Michael Harrington helped ignite The Great Society and all the benefits and problems that were associated with that effort, and made the elimination of poverty a staple of Democratic politics. Natually he clashed with William F. Buckley, Jr., who viewed Johnson’s war on poverty as an exercise in futility.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective

How is it, Michael Harrington posed to William F. Buckley, Jr. and others who shared his economic views, that the free enterprise system you endorse has left 50 million Americans in poverty?

In the 1960s, that number, while disputed, represented nearly 25 percent of the nation’s population.  Remarkably, these poor were to a large extent invisible to the rest of the nation. Many of them were elderly and children confined to isolated communities – rural enclaves like Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains or in inaccessible sections of major cities. Nevertheless, Harrington maintained, their suffering and deprivation were real. It constituted a public policy crisis and a moral disaster for the richest nation in the world.  As the man who nearly single-handedly inspired the anti-poverty programs of the 1960s, Harrington knew the issue as well as anyone.

He had written The Other America, considered one of the most influential books of the past century, in 1963. When Buckley introduced Harrington in May 1966 on Firing Line, he began this way:

Michael Harrington, the young and engaging man from whom you are about to hear and by whom I am about to be whiplashed is commonly acknowledged as the man who first declared the War on Poverty . . . His most famous book, called The Other America, described a portion of the American population beset by tormenting poverty. That book caught the attention of Professor Walter Heller, who brought it to the attention of President Kennedy . . . when Doctor Heller took the subject up with Mr. Kennedy’s successor, Mr. Johnson reacted with enthusiasm. And so, the war was born toward the prosecution of which we are spending about two billion dollars a year, not nearly enough to satisfy Mr. Harrington, as I am sure he will make clear, with that emotional consciousness for which he is greatly and justifiably famous.

Buckley, as the leading conservative public intellectual, would question whether Johnson’s war on poverty was an exercise in futility whose main result would be to concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of the federal government. The debates between Buckley and Harrington were not limited solely to this critical issue, however. Their disagreements over three decades would revolve as well around religion, free speech, socialism, economics and education, not to mention Vietnam and Ronald Reagan.

As was often true with Buckley and the leftists with whom he engaged, he and Harrington would cultivate a respectful if adversarial relationship. This dialogue continued through the 1980s and they kept their disagreements friendly.  No doubt certain common threads in their background helped them bridge their ideological divides. They were both Catholic, highly educated and serious about ideas. Early on they were recognized as important public intellectuals and earned the praise and support of iconic figures in American politics and culture. Buckley attended Yale, Harrington Yale Law School.

Yet their differences were wide and deep. Harrington’s conviction that the federal government had an obligation to address widespread poverty reflected his exposure to the working-class, his religious and philosophical training, and his infatuation with radical theory. He had been raised and educated in St. Louis, where he attended St. Louis University High School, a Jesuit-run college preparatory school. There he was schooled in the Christian obligation to aid the poor and studied Chesterton’s critical attitudes about the impact impersonal capitalism had on the individual. Chesterton’s theory on economics – distributionism – would foreshadow the concerns of American conservatives like Russell Kirk, who saw in capitalism a powerful force that could sweep away traditional culture and society. (Marx, too, predicted this, but he saw it as a necessary and positive phase in the evolution of a socialist society.)

Though his father was a lawyer and Harrington acknowledged a brief infatuation with Robert Taft, Harrington’s grandfather was so committed to Franklin Roosevelt that he declined to let a priest administer a sacrament when he learned that he was a Republican. Like millions of Democrats, he saw FDR as the savior of the nation, a man who understood and cared about the working class man. Harrington eventually attended Holy Cross and then Yale Law School, where he was thoroughly exposed to the leftist perspective and embraced radicalism (thereby proving Buckley’s point that Yale in the 1940s and 1950s was no longer nurturing a healthy respect for free enterprise or religious obligations). Harrington withdrew after a year at Yale to study literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago. Eventually he made his way to New York City where he would immerse himself in the mission of Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist who had built a reputation for ministering to the urban poor. Harrington wrote for the Catholic Worker and established himself as a committed intellectual and radical even as he struggled to sustain his faith in a God in whose creation justice and mercy proved so elusive. (He would later abandon his faith totally, though not his respect for Catholic tradition.)

