Political imagination and discources about policies does shape reality – empirics prove.

This book examines collective im-agining about poverty and the poor in the institutional forums of public policy debate. Members of a political community come together through public policy debate to formalize agreed-upon rights, responsibilities, and obligations; debate also presents an opportunity for new understandings of these areas to emerge. In public policy and other forums, the modern paradox of seeing the poor has been evident. The vision of debate participants has narrowed considerably. In the mid-1960s, participants declared unconditional war on poverty, recognizing poverty as a multifarious phenomenon affecting diverse types of people. In the 1980s and 1990s, participants renounced federal interventions, viewing poverty as "dependence" on government public assistance — "welfare" — programs by a black, urban "underclass." A policy trajectory that ended in the repeal of the principal government public assistance program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), developed contemporaneously with this narrowed vision. This repeal trajectory began in the early-i98os with budget reductions in AFDC and other programs. It proceeded in the mid-1980s with a reorientation of AFDC that placed new demands on adult recipients. This trajectory culminated in the 1990s with legislation that repealed the AFDC program. Together, this narrowed vision and repeal trajectory constituted a retrenchment era in welfare policy discourse. Retrenchment was one of four eras that make up the larger history of AFDC. The program developed successively through periods of enactment, early operation, expansion, and retrenchment. Title iv of the 1935 Social Security Act (SSA) —the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1962 — in effect federalized mothers' pension laws that had been enacted by forty-five states. The Committee on Economic Security (CES), President Roosevelt, and the Children's Bureau all viewed ADC as a noncontroversial component of the SSA. In its report to the president, the CES recommended that ADC families "should be differentiated from the permanent dependents and unemployables."6 Suspicious of "relief," FDR did not regard ADC mothers as relief recipients because he did not view them as part of the potential paid labor force. The program avoided controversy in its early operation between 1936 and i960 because local administrators decided to exclude from the rolls potentially eligible cases that may have drawn the ire of local constituencies. Writing in 1939, Jane Hoey, director of the Bureau of Public Assistance, complained that many of the local administrators applied rigid character tests for granting aid "on a basis of 'promoting' the 'nice' families." She reported that only 2 percent of children receiving ADC lived with an unmarried mother.7 Racial discrimination also limited distribution of aid. In the South, ADC coverage by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased. Nationwide, the average payment per child by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased.8 Yet events during this era presaged future conflict as amendments to the SSA in the 1940s and 1950s altered the composition of the ADC caseload by making greater numbers of "worthy widows" eligible for social insurance programs. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, AFDC expanded dramatically and public hostility toward the program emerged. Governmental, community, and judiciary forces combined to prompt a large increase in the percentage of families that applied for public assistance through the 1960s. The most telling statistic of the decade concerned the sharp rise in the number of eligible families who actually were assisted. In the early 1960s, 33 percent of eligible families participated in AFDC; in 1971,90 percent participated.9 At the same time, AFDC came under increasing scrutiny as a flawed program. State and local governments engaged in highly publicized efforts throughout the 1960s to reduce AFDC caseloads. In 1969 President Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan (FAP) that embodied these divergent tendencies. His speech introducing the FAP rebuked AFDC as a program corrupted by the increased power of the federal government. Yet his solution in effect would have established a national minimum income guarantee. Though benefit levels dropped by 30 percent in inflation-adjusted figures through the 1970s, retrenchment commenced in earnest in 1981 as Ronald Reagan and his supporters sought to reduce federal spending by removing reputedly non-needy recipients from the AFDC rolls. In the following chapters, I present an overview of the eras preceding retrenchment and trace the policy debates of the retrenchment era and the images of the poor that circulated therein. In so doing, I tell the story of how the least controversial component of the 1935 Social Security Act became the only component to be repealed. Imagining, Controversy, and Tensions of Representation The repeal of AFDC transpired in the imagining of policymakers as much as in the votes legislators cast on the House and Senate floors. Affirmative votes in these two chambers would not have been recorded without significant shifts in processes of collective imagining. In light of its import, imagining in its multiple meanings as mental faculty, social force, and representational process merits closer scrutiny. In a quotidian and fundamental meaning, imagining denotes forming mental images and impressions or conceiving or pondering matters, as in a faculty of the mind.10 Although conceiving or pondering often operate jointly with perception, imagining as a mental