A Lost War
Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty.
by Daniel P. Moynihan.
The Free Press. 218 pp. $5.95.
The “maximum feasible misunderstanding” Daniel P. Moynihan has in mind is the morass of confusion stemming from a key phrase in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the declaration that “Community Action” projects funded by the War on Poverty should provide for the “maximum feasible participation of the residents of the areas and the members of the groups” involved in the local programs. But the title of this fascinating book has a certain ironic resonance, for its author is well on the way toward becoming the most misunderstood figure in American public life. His famous 1965 Department of Labor report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, was distorted beyond all recognition in the controversy that followed its release. A document intended to point the way toward the most constructive innovation in American social policy in thirty years—employment guarantees and income redistribution measures which would eliminate the underclass of desperately poor people who lived in “the other America”—was branded as reactionary and racist. Caught in a withering crossfire between the Left and the Right, the Moynihan report disappeared into oblivion. The dominant thrust of the War on Poverty as it developed was in a quite different direction, away from a national employment and income redistribution strategy and toward the mobilization of poor people for social action at the local level. Moynihan's new book critically analyzes this development. It is a sparkling, pungent essay, delightfully written and rich with insight. It raises questions of the utmost importance, but judging from the reviews thus far, it is likely to be misunderstood, like the 1965 report, in just those quarters which should attend most closely to its message.
Moynihan is a Tory socialist in a country which has little use for either Tories or socialists. He is a Catholic, an admirer of Edmund Burke, a man who values order and organic coherence. He believes people should live in stable families, and should act through established channels; he even believes in the nation, and hopes to see it grow “in strength and internal cohesion.” He appreciates not only “the New York mind” but “the Washington mind”: “the one deeply concerned with society, the other preoccupied with government; the one emotionally . . . committed to social change, the other profoundly attached to the artifacts of stability and continuity; the one fascinated by racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, the other fiercely loyal to the Republic and still trying to fashion a nation out of a continent.”
Thus the Tory in Moynihan. No wonder that the Left instinctively bristles, no wonder that not only John F. Kennedy but Richard Nixon as well should find him attractive. But there is a socialist streak in Moynihan too, to speak with some hyperbole, and it is this to which the Left is curiously blind. The central point of the Moynihan report was a radical one: that the age-old American faith in opportunity and free competition was dangerously outmoded, that the test of a good society was not merely that it provided equality of opportunity but equality of results. If the economic situation of the typical American Negro was abysmal, as it was, by all means do whatever possible to eliminate those barriers of prejudice which gave blacks a less fair start in the great American rat race. But do not be deceived, Moynihan argued, that public accommodation laws, open housing, fair employment practices legislation, etc., will be enough. The traditional demands of civil-rights groups would do very little, certainly in the short run, to strike at the roots of the racial crisis—the fact that Negroes were overwhelmingly concentrated in ill-paid, insecure, marginal jobs. The worst thing about being poor was not having enough money; the prime task before the nation was to move beyond the rhetoric of free competition, beyond the primitive welfare statism of the New Deal and Fair Deal, and insure that no American citizen be allowed to receive an income below a decent minimum.
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It was a curious and discouraging spectacle to observe the attack mounted by Moynihan's presumed “radical” critics. Perhaps it was not surprising that many Negro leaders were offended by Moynihan's argument that living in extreme economic deprivation had produced pathological patterns in many black families. For them to deny this was rather like an abolitionist echoing the Southern planter's complaint that Harriet Beecher Stowe had grossly exaggerated the harm slavery had done to blacks, and each of Moynihan's observations had of course been made long before by black social scientists like E. Franklin Frazier and W. E. B. Du Bois. But this was a time in which blacks were struggling to develop a positive group image, and it was obviously painful for a prominent white commentator to emphasize how much was wrong. Moynihan was certainly vulnerable to the charge of looking through white middle-class eyes with none of the caution of the anthropologist, whose cultural relativism might lead him to argue that the female-headed household was as functional for lower-class black culture as the stable nuclear family for white middle-class culture. But those who took this line failed to see its profoundly conservative political implications. If the cultural relativists' perspective was correct, whatever was was right, and thus there could be no basis upon which to appeal to the American public for dramatic changes in public policy. The effort of some radicals to have it both ways—to defend the integrity of lower-class black culture against middle-class criticism and yet to insist that it was urgently necessary for white America to change its ways—was intellectually and politically impossible.
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The other major point at issue in the controversy over the Moynihan report concerned the relative merits of two reform strategies—one aimed at changes in economic policy at the national level, the other seeking institutional change at the local level—and this is the main theme of the book at hand. Moynihan sees the War on Poverty as a lost war, lost not because of a lack of true commitment on the part of the administration, the resistance of vested corporate interests, the incorrigible bourgeois prejudices of the middle class, or the drain of the war in Southeast Asia, but lost because of the misguided notions of the intellectuals who insisted on the priority of arousing poor people, especially poor black people, to protest at the local level. In this sense Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding is a latter-day Treason of the Clerks, and will doubtless provoke a good deal of pique among those who, like this reviewer, find “the New York mind” more congenial than “the Washington mind.”
It is easy enough to quarrel with Moynihan's stress upon intellectual misconceptions as the prime cause of the failure of the povery program, as some reviewers have done, and to argue that the constraints inherent in the political situation he describes should receive greater emphasis. That Lyndon B. Johnson would have liked to eliminate poverty in America is doubtless true; that Lyndon Johnson and a majority of Congress might have been persuaded to do what would be necessary to eliminate poverty but for the blundering of naive enthusiasts of community action may be doubted, as some of Moynihan's own evidence suggests. But it must be recalled that this book is not a full history of the War on Poverty; it does not purport to be. It is a selective essay focusing on the idea of community action and how it worked out—or failed to work out—in practice.
Taken as such it is a powerful and disturbing piece of work. As one with a strong attachment to conflict models of social change and a deep skepticism about the likelihood of fundamental reform coming from the top clown, I found my views shaken on several points. I believe Moynihan is right to insist that restructuring the labor market and establishing a minimum income floor is of the highest priority and that much of the struggle for community action and local control over the institutional structure deflects attention from this critical need. Black power, fine, but black power over what? The sources of economic power in a complex industrial economy do not lie at the local level. Nor is “local control” an unmixed blessing even in terms other than economic, for as Moynihan persuasively shows, efforts to “rub raw the sores of discontent” have often produced heightened anomie, frustration, and conflict among the members of affected communities. In fashionable rhetoric “the black community” is an imposing entity, but the reality is far more complex, and in many instances the effort to identify “indigenous leadership” and to support it with federal funds has generated not heightened unity and sense of pride but murderous (sometimes quite literally) rivalry.
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Conflict, power, self-interest are inescapably the stuff of politics, as radicals insist, but there is a profound difference between institutionalized conflict within a framework of consensus over the rides of the game and the sort of conflict which is currently on the rise in American society. Moynihan may be a bit too respectful of established procedures, and may take the revolutionary rhetoric abroad in the land rather too seriously. Angry protest at the local level and changes in economic policy at the national level may not be as starkly antithetical as he assumes, for presumably it will take concerted political pressure from some segment of the society to make changes which entail real redistribution of resources. But certainly Moynihan is right in his belief that conflict can easily become counter-productive, especially when it follows ethnic lines, as he is correct in his contention that the hostilities unleashed by the War on Poverty's experiments in community action did not move the country discernibly closer to constructive national action. This is an unpalatable truth, but one that anyone serious about changing American society will have to ponder.