Life in New York only moved Harrington further left. He aligned himself with Norman Thomas and the socialist movement. He critiqued the American economic system and closely studied Marx. He also became a renowned debater who loved to argue and discuss the critical issues that were shaping post-war America. He lived in Greenwich Village and kept company with some of the great writers and politicians on the New York scene, including Dylan Thomas, Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer and Daniel Patrick Moniyhan. He would make nightly forays into the taverns and bars of the village where he would drink, debate and enhance both his political and romantic opportunities.

Buckley of course took a different road. His intellectual mentors were Albert Jay Nock, Frederick Hayek and Jose Ortega y Gasset. Where Harrington saw the capitalist glass as half-empty, Buckley saw it as mostly full. He had witnessed the failure of centralized power to build a better society in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and in Eastern Europe. He had watched utopian dreams destroy economies, businesses and religious and social institutions. It was increasingly clear to Buckley that the leftist commitment to create a more perfect society led mainly to the enslavement of imperfect individuals.

Harrington, like another Yale alumnus Dwight Macdonald, no doubt became aware of Buckley’s activities at Yale during the late 1940s. Buckley already was earning notoriety for his debating skills and his conservative views, which he imparted to the Yale community as he served as editor of the Yale Daily News. When his first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951, Harrington reviewed it for the Catholic Worker and disagreed with much of it.

Conservatives usually excoriate 'unbridled' capitalism in theory, though they are hard put to name any case of its existence. Mr. Buckley saves us that tiresome argument. He is in favor of laissez-faire capitalism in a very literal, Manchester sense which has been condemned in so many papal documents that it would verge on the heretical to agree with him.
– As quoted in The Other American, Maurice Isserman, p. 87.

The two men first met at a debate held at the University of Vermont. The question on the table was whether the educational system was leading America toward socialism. Buckley took the affirmative and Harrington would recall that Buckley was at a great disadvantage. The student audience clearly sided with Harrington and while many observers would call the debate impressive, Harrington, though favorably inclined toward Buckley, felt he did not perform at the “high level” he had expected. Buckley faced an additional challenge, as several local clergy in attendance also publicly sided with Harrington. Nevertheless: “It was the beginning of a life-long and respectful relationship between the two political adversaries, who would spar on numerous occasions in public forums, including repeated appearances on Buckley’s television show Firing Line.” (Isserman, p.87)

Buckley recalled the debate years later and complimented Harrington. “He was so much in command of his own arguments and pitch that he was effective. He was a very, very good polemical slugger . . . in the first place, he was very quick. Secondly, he was very fluent, extremely keen in seizing the weaknesses of his opponent, whether those were analytical philosophical weaknesses, or whether they were exploitable vulnerabilities in terms of the sentiment of the audience.” (Isserman, p. 88)

Their causes carried them in opposite directions nevertheless. Buckley would become a Goldwater supporter and would excite campus conservatives by establishing the Young Americans for Freedom. Harrington, meanwhile, would be mobilizing on the Left. He not only was a committed socialist, he mocked one YAF rally as having all the “spontaneity of the Komsomols marching in Red Square.” Buckley had good reason to take Harrington seriously beyond his engaging style and his sharp debating skills. Harrington was a serious leftist who had great influence among the socialists in the country, though Buckley would quip that, “Being called America’s foremost socialist is like being the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas.” (The Long Distance Runner, p. 137.)

Nevertheless, Harrington was a star on the Left. He knew and respected Norman Thomas, America’s long-time socialist leader and presidential candidate. When The Other America was published, Thomas would tell Harrington that the book articulated what many socialists believed consciously or subconsciously about American society and its challenges. Others would proclaim Harrington the man “who discovered poverty,” so influential was his book on the 1960s and 1970s.

Unquestionably the specter of poverty in a nation as affluent as the United States posed a direct challenge to free enterprise, a system that Buckley believed served as a bulwark against creeping socialism and the impoverishment of entire peoples forced to live under socialist systems. Yet, the appetite for empowering the federal government would only increase in the turbulent 1960s as reformers and radicals sought to remake American society.

The issues were complex and Buckley did not treat them glibly. He dedicated his storehouse of intellectual and financial resources to founding National Review as a vehicle through which to resist the worldview propounded by Harrington and other leftists who sought to roll back capitalism in the name of equality and justice. Buckley was fond of observing that the system that advocated freedom tended to be more successful in creating equality than the systems engineered to produce equality. This struggle was not merely material but spiritual, Buckley believed, and no one annunciated this to him more clearly than his good friend Whittaker Chambers, whose memoir, Witness, offered compelling testimony against the Marxist vision of humanity. As Harrington studied Marx and sought to bridge the divides that threatened the Left (there were more schools of Marxism and socialism than need be recounted here), Buckley would argue that a free, prosperous society could not be planned collectively, but would be best achieved by allowing individuals to pursue their enlightened economic and spiritual interests free of the intrusive state.

