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Jason Riley’s Brilliant Take on Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I’m late in coming to it, but in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month Jason Riley published an enormously powerful article marking the fiftieth anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, “The Negro Family.”
“The fundamental problem is that of family structure,” wrote Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology. “The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling….”
He goes on:
History has proved that Moynihan was onto something. When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage….
This year, Riley continues, we also mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which represents a complete and total success. In the South today, black voter registration is higher than anywhere else in the country, and in 2012 a higher proportion of blacks than of whites turned out to vote.
And yet, Riley asks in his powerful conclusion, what good will the Voting Rights Act have done if black families remains fragmented and dysfunctional?
[T]he political gains have not redounded to the black underclass, which by several important measures—including income, academic achievement and employment—has stagnated or lost ground over the past half-century. And while the civil-rights establishment and black political leaders continue to deny it, family structure offers a much more plausible explanation of these outcomes than does residual white racism.
In 2012 the poverty rate for all blacks was more than 28%, but for married black couples it was 8.4% and has been in the single digits for two decades. Just 8% of children raised by married couples live in poverty, compared with 40% of children raised by single mothers.
One important lesson of the past half-century is that counterproductive cultural traits can hurt a group more than political clout can help it. Moynihan was right about that, too.
Counterproductive cultural traits can hurt more than political clout can help.
Profound, beautifully stated, and, on the record of things, obvious. Why can’t liberals see this?
Published in General
I’m sure the left will have plenty of unkind things to say to him. He is this month’s Imprimus guest.
Here’s Jason Riley’s talk at Heritage last year:
“Why can’t liberals see this?” I feel certain the Instapundit would say that doing the right thing offers insufficient opportunities for graft. And he would be right.
It’s kind of a vicious cycle, isn’t it?
If you exhaust your political freedom on a single political party, you waste the freedom. At this point, it barely counts as freedom – after all, every pressure is brought to bear on blacks to vote Democratic, and individual blacks are eviscerated unless they vote liberal Democrat. Other than a barely superficial definition of freedom, how can anyone call that free?
I know it’s probably a rhetorical question . . .
Leftists [I hate yielding to them the once-honorable title Liberal] can’t see this because they’re too busy being shocked — no, not just shocked, but outraged — no, not just outraged, but offended — that you would blame the victims. And not just any victims, but black victims, which means you’re a racist, too. This is hate speech. There ought to be a law . . .
The nice thing about this line of “reasoning,” for the Leftist, is that by the time he’s done being outraged, he doesn’t have to think about your point. In fact, his “reasoning” has further convinced him that conservatives are a bunch of evil racists, so he doesn’t have to listen to any conservative arguments in the future.
As long as enough people are getting paid, this trend will not only not be arrested but encouraged in the most cynical manner possible. I fear it will take something truly horrible to adjust the status quo. There are just too many incentives for keeping things just as they are, while promising success if we can pour just a bit more money into the leaky bucket that is centralized spending designed to fix generational poverty.
LBJ cynically rammed through the Great Society and now it is not only no longer Great, it is, at least for Black community, a prison.
As with the immigration issue, the Left doesn’t want uppity citizens: it wants grateful peasants. It wants to be the Voice of the Voiceless, because the Voiceless don’t argue. It doesn’t want a black middle class, and hates their independence. It doesn’t like the employed. It finds families too independent. The Left distrusts charity and tolerates religion only as a kind of folk festival. It wants to feel needed and it will impoverish and silence anyone who doesn’t act like the breadline is their natural habitat. It feels nostalgia for the Depression and longs for a time when ration books and CCC uniforms will return. If it can only sell racism as reality, the Left will have all the clients and gratitude it needs.
One thing that occurs to me is that in the case of black communities in America, honor & interest seem to diverge rather sharply. The last two generations have seen more & more by way of equality for blacks, whether granted, taken, claimed, or imagined–certainly, that redounds to dignity or honor. But when it comes to the families of black people, the result has been a disaster.
Being black could be understood either individually or otherwise. This is where the complications come: Black in the sense in which Mr. Obama, of mixed race, represents the crowning achievement of the black race, does not really do much good to black communities–these kinds of achievements require a political solidarity that conceals or ignores & maybe magnifies the real suffering of real human beings who happen to be black. Then again, black individualism might not always be positive either–striving at the individual level can deplete communities of the kinds of men needed to take responsibility & improve things for people.
Somehow, the black communities stand in-between individualism & the race (this is also what the federal gov’t & your universities & so forth count, irrespective of community). This ‘somehow’ may have no future. Equality conceived of as the acquisition & exercise of new rights, which could broadly be termed desegregation, whether legal or extra-legal, seems to go against the needs of any given community–it introduces strange new forces that break it apart, but nothing to put it or keep it together.
“I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”
Note that it doesn’t even matter whether LBJ literally said this or merely meant it, or whether he meant it in the sense of “they’re below us and need our largesse” or “they’ve been oppressed from the beginning, just need a temporary leg up, and their gratitude for it will last for centuries.” The result is the same.
Leftism is the toxic combination of a worldview of a bulk of humanity unable to care for itself without the coercion of its betters and strictly first-order (vs. higher-order) causal reasoning. There are no “unintended consequences;” there is only opposition which, by definition of “opposition,” is evil and must therefore be destroyed so the obvious first-order effects of right policy can come to fruition.
It is a conception of human relations on par with the Conan the Barbarian novels of Robert Howard, and just as adolescent.
Peter Robinson:Counterproductive cultural traits can hurt more than political clout can help.
Profound, beautifully stated, and, on the record of things, obvious. Why can’t liberals see this?
Really. Why can’t Leftists see this? This is not a rhetorical question. It goes straight to the heart of the 100 year confrontation between Left and Right. Can’t they see it? Do they willingly avoid it? Or do they actually see it but choose to USE it as a tool instead of addressing it as the serious problem it is?
If it is that they can’t or won’t see it then there might exist some communication strategy, some consciousness raising, that can help them. (I don’t know what that might be but I can hope someone smarter than me can come up with one.)
But if they really do see it and choose to embrace it and USE it … Then I think I am a bit afraid of them. Because that means there is no convincing them … They see what we see, they just LIKE it. That’s a scary thought.
This is why Andy Stern uses the SEIU for a platform to make money for himself and to help his friend, Obama. It’s also why many of the union thugs get themselves in charge of unions — the members are weak and “the Voiceless don’t argue.”
Excellent comment.