Narratives of the Welfare State

Abstract

Narratives of the Welfare State Stephen K. White (bio) Last August the U.S. government enacted welfare legislation abandoning the idea that all citizens and legal aliens have a right to some minimum level of material support. At the time this occurred, I was at a conference in the Netherlands. What struck me again and again was the contrast between the way the Dutch talked about their democratic welfare state and how we now talk about ours. This divergence of discourse led me to reflect upon the kinds of narratives that sustain the guarantees of the welfare state and the kinds that erode it. In what follows, I want to speculate a bit about some of these, more particularly the ones that seem to be circulating most prominently now among political leaders and the white middle class in the U.S. By “narratives,” I mean simply the kind of stories “we” use to describe what “we” as a nation and political community are all about, and, more specifically, what role the democratic welfare state has in our imagination. One might first simply draw a distinction between affirmative, negative and neutral narratives. The first two of these can be further characterized as emphatic or non-emphatic. By “emphatic” narratives I mean ones that tap deep aspirations, motivations and moral sources; ones that give life and shape to our various particular political perceptions, judgments and aspirations. Affirmative narratives of this sort still seem to have some resonance for many Europeans. Their stories of politics are still entwined with a sense of solidarity with the least advantaged members of a society, and a sense of obligation to provide the material conditions of self-respect and human dignity. These narratives contain what Charles Taylor calls “words of power” — “solidarity,” “self-respect,” “human dignity” — that is, words with the power to move us.1 In the United States such affirmative narratives have increasingly lost their resonance. They seem to have been drowned out or displaced by negative and neutral narratives; that is, by ones which either actively discourage any sense of obligation to the purposes of social welfare or which rework that obligation into a more ethically-detached, no-nonsense stance. The negative narratives I am thinking of retain that quality of emphatic spirituality to which I just referred, only it is turned against social welfare. The neutral narratives, on the other hand, let go of that quality almost entirely. Let me turn first to the negative narratives. Two are most prominent: The first I will call The Siege Engine of the Profane; the second, The Drama of Beautiful Social Competition. Although both are corrosive of the welfare state, they differ in the source of spirituality they draw upon. The first narrative is deployed primarily by Protestant fundamentalists. I am thinking here especially of the Rev. Pat Robertson and his followers. Their moral-political stance obviously draws its motivational power from religious sources. The story of the welfare state is for them the story of the “Siege Engine of the Profane,” which continually tries to assault Christian belief and community. To oppose it is to do God’s work. However fascinating it would be to follow out the manichean, symbolic politics displayed each week on Robertson’s T.V. show, The 700 Club, this is not the negative narrative upon which I want to focus. Rather than attending to what circulates within a specific segment of the religious right, I want to turn to a narrative that circulates more generally within the political right and center. If we think of the last 15 years as an era of conservative ascendancy, and we ask what secular arguments have been in the forefront of this movement, the answer of course revolves around claims about the necessity of cutting down the size of government in order that the free enterprise system be allowed to function in the most efficient way possible. Ideally, the welfare activities of government would be replaced by private charity. On its face, this neo-laisser-faire package seems to be a hard-headed, instrumental set of claims of the sort: if you do X, then Y will result. If you cut the size of...