faculty also focuses on things not present to the senses. On this functional understanding, imagining appears as the method by which most Americans come to know their poorer compatriots. Americans increasingly live and work in economically segregated settings. The daily lives of middle- and upper-class Americans place them less frequently in any significant contact with the poor. Importantly, imagining, as a method of coming to know others, is not an idle, inconsequential activity. Its consequence emerges in other meanings of the word. Imagining engages a creative energy. If imagining can conceive of things that are not present to one's senses but perhaps existing elsewhere, then it also invokes actions or events not yet in existence. Imagining looks beyond the bounds of the existing and the limits of the Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 10 VISIONS OF POVERTY established order to create and consider that which is not yet. Moreover, the energy of imagining engenders an expectation: that which is created in one's imagination is anticipated, viewed as likely to come into existence. These additional meanings reveal that imagining and the imagination may act as a social force. In this way, imagining is a productive act with consequences for imaginers and others subjected to their imagination. Some commentators, such as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, see the manifest force of the imagination as a positive, recent development. He maintains that "there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today."11 Appadurai attributes its newfound power to the exposure of more and more of the world's population to global media channels. He believes that as a result people who live even the most dreary of everyday lives may regard their present circumstances not as an inevitability, but as a compromise between imaginative play and existing opportunity. That is, such individuals may live their lives significantly in the imaginative space that emerges between circulating media images of glamorous lifestyles of pleasurable consumption and the constraints imposed on them by their subordinate socioeconomic status. Retrenchment-era welfare policy debates suggest an ominous alternative role for the imagination: imaginative "play" may disempower some people by representing them through disabling images. Imagining may be a means by which established interests sustain and perhaps even strengthen their positions of privilege. This ideological use of the imagination has functioned crucially in constructing and maintaining dividing lines over social justice in the U.S. welfare state. The 1935 Social Security Act bifurcated social welfare into public assistance and social insurance programs. Public assistance programs occupy an inferior position in the U.S. welfare state in comparison to social insurance programs. Public assistance programs are federal-state programs administered almost completely by state governments. They disperse meager grants that vary in each state and some localities, do not keep pace with inflation, and require satisfaction of corollary conditions. Social insurance programs are administered by the federal government and distribute generous grants that maintain uniformity across geography, index to inflation, and require no further actions from recipients. Recipients of social insurance —"social security" — have been portrayed as independent citizen-workers rightfully claiming money earned. In contrast, public assistance recipients have been depicted as clients benefiting from public charity.12 Performing their ideological function, these contrasting images occlude the similarities between social insurance and Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 11 public assistance. The practice of social insurance belies its honorific contributory status.13 Retirees receive benefits out of proportion to their contributions. Money paid by current workers is not held in millions of separate accounts but used as general revenues. Moreover, whole classes of workers have been excluded from social security since its inception. Imagining as a social force indicates that its creative energy is not coextensive with our social world generally, with what some theorists have referred to as the "social construction of reality."14 Imagining may participate in constructing our shared social world, but it is not the only participant. In this way, Charles Taylor situates the collective imagination as a mediator between the realm of social habit and that of explicitly articulated ideas, doctrines, and ideologies.15   To advance this distinction, however, is not to insist that imagining cannot order our shared social world. This is precisely the role ascribed to the imagination by political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.16 He holds that some imagined notions —he references such concepts as the "citizen," "justice," "money," and others — serve a central role in structuring societies.  Collective understandings of these intertwined central notions order relationships among the people and objects through which they are represented.  