For decades, conservatives like Vance have criticized welfare programs under the guise of defending the nuclear family.
Li Rui—Xinhua News Agency via Getty Imagesto an audience in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, that he would “fight for every single worker in this country.” The promise fit with the image Vance has created for himself as embodying the American Dream.
In 1861, Congress approved pensions for Union soldiers wounded in combat and families of soldiers killed during the Civil War. White Americans’ access to government assistance increased over the ensuing decades, as Congress extended pensions to all disabled Union veterans and started programs providing financial support to widowed white mothers.
Yet, just as social safety net programs became more equitable, politicians began questioning the efficacy of welfare, specifically for Black families. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published, popularly known as the Moynihan Report. It sought to understand the root causes of Black poverty. The report, however, downplayed the role of enslavement and Jim Crow, and instead blamed the higher prevalence of female-headed Black families.
The Moynihan Report offered a way for conservatives to reach these voters. Over the ensuing decades, portraying welfare programs as threatening the nuclear family gave conservative Republicans—perhaps most notably President Ronald Reagan—a way to tap into these voters’ racial anxieties, and peel them away from the historically pro-labor Democratic Party.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, conservative academics gained a new ally in the religious right, which was alarmed by what it perceived as an all-out assault on “traditional” values and the nuclear family. The most prominent face of that movement was Jerry Falwell Sr., who co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to advocate for social conservatism and help candidates committed to it.
Yet, the law failed to substantially reduce the percentage of single-parent households and lift families out of poverty. Instead, itthe number of single mothers working low-wage jobs and worsened racial wealth inequality by making welfare a less reliable and accessible source of income, as well as returning control of aid distribution to state-run agencies. .
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