Ethnic Studies > Gareth Davies: From Opportunity to Entitlement

A description of the book:

The author, Gareth Davis, explains to the reader what opportunity and entitlement means to the American public and what it means to legislators. He illustrates the procedures and hardships a president has to encounter when trying to implement a new or unusual idea. The book shows us how liberalism and liberalistic initiatives, regarding the situation of poverty in the United States, bounced back from Congress over and over.

Gareth begins his work with explaining what he means by opportunity liberalism, which is “the ideals of personal responsibility and self-support as some bold philosophical innovation”(2). He continues that this claim is valid but only in a limited fashion, since this society is a predominantly individualist one. Then he moves on to describing the rise of entitlement liberalism, as Senator George McGovern puts it, and it is the immediate obligation of the federal government to “raise all poor Americans above the poverty level by guaranteeing them an income, no question asked” (3). From the first chapter on the reader gets an overview of the American individualist tradition, which was one of the major reasons of why the notion of entitlement was greeted with such resistance. By the middle of the 1960s the two opposing parties, -those who were concerned with taxes, and those who were welfare oriented- joined the struggle against dependency. In 1964, this community of interest between conservative and liberal groups contributed to the political appeal of President Johnson’s War of Poverty.

In the following chapters the author goes on to describing the President’s struggle with opposing opinions as to how the problem of poverty should be dealt with. Is the real solution to the problem is to give opportunity to the poor to raise themselves through education and hard work, or is it their unconditional entitlement to government welfare programs? By the time Johnson left office in 1968, the guaranteed income principle gained widespread acceptance within his administration despite his personal resistance. The next president elect, Nixon, was concerned however that welfare penalized work. He accepted Moynihan’s opinion that the government should only help the working poor. On 20 November 1970, Nixon’s visionary Family Assistance Program was crushed in Congress. And the main reason for this defeat, except for the liberal hostility, was that FAP was not congruent with national attitudes toward work and dependency.

The thesis and major arguments of the book:

The author makes an attempt to explain to the reader why and how liberals move from the notion of opportunity to as far as rejecting it; and advocating instead the less popular view of entitlement regarding the question of poverty. The most successful reform-minded politicians of the twentieth century have been those who responded to the changing social and economic conditions by adapting, rather then replacing the language of individualism. One of the most important figures of liberalism, Patrick Moynihan, understood that the liberal political agenda could not be advanced unless it was seen to respect the nation’s dominant social philosophy, which is based on individualistic values. There is however one major exception to the tradition of opportunity centered liberalism, and its development and failure provides the major focus of the book. The traditional and authentically liberal notions of self-help and personal independence sounded novel and conservative in the 1980s and 1990s because these ideals largely disappeared from the liberal discourse of the late 1960s and 1970s. These ideals were replaced by the radical notions of income by right, and that’s why American liberalism remains associated, even today, with the entitlements doctrine, that in reality lies way outside of its political tradition. The notion of unconditional right to income clearly exceeds the tradition of liberalism.

The book seeks to answer the question of how American liberals came to reject the politically valuable individualistic tradition, in favor of radically “un-American” definitions of income entitlement (3). The liberalist tradition viewed welfare dependency as degrading, and that it “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration that is fundamentally destructive to the national fiber” (Roosevelt 1). About forty years later democratic Senator Terry Sanford noted that “[Welfare is] degrading, causing a deterioration of the human spirit, because it destroys the sense of purpose and meaning of life and living” (1). So what happened in between that changed so much the basic notion of opportunity among liberals and lead to the entitlements doctrine that sharply contradicts the traditional view of individualism in the United States. Lawrence Mead noted that “the most vulnerable Americans need obligations, as much as rights, if they are to move as equals on the stage of American life” (1).

The Book also tries to “illuminate the unique transformation in liberal perspectives on entitlement and dependency that occurred during the Great Society era. It also hopes to expose the dynamics of a broader ideological and tactical shift that had profound political consequences” (6). Why so many democratic liberal politicians choose to deny the individualistic tradition that enjoyed wide range support in favor of the unpopular definition of income by right? The War on Poverty must be placed in the broader context of the New Deal and Cold War democratic tradition and an emergence of the New Politics among radical liberals. When analyzing the politics of welfare policy during the 1960s, we also have to consider the domestic and political consequences of the Vietnam War. Entitlement liberalism that emerged during the late 1960s confronted the notions of individualism and mutual responsibility that had been long accepted and supported even among the poor.

Strengths and weaknesses of the book:

The style of the book, I’d have to say, is not very clear, not so easy to follow, at least not for the first reading. I often had to read the paragraphs more then once in order to understand what they were about. Clearly, this book wasn’t written for the wider public, but rather for those who have a general understanding of modern history and politics. Only after Professor Taylor began to explain what it was about, could I finally make some sense out of it. As a matter of fact, with the professor’s help now, I think, I understand the book and its significance.

The author, Gareth Davis, makes many credible arguments, which are supported by a vast amount of data. Forty seven pages of notes can be found at the end of the book. He is a historian, a scholar from Europe, so we can even be more confident that what we read is an objective, well thought argument about a period of the American history, called opportunity liberalism. In the Acknowledgement section at the beginning of the book Davis names those who were most influential on his career, and names those who helped him with his extensive research on the topic. I think that by giving those people’s names, he makes his book more trustworthy. If we read the book carefully, we can see that it is free from any ambiguous statements, unlike many other books about politics. It’s written in a chronological order, which makes it somewhat easier for the reader to follow.

The book leads the reader through the period of opportunism that is followed by entitlement liberalism, and the author does this by connecting them to presidents in office at that time. Also names those persons, politicians, sociologists, and others who were the most powerful policy makers during that time, and their influences on legislations. The author is very objective about his subject; he doesn’t make any judgments what so ever regarding liberalism. He seems to be standing in the middle, and neither on the right or left of the political spectrum. The structure of the book is very coherent; we can see how one event leads to the other, even though we might not always understand their true motives. Every fact or event the author mentions can be traced back to its origins, they’re not just some kind of fictional creations. The sources are not mainly primary resources, since the author wasn’t personally there to interview the presidents or their advisors. The book is based mostly on secondary resources, but they’re all cited at the end, therefore just as credible.