People and objects, in turn, make these notions tangible. The controversial history of welfare reform suggests that "welfare" often functions in this manner. Our collective understanding of welfare informs relations among potential recipients, proposed programs, prospective administrative agencies, and, often in the guise of the financier, the general public. These people and objects, in turn, represent welfare as a material practice. However, these valuable formulations of the imagination as a structuring force risk circumscribing a passive, background role for imagining: imagining in this mode exists in the background of public debate at a level below that of explicit argumentation. Imagining as a social force, though it often establishes an implicit context for topics identified as "public issues," may operate actively, especially in those historical moments when imaginings shift. The controversial history of welfare reform has countenanced significant shifts in collective imaginings of appropriate public assistance recipients. These shifts have occurred within and without the retrenchment era. From the enactment of AFDC to its repeal, images of the adult female recipient highlighted variously her often competing roles as family caregiver and paid worker. In important respects, the controversial nature of welfare reform has contributed to shifts in collective imagining. As a Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 12 VISIONS OF POVERTY quality of some public arguments, controversy raises the stakes of engagement for debate participants and those affected by debate outcomes.17 Controversial issues often are highly visible issues that rally widespread support and opposition and stir strong feelings. This import of controversy belies traditional scholarly understandings that treat controversy as something to be avoided because it putatively departs from or perverts formal rules of disputation or reason. Against this orientation, G. Thomas Goodnight advances a view of controversy that acknowledges its significance for explicit issues under debate and beyond.18 Goodnight explains that controversy may call into question unspoken rules and procedures that inform public argument as well as contexts of understanding drawn through public argument: controversy may make explicit and potentially alter previously taken-for-granted relationships between communication and reasoning, and controversy may reveal and potentially reconfigure contexts through which people understand issues. These functions operate significantly in welfare policy debates as, for example, some advocates regard certain types of evidence, such as social scientific program evaluation data, as inherently superior to other types. Also, advocates holding different views of the appropriate role of government action draw contexts placing differing emphasis on matters regarding the family, the workplace, and the public good. These qualities of controversy suggest that it engenders moments especially amenable to shifts in imagining. Controversy unsettles collective imagining as a background understanding and engages imagining as an active social force. The active role of imagining in moments of controversy betrays another meaning of the term, one that has informed my discussion thus far but has not been addressed directly, namely, imagining as a process of representing people, objects, or ideas. This process is by no means innocent. Increased critical scrutiny of representation has drawn attention to a "politics" of representation.19 To assert that representation enacts a politics is to assert that all representation is tendentious. We do not represent people, objects, or ideas to ourselves and others in a transparent, valueneutral fashion. No one-to-one correspondence exists between the representation and the person, object, or idea represented. Representing entails contest and struggle as participants in public debates and controversies seek to sustain, modify, or supplant representations that circulate through public discourse. Representing engages the creative and consequential force —the powerful force —of the imagination, and yet representations exhibit qualities that occlude this character. As Frank Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 13 Lentricchia explains, the authority of any representation lies in its assertion of an inherent, ontological claim, "used like a hammer, that some part of the whole really does stand in for the whole." Representations insist that they depict people, objects, or ideas as they truly are. Representing thus becomes a "cover-up" in concealing itself as "an agency of specific political power" and in obscuring "social and cultural difference and conflict."20 This political dimension informs the images of the poor that circulate in welfare policy debates. Such images purport to be natural, essential, and universal renderings of the people they imagine. The political nature of representation is obscured further by a fundamental tension in representation between absence and presence, between standing for something and embodying that something. In his Keywords, Raymond Williams notes that representation historically has meant, and not without considerable overlap in meaning, "standing for something that is not present" and "making something present to the mind."21 Representation as presence emerges, for instance, in aesthetic theories that judge paintings and other artworks by their ability to portray in a lifelike manner the elements of our physical world. Representation as absence informs certain theories of democracy whereby elected officials in parliamentary or legislative bodies speak on behalf of their constituents. Yet neither invocation dispenses with the other.22 The representation is and is not the person, object, or idea represented. In retrenchment-era welfare policy debates, recipients of public assistance suffered doubly from this tension in representation: representation as "standing for" kept many recipients out of the debates and representation as "making present" brought recipients into the debates through disabling images. For the most part, those claiming to speak for the poor, not the poor who were likely affected by changes in public assistance programs, participated in welfare policy debates. But the poor were by no means absent from the debates: vivid images of current and potential public assistance recipients elicited intense scrutiny from most participants. Tensions of representation also arise in discussions in the "public sphere," a term that signifies the social space generated when members of a political community come together to discuss issues of common concern. The social space they generate is a discursively constituted space. As Jiirgen Habermas explains, "[t]his space stands open, in principle [if not always in practice], for potential dialogue partners who are present as bystanders or could come on the scene and join those present."23 In important respects, the public sphere is an imagined space, for its Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. 