William Morrow & Co. • 1993 • 256 pages • $20.00
In 1984, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground brought the topic of welfare reform to the forefront of political consciousness. With impeccable research and meticulous logic, Murray marshaled a vast array of statistics to support his assertion that the huge expansion of government welfare programs resulting from the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty” had actually harmed those it had intended to help. By making welfare more attractive to single mothers than marriage or entry-level jobs, Murray argued, the federal government created “incentives for failure” which lured the poor, and especially poor blacks, off the economic ladder to success and into an intergenerational cycle of dependence and illegitimacy.
Though controversial when first published, large portions of Murray’s thesis have come to be accepted among the political establishment, even in such unlikely places as the Clinton White House. Manhattan Institute Fellow and Fortune Editorial Board member Myron Magnet agrees with Murray, but only to a point. In The Dream and the Nightmare, he argues that Murray’s purely economic analysis provides an incomplete picture of the true causes of the underclass, that Murray and other policy analysts have left “a hole in the theory.” And in that hole, Magnet argues, you’ll find “culture.”
He argues that it is culture, or rather its lack, that has mired the underclass in perpetual poverty. Even faced with the perverse incentives to fail that welfare offers, most people would still choose work and marriage out of a sense of self-worth and respect for community standards. The reasons that the underclass has not done so, he argues, is that the counterculture of the 1960s turned traditional values upside down. Though this revolution was one carded out largely by the “Haves” in an effort to “liberate” themselves from what they perceived as the oppressive moral constraints of their parents’ generation, Magnet argues that its long-term harm to most of the “Haves” was subtle, while its effects on the “Have-Nots” was devastating.
According to Magnet, it is this “poverty of spirit” which has turned large portions of America’s cities into drug-infested, crime-ridden wastelands. Inner-city children grow up in households of single welfare mothers who are incapable of teaching them the cultural values of hard work, thrift, and individual responsibility—the very values needed to climb out of poverty. To support that thesis, he presents an impressive array of statistical and anecdotal evidence to paint a devastatingly bleak picture of underclass life, and that portrait is the strongest portion of the book.
In painting that picture, Magnet describes the pathology of the underclass with an unwavering eye, exploding many myths in the process. Despite liberal protestations to the contrary, the underclass does exists, and is disproportionately composed of inner-city blacks. Lack of economic opportunity does not explain the existence of the underclass, since it first appeared during one economic boom and continued to grow during another. Moreover, the harsh conditions of the inner city haven’t prevented Asian entrepreneurs from flourishing there. The homeless are not down-on-their-hick working families, they’re mentally ill alcoholics and drug addicts—and their numbers are closer to 300,000 than the three million figure homeless “advocate” Mitch Snyder pulled out of the air one day.
But describing the underclass is only part of The Dream and the Nightmare, with much of the rest taken up by Magnet’s explanation of how the Have-Nots came to live in such a condition of self-perpetuating misery. In this he seems to be shadowboxing with Losing Ground, not because he feels Murray’s thesis is fundamentally wrong, but because he’s the only worthy opponent on the scene. Indeed, he calls the book “superb” and Murray “the profound-est of all commentators on the underclass.” But ultimately Magnet does a less convincing job of presenting his case than Murray did of his. While Magnet’s judgment about the lack of values among the underclass is quite convincing, his arguments about how they got that way are far less so. What’s more, his prescriptions for restoring those values are either vague, nonexistent, or woefully misguided.
When Magnet speaks of the counterculture, he has in mind not Woodstock or anti-war protesters, but a shift in cultural opinions among certain American elites in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As such, Magnet’s view of the counterculture is both highly selective and overbroad. We get no mention of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, or Paul Krassner, but plenty of Norman Mailer, Michael Harrington, Paul de Man, William Ryan, and (more improbably) Thomas Szasz. It is these and other elite thinkers, Magnet argues, that gradually shifted the culture of the Haves toward belief in . . . . Well, there’s the problem.
While Magnet spends several chapters documenting various social ills (crime, strained race relations, declines in higher education) then linking their origin to various influential books and academic theories, he never adequately articulates just what constitutes the “Sixties Legacy to the Underclass.” Instead, he merely catalogs several disparate parts of this supposed legacy that never seem to coalesce.
In fact, the scope of Magnet’s theory is eventually his undoing. Of the various harbingers of cultural change he cites, most have little in common save a vaguely leftist slant and (usually) a de-emphasis of personal responsibility. Indeed, the “Cultural Revolution” he speaks of is simultaneously so broad and so selective that just about any theory or cultural ill can be shoehorned underneath its rubric.
Besides being unable to prove its central theory, The Dream and the Nightmare also suffers from a number of lesser flaws. After debunking so many myths, Magnet falls prey to one of the most pernicious, that of the 1980s as a “Decade of Greed.” Even though he once again lays blame at the feet of his cultural elites rather than the usual scapegoat of Ronald Reagan, by accepting the existence of some overreaching cultural zeitgeist characterizing each decade he succumbs to facile overgeneralization at its worst. Though adept at puncturing media myths about the underclass, his casual acceptance of this most overbroad of clichés leaves the impression that he is truly out of touch with the deep currents and eddies of the broader American culture with which he is so vitally concerned.
Part of this seems due to a distinctly “New York Centric” viewpoint. For example, when he states that the Hispanics making up the underclass are “primarily” Puerto Ricans, he displays a rather shallow knowledge of conditions in the other 49 states, especially California. And when Magnet says that “no one seems to have much good to say about the standard-issue eighties and nineties middle class youth,” one gets the impression that he doesn’t get out of New York much.
Finally, Magnet tends to ignore or downgrade important evidence that supports competing (i.e., economic) theories of underclass formation. Two of the three examples he puts forward as showing the primacy of culture in “The Hole in the Theory” (of Eugene Lang’s offer of college scholarships to all students in an inner-city class who graduated from high school and of Kimi Gray’s transformation of the Kenilworth public housing project) could easily be argued just as successfully from an “economic primacy” standpoint. Despite an otherwise excellent analysis of homelessness, he ignores William Tucker’s landmark studies of the strong link between homelessness and rent control policies—lapse that is especially puzzling since Tucker’s work was partially underwritten by the Manhattan Institute.
As far as offering solutions to the underclass problem, Magnet’s general ideas for restoring personal responsibility and individual rights are good, but what few specifics he offers are woefully misguided. His suggestion for creating government-run “group shelters” in the place of current welfare programs ignores the law of unintended consequences and the mischief that government is able to work with just about any social program. Likewise, his argument for “Head Start”-type programs for preschoolers in the same paragraph ignores the mounting evidence that these have little or no long-term effect.
Still, despite all the foregoing, The Dream and the Nightmare is a much better book than this list of flaws would lead you to believe. Though Magnet’s reach has definitely exceeded his grasp, his book’s virtues are great, its sins, more of omission than intent, relatively small. While his diagnoses of the causes and cures of underclass pathology are unconvincing, his description of the disease itself is valuable for its depth and accuracy. Though it doesn’t replace Losing Ground, it does provide an extra dimension to the welfare debate, and functions as a handy source book for how that debate has developed over the last decade. []
Mr. Person is former editor of Citizens Agenda. His work has appeared in National Review, Reason, and other magazines.
