The enlightened meritocracy

Below is an excerpt from the chapter “Growing class stratification and the ‘enlightened meritocracy’” in the new book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart: Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism. Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES

The hypocritical and fraudulent character of Obama’s 2008 Fathers’ Day lecture about “the foundations of our families” getting “weaker” became even clearer a few weeks later, when he took part in a televised presidential forum in southern California at the Saddleback Church of Rev. Rick Warren. When Warren asked him about “the most significant position you held ten years ago that you no longer hold today,” Obama immediately pointed to his support for the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by the Clinton administration and Congress in 1996. Obama said that he “was much more concerned ten years ago when President Clinton initially signed the bill that this could have disastrous results.”

But by August 2008 — a few months before the November presidential election, and a few weeks before the explosion of the world financial crisis and its unfolding consequences for workers’ jobs and conditions — Obama was “absolutely convinced” that Clinton’s “welfare reform” had to remain “a centerpiece of any social policy.”

Quite a contrast to the scathing indictment a decade earlier by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the Democratic Party US Senator from New York. Speaking on the Senate floor in 1996, he called the law “the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place since at least the 1930s.” (The “social contract” — that’s how a bourgeois-academic-turned-politician talks about concessions wrested as by-products of the mass working-class struggles that forged the industrial unions.) In a 1996 letter to President Clinton, Moynihan went even further, labeling it “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction” — he should have said since the bloody defeat of Reconstruction.

What have been the results since 1996 of what Obama called this liberal “centerpiece”? A 2015 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summarized the brutal consequences, an outcome magnified by the sharp contraction in the rate of growth of capitalist production and trade — the slow-burning depression, in fact — that opened in 2008.

Far from guaranteeing women productive jobs at good wages, those pushed off AFDC who’ve been lucky enough to find work of any kind have been forced into low-paying, nonunion jobs with little or no health, pension, or other benefits. By 2013 the percentage of single working-class mothers with jobs stood at 63 percent — exactly where it had been in 1996. That means 37 percent have no jobs, even jobs with miserable pay, conditions, and protections.

Related articles:
Workers still battered by Clinton 1996 welfare cuts

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home