14 VISIONS OF POVERTY manifestation does not require participants to occupy the same physical location nor does its appearance mandate that discussions proceed contemporaneously. The newspaper reader perusing a letter-to-the-editor, for example, brings a public sphere into being when this person imagines oneself as part of a larger audience and in this manner engages the views expressed by the letter writer. Motivated significantly by a concern for who may secure representation and how one may be represented, scholars in a wide range of disciplines have sought to conceptualize the public sphere more inclusively. Their efforts bear upon the institutional forums of public policy debate, since lines between the public sphere and governing institutions often blur, especially in settings such as congressional committee hearings, where citizens interact communicatively with state officials. Scholarly efforts toward conceiving greater inclusiveness have envisioned public debate as multiform and fluid. From this perspective, observers see public debate as an activity that occurs across multiple constellations of partly overlapping public spheres rather than in a singular sphere, enables the thematization of differences among participants as a resource rather than as an obstacle to meaningful social dialogue, and constitutes and clarifies notions of the public good in processes of debate rather than as a priori stipulations.24 These various prescriptions for greater inclusiveness support Harrington's view that engaged political debate may offer the best hope for producing new periods of political creativity—in this case to alleviate the debilitating consequences of representation. Deliberation holds the promise of perspective-taking, which may engender among more powerful political actors recognition of the struggles and aspirations of poor people without resorting to disabling representations.25 This potential for perspective-taking arises in the ways that deliberation may unsettle and make available for examination individual desires and suggest their possible transformation. Deliberation asks participants to judge critically their own claims and the claims of others. This critically reflective dimension has been illuminated by Seyla Benhabib, who advances three reasons to support the claim that deliberation may generate democratic legitimacy.26 First, deliberative processes impart information. No single person can articulate all the perspectives through which social and political issues may be perceived by different people nor possess all the information relevant to a decision affecting many people. Second, deliberation does not proceed from a methodological fiction of an individual with an ordered set of coherent preferences. Deliberative Asen, R. (2001). Visions of poverty : Welfare policy and political imagination. Michigan State University Press. Created from umichigan on 2023-06-27 20:12:38. Copyright © 2001. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. IMAGINING OTHERS IN PUBLIC POLICY DEBATE 15 processes enable participants to discover, clarify, and/or alter their views and preferences through communicative interaction with others. Third, the very act of articulating a view in public imposes a certain reflexivity on individual preferences and opinions. The publicity of deliberation prompts participants to support their positions with good reasons or risk the dismissal of their views as unsupported assertions. An embrace of nondeliberative alternatives for policymaking such as bargaining processes and patronage rewards relies on the very resources that the poor lack— money, access, and power.27 Without attending to the circulation and functioning of images of poor people in welfare policy debates, efforts to reconfigure a deliberative public sphere more inclusively may not be enough to counter the doubly disabling tendencies of representation. That is, images may disable even if more citizens participate in public policy debate and even if deliberation is open to various topics and different ways of speaking. Images of the poor link up with the arguments of participants in welfare policy debates to bolster or weaken policy initiatives and to advantage or disadvantage participants. Images may help sustain particular configurations of power, but the creative energy of imagining suggests that any one configuration, for better or worse, will not persist indefinitely. Especially in moments of controversy, imagining may unsettle established evaluations of policy initiatives and positions of advantage and disadvantage. The anticipatory quality of imagining signals further that the outcomes of debates in these controversial moments may be crucial for setting in motion a particular policy trajectory. The retrenchment era of welfare policy debate appeared as one such instance of unsettling and anticipating—and its key episodes set in motion a repeal trajectory.