Nor had it escaped Buckley that Harrington’s “war on poverty” was not an end in itself. Harrington believed that poverty existed not because of individual failure but because of structural injustices that stranded millions of people on islands for economic misfits. These people had little hope of catching the great economic tides that cast them upon impoverished shores or offered to liberate them from their captivity. That was the lesson millions of radicals, leftists and liberals learned from the Great Depression, which they interpreted as a failure of capitalism. Capitalism survived, they argued, only because World War II and the Cold War established the military industrial complex as a dominant piece of the American financial and economic system.

In trying to temper this bleak view, Buckley asked two fundamental questions: did the poverty problem exist as Harrington defined it? And even if it did, would yielding to the federal government an increasing share of economic resources address the problems as outlined by Harrington and others on the Left?

The Other America represented a major shift from the societal complacency that defined the 1950s, many would contend. Though the civil rights movement had been mobilized and in some quarters embraced, the Eisenhower administration had not demonstrated a willful desire to reconstruct the social contract. Harrington sought to change this. While America’s poverty might not compare with that of other nations in which people lived on the edge of starvation, Harrington noted, that “does not change the fact that tens of millions of American are, at this very moment, maimed in body and spirit, existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care.” (TOA, p. 2.)

Harrington wrote about the invisible poor, often elderly or young, out of sight, clothed to appear affluent, but underfed and underpaid, living in deplorable conditions. Their situation was made more difficult precisely because the rest of society was doing so well. Yet, Harrington’s own description of the circumstances surrounding these poor raised the question of how any society can assist people so helpless to improve their own lives.

Indeed, the paradox that the welfare state benefits those least who need help most is but a single instance of a persistent irony in the other America. Even when the money finally trickles down, even when a school is built in a poor neighborhood, for instance, the poor are still deprived. Their entire environment, their life, their values, do not prepare them to take advantage of the new opportunity. The parents are anxious for the children to go to work; the pupils are pent up, waiting for the moment when their education has complied with the law . . . They are, as (John Kenneth) Galbraith rightly points out, the first minority poor in history, the first poor not to be seen, the first poor whom the politicians could leave alone.
– TOA, p. 9.

Harrington conceded that the afflictions faced by the poor were deep and unrelenting – lack of ethos, ambition, aspiration. His analysis raised the fundamental challenge – and underscored precisely why Buckley did not believe an impersonal government would prove an effective tool in mitigating the issues. In Buckley’s view, the hardworking transient poor would, given time and a free economic system, find their way to a better situation. The cultural poor – those trapped in poverty by the social dysfunctions identified by Harrington – would be better led by community groups, churches, or local governments that could more effectively engage and support their efforts to reevaluate their own lives and behavior.

Despite prodding from Buckley over the years, Harrington could only begrudgingly acknowledge the vitality of the economic system that offered more opportunities to more people than any system ever devised. His emphasis on education as a path out of poverty, while statistically valid, failed to account for the variety of ways skilled workers, the poor, the innovative could make their livings. In his desire to involve the federal government in educational endeavors, it seemed to escape Harrington that public schools, libraries and community colleges, all mostly locally funded, offered endless opportunities for people to retool.

Harrington offered a compelling portrait of the culture of poverty, critics would argue, but never provided a real solution beyond endless expenditures that didn’t seem to alleviate the problem. Each program led to other problems: the minimum wage eliminated jobs; public housing entrenched dysfunctional behavior; public schools mirrored the neighborhood ethos; playgrounds, far from providing relief to children, attracted deviants and drug dealers; political parties benefited from keeping people dependent; unions were corrupt and racist; food stamps lead to fraud; and so on.

In an essay entitled, “The Politics of Poverty,” Harrington made it clear that his goal was not merely to eliminate poverty but to remake society in the socialist image. Before he had figured out how to change a solitary man, he was ready – in the way of many on the Left – to remake all society. Published in the mid-1960s as part of a collection of essays called The Radical Papers, the essay paid tribute to the notion that centralized control, militant political action and paternal government were the keys to resolving issues of poverty and cultural dislocation. The path to a better America ran through the state.

