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IRVING HOWE
• The image of America inherited from folklore, textbooks and
civic rhetoric proves unusable, and the result is an enormous barrier
of intellectual and emotional fog which prevents people from appre–
hending their true needs.
• At the margins of the welfare state there spring up apocalyptic
movements and moods, seemingly political but often in their deepest
impulses antipolitical (they want not a change in power relations but
an end of days). Reflecting the pressures of the fading past and the
undiscovered future, these movements confound, yet sometimes also
refresh, the politics of the welfare state.
IV. Inner Problems 'Of the Welfare State
It is not only the distinctive American setting which affects our
version of the welfare state; there are also certain characteristics
which seem to be intrinsically dysfunctional or at least unattractive.
A few of them:
• Especially in America, the welfare state fails to live up to
its formal claims. At best it
is
a semi-welfare state; at worst an anti–
welfare state. It allows a significant minority, the chronic poor, to be
dumped beneath the social structure, as a
lumpen
deposit of degrada–
tion and pathology.
• The welfare state may gratify the interests of previously de–
prived minorities and thereby benefit the society as a whole; but while
doing this, and perhaps because of it, the welfare state tends to
dampen concern with such larger values as justice, fraternity, equal–
ity and community. At least for a time, one consequence is that
fundamental issues of power are muted; for better or worse - I think
for worse - the system as such is hardly an issue in public debate.
Yet here again we ought to beware of a sin prevalent among in–
tellectuals: the sin of impatience with history. For even in its brief
existence, and with its own "historical tasks" far from fulfilled, the
welfare state has witnessed the growth of an enormous body of social
criticism, as well as the appearance of the militantly idealistic young,
both of which insist that we pay attention to precisely the larger
issues.
If
the welfare state lulls some groups into acquiescence, it also
grants a succeeding generation the relative affluence to experiment
with its life styles and cry out against the slumbers of their elders.
