an “assault on equality,” the administration has in fact done exactly the opposite in proposing the establishment of a guaranteed annual income for the first time in American history. That this wholly unexpected effort to advance the “Equality Revolution” has so far failed is in no small measure a consequence of the bizarre war which has been waged against it by the same “troops” Professor Ryan is summoning “back into uniform” to do further battle in the name of that very revolution. If, then, there are counterrevolutionaries to be “demolished” in this particular “skirmish,” Professor Ryan and his friends can most easily find them not by traveling to Washington, or by searching through the works of their more skeptical academic colleagues, but merely by looking in the mirror.

The rest of us, meanwhile, would do well to ponder the fact that a man like Daniel P. Moynihan, who believes, along with Nathan Glazer and others, that there are limits to social policy and that neither individuals nor institutions are as malleable as the extreme environmentalists would like us to think, ends up by conceiving and then very nearly realizing the most radical proposal for the redistribution of income ever to have issued from the White House, while the practical result of believing in the kind of doctrines Professor Ryan and so many of his friends are pleased to call equality is that they have done everything in their power to prevent the enactment of this proposal for the furthering of equality and to vilify those who have been trying to bring it to pass.

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¹ Setting National Priorities: The 1973 Budget, by Charles L. Schultze, Edward R. Fried, Alice M. Rivlin, and Nancy H. Teeters, 468 pp., $8.95 (clothbound), $3.50 (paper). This report is also the source of the figures cited above. It is worth stressing, and will come as a surprise to many, that the federal government spends more on social welfare than it does on defense, space, and foreign affairs put together. The comparative totals for 1973 are $110.6 billion (or 43 per cent of the total budget) for social welfare, as against $88.0 billion (or 34 per cent of the total) for defense, space, and foreign affairs.