There must be a conscious governmental creation of a labor market in which the poor can find economic opportunity, and this can be done only by social investments which will also attack the environmental structure of poverty. There must be, in short, a planned expansion of the public sector of the economy, particularly with regard to housing, education and transportation.
– RP, p. 140.

By blaming poverty on structural economic deficiencies Harrington faced a paradox. He wanted the public sector, which is traditionally less dynamic in the task, to create jobs. Targeted programs aimed at pockets of poverty identified by Harrington and those who became the anti-poverty brain trust would alleviate systemic poverty. While Harrington acknowledged that the bulk of the economy would remain in private hands, he suggested that a third New Deal was the key to eliminating economic dislocation.

A major instrument of social policy is the expansion of the public sector. There are two arguments for such a tack: the private good producing sector will not crate jobs for the poor, so there must be a conscious generation of work in the public sector; in the course of providing the needed quantity of jobs through the public sector, we will be able to transform the quality of American life.
– RP, p.142.

Harrington then revealed the larger goal, which is not to make people economically useful, but to make them socially useful. Empowering the state was only a first step. “This would still leave the great mass of the economy in private hands. Yet it is a most important opening wedge for establishing a principle which could be extended until there is democratic control of major economic decisions.” (RP, p. 143)

The goal, he continued, was not to ensure that people lived in decent neighborhoods, but to ensure that “the people” wrested control of the economy from private capitalists whose allegiance was to profit, not social justice. He quoted Kenneth Clark, approvingly, to the effect that organizing a neighborhood to pick up trash was misguided because it assumed (how outlandish) that local residents were responsible for the litter in the streets. Better to mobilize a militant response at city hall to ensure that the city dispatched workers to clean the streets for the residents. (RP, p. 143)

He continued: “Such militant activism among the poor cannot be wished into existence. If the argument of this essay is correct, one of the consequences of a liberal program for the generation of new jobs would be that it might well create the economic setting for a radical movement of self-organization among the poor.” This organized group of poor folks would then work to “make planning an instrument of the popular will rather than of the corporation.” (RP, p. 144) “Popular will,” students of Rousseau might recall, sounds ominously familiar to “the general will,” which some critics have observed was the recipe for totalitarian tyranny as it unfolded during and after the French Revolution.

Harrington, being anti-Stalinist, had no desire to impose such a system, but he did embrace rhetoric that struck Buckley and others as insufficiently sensitive to the impact on a free society. His goal was not simply to ensure adequate jobs and upward mobility, but to create a politically active working class that would counter the power of corporate and private sector interests and mobilize on behalf of collective power. This is a page ripped from Marx – those who control the means of production ultimately control the shape of society. In proposing these ideas, Harrington would concede that state-orchestrated solutions of this kind could reduce freedom and wealth but that this was a necessary trade-off in the pursuit of a more just society.

His book Toward a New Democratic Left underscored Harrington’s mixed feelings about his own agenda for mass societal change. He was a radical, but also an honest intellectual, which characteristic Buckley clearly observed and admired. Harrington argued:

American needs a majority party of the democratic Left . . . It is simply a recognition of the fact that, to solve problems which the Government passively records, there must be radical departures and a political movement capable of initiating them. The real ideologues in this period are those utopian pragmatists who believe that the society can bumble its way through a revolution. They are fanatics of moderation.

Harrington acknowledged later in the book, however, the complexity of his challenge. Just as the Left sought to empower the state at the expense of the individual, he argued, the Right acceded to the accumulation of power in the hands of corporate America. Neither side, he admitted, had totally clean hands when it came to reducing liberty at the hands of centralized power. (See TNDL, p. 131) The Left, he argued, sought to use that power for the common good – that was the critical difference.

All of these issues were clearly part of the mix when Buckley and Harrington debated “Poverty: Hope or Hopeless” on Firing Line, May 1, 1966. As Buckley later recalled, Harrington was the first guest recorded for the show, though the broadcast would be shown after his interview and debate with Norman Thomas himself. In taking on Thomas and Harrington as his first two guests, Buckley announced his serious intention to tackle head on the mythologies of leftist thought as he saw them. Whereas he and Thomas focused mainly on the Vietnam War, Harrington and Buckley debated the issue of poverty, with Buckley suggesting that Harrington’s definition of poverty was itself open to question. Buckley suggested that government in a variety of ways was trying to address the issues raised by Harrington, but with minimal success.

