When things go wrong for poor people

There was a time in the United States when we paid attention to poor people. It was a time when the public, the government, and the press recognized that Americans were suffering and that attention must be paid. It was the Great Depression.

The government of FDR undertook serious programs attempting to combat the ravages of depression and the Dust Bowl. The WPA gave jobs to destitute men and women. The Farm Security Administration documented this suffering — much of it rural — with the photography of people like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein. And great films like Grapes of Wrath (1940) gave the public a tangible and empathetic view of what was happening to ordinary families across the United States. (Listen to Tom Joad’s speech to Ma Joad in this Youtube clip from Grapes of Wrath.)

So where is that empathy today? Did we care more as a people about social justice in the 1930s than since the 1980s? What explains the climate of hostility towards the poor that we see today?

In an earlier post on UnderstandingSociety I considered the roles that social distance, political ideology, racial attitudes, and personal self-interest may have played in the current hostility to poor people our society seems to reflect, and these all seem like valid factors indeed. Since the Reagan administration there have been a rhetoric and a policy from the right that have been overtly antagonistic to the poor.

Figuring this out is important.

It is important, to start, for the interests of social peace. A polity needs to represent a fundamental sense of shared interest if it is to be stable and peaceful. But if 40% of our society feels that its interests are denigrated and ignored, the conditions of social harmony are undermined, and a rising tide of gated communities and social conflict should be expected.

But it is important in a loftier sense as well. We surely don’t want to be a Dickensian society, a Marie Antoinette society. We want to be a society in which all of us have concerns for our fellow citizens, and all of us can have confidence that the values of social justice and mutual respect are embodied in our policies and our actions.

If we had to choose between social democracy and unbridled Randian capitalism, the choice seems clear: a society has obligations to all its citizens, not just those who have had good fortune in the lottery of life.