B: But you think that the government, through a highly bureaucratized part of the government, can really reach in and help a person of that kind, or aren’t you really, really stuck because what it is at fault with the society is that an ethos of a kind that did make even very poor people happier than relatively rich people are today, made it possible for them to come to grips with their existence. You, after all, do despise our social order. You don’t believe there’s such a thing as religion, and under the circumstances, you are in your active polemical life doing very much that, in my judgment, has the effect of depriving people of some of the consolations, and some of the truths that might make them more serene.

H: Well, there’s so much that’s been tossed at me, if I could have a secon . . . To get to the basic point, can a materially oriented public program affect the inner psychological torments of the poor; and the answer I think is to a certain degree, yes, to a certain degree, no.

Harrington mentioned the civil rights movement in Alabama and the positive impact it had in reducing crime because it lifted dignity.

H: Similarly, this year, the government has given us some figures that would indicate that if we would put some income into the slums, the incidence of broken families would drop, because one of the big reasons that families break up is because there’s not enough money, because a man can’t be an economic father, because many of our welfare programs literally penalize marriage by refusing any kind of welfare as long as there’s an able-bodied though unemployed or poor male in the house. So, I’m saying, yes, by material federal action, we can change some of these circumstances and improve some of the psychological and spiritual life of the poor.  

Buckley did not dwell on this point, but focused on Harrington’s larger political goals.

B: You are primarily interested, of course, in changing the social order. You have a great and eloquent contempt for capitalism, even, I gathered, for those achievements of capitalism which made it possible to accumulate a surplus which can go to the poor. Now you are, in some people’s eyes, primarily interested in the poverty program, not because they doubt the integrity of your own interest in the poor, but because you find a means by which to advance social revolution . . . Now, those of us who believe that the poverty program is in some way related to the success of the free enterprise system, on the other hand, need to oppose you as you profiteer on the poverty program for your own ideological ends, and on the other hand, we need to try to be apparently – more convincing than we have been to make you study the figures which show that . . . our own system has given us over a period of 30 years the greatest net rise in public income in the history of economics. Now, at what point do you feel that your devotion to revolution, peaceful revolution to be sure, in this country is really dominating your thought. At what point are you willing to concede that your interest in poverty is, in effect, a vested interest, and that if the free enterprise system dissipated poverty completely you’d be left rather embarrassed without some sort of a medium to advance your revolutionary zeal.

Harrington denied he had any direct political or material interest in the poverty program and argued that the private sector was hardly threatened because it was not “socialist or revolutionary.” He and Buckley exchanged comments on the capitalist system, with Harrington conceding that free enterprise, finally, was yielding some positive results and should be applauded. Buckley then retreated ever so gently from his strong rhetoric.

B: Well, perhaps contempt was too strong a world to describe your feelings on capitalism. I was struck by that sentence of yours that goes: practically every ethical, moral and cultural justification for the capitalist system has now been destroyed by capitalism, which some people would find contemptuous indeed.

H: Well, this is something I think you would agree with me on.

B: (Laughing) Well . . .

H: No, I think you would agree with what I was saying, that the old free enterprise, the owner, the old market economy that you revere and want to go back to, the old free enterpriser, the man who saved up string and made a big business, and you look back to as a great man, that man is going.  We’re having the organization man now.

B: I’ve been hearing that for 25 years.

H: It’s been true for 25 years.

B: Meanwhile, we have 75 million jobs which we were told was impossible back when we had a mature economy with 42 million jobs. I have a certain amount of faith in capitalism, and suggest that it’s likely, even, to survive your own strictures against it.

The fundamental issue throughout the debate was whether the dislocation being felt in modern society, which contributed in part to the poverty problem, could be addressed by the federal government. Both men agreed not, but both also appealed to different agendas. Buckley reinforced the idea that traditional values of thrift, hard work and individual effort, rooted in a spiritual view of the world, were the path to liberation for the poor. Harrington continued to argue that the federal government could and should play a role in providing decent housing, better nutrition, and jobs. Buckley challenged the effectiveness of this approach and suggested the cost of implementing such programs at the federal level was too high. He added that there was a certain political opportunism at work by those who advocated such programs.

Buckley concluded his first Firing Line engagement with Harrington by thanking him for not suggesting, as often happened, that those who opposed the leftist position were “waspish and callous . . . I appreciate your not having done that to me. And I do think that you have made as eloquent a case for the poverty program as any I’ve heard.”

Eloquent, yes, but still not all that convincing in the light of 40 years of welfare culture. Harrington helped ignite The Great Society and all the benefits and problems that were associated with that effort. He made the elimination of poverty, defined in liberal/leftist terms, a staple of Democratic politics. A modern day political observer need only listen to the populist rhetoric of mainstream Democrats like Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards to appreciate that the emotional pull of this issue remains strong among the left/liberal wings. Even Republicans are not immune to it, as President Bush’s spending record underscores.

At least one Buckley critic, Larry L. King, suggested that Buckley was unsympathetic to the welfare state because he was, well, rich. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, in 1967, King concluded a flattering essay this way: “He doesn’t have to grocery-shop, drive the children to school in a car pool, or stand in line at the tax office while an IRS employee counts on his fingers what you owe Uncle Same thirty minutes before the filing deadline. Buckley will never fret over whether social security will see him through to the grave, whether his children will be equipped to face the world or be accepted in it, or whether he can rescue his wife’s gift from Lay Away by Christmas Eve.”

This is the typical liberal emotional response to anyone who questions the wisdom of government-driven solutions to complex social ills, and it is easily exposed by asking a few questions. Would we worry about Social Security so much if the government did not confiscate so much of our wealth in the first place? Would it help Mr. King reason through the issues if we could roll out 100 critics of welfare culture who had personally witnessed poverty or had even grown up in it? (The author, for what its worth, once worked several months in the projects of Hampton Roads, Virginia and nothing observed there vindicated the liberal approach to confronting entrenched dysfunction or poverty.) Is King actually suggesting that all rich children are well adjusted and confident, which is the implication of his reference to Buckley’s children (he actually only had one child).

The notion that we would all rush to embrace the Great Society if we understood the devastating impact of poverty fails both empirical and logical tests. Poverty programs are at best a worst case option. The truly compassionate appreciate that nothing is more vital to a person’s self esteem than the confidence that they can find their own way in the world and get back on their own two feet as quickly as possible. To dismiss Buckley’s critique of welfare in this way is not only a cheap shot, it is a subtle form of demagoguery that resists reason, analysis or honest dialogue. In this instance, King learned the technique from Harrington, who earlier in the same essay had suggested to the author that Buckley’s ignorance of poverty explained his views and his critical attitude toward the welfare state.

The degree to which Buckley took this discussion seriously and helped frame it is underscored in his book, Four Reforms, in which he took head-on the issue of poverty and welfare. He observed that welfare efforts in the 1960s had not achieved the desired end.

We are an empirical society, achievement-oriented. Our failure to eliminate poverty through welfarism has caused not only many politicians to wonder, but some social philosophers to question the further dogmas of welfarism, more or less a posteriori. It is questionable that anyone would object to welfarism in almost any form if one’s historical experience with it had been that in fact it had progressively reduced, to the point of eliminating, poverty.
– Four Reforms, p. 20.

What occurred with the onslaught of the anti-poverty programs was the opposite of success, Buckley argued, as more and more people got on the welfare rolls – from seven million in 1962 to 16 million in 1972. While the percentage of those who qualified as poor dropped from 50 percent in 1920 to nine percent in the early 1970s, the number of people receiving federal aid continued to grow. Buckley added: “It is deduced from the gross figures that what happened to make the poverty rolls grow was less the multiplication of poor people than the wide advertisement of the availability of welfare subsidies.”

Buckley’s recommended reform was aimed less at individual welfare recipients than at the system of centralization. The transfer of funds from states to Washington, D.C. and back to the states made no sense, for it institutionalized inefficiencies and increased costs that could be spent directly on services if the money stayed within the state in the first place. Buckley therefore recommended that only states with a per capita income below the national average should receive federal aid. He was not arguing that assistance to the poor should not occur, but rather that it be more effectively managed to 1) reduce costs; 2) activate at the local and state level those economic and social forces that might mobilize against temptations toward dependency; 3) better target help where it was truly needed.

Of course, Buckley’s reform was never adopted or even seriously debated. Daniel Patrick Moniyhan, who reviewed Four Reforms for the New York Times and was a leading reformer on poverty issues in the 1960s and 1970s, had appeared on Firing Line to argue for his own solution to the poverty problem — a guaranteed income for families in the United States. He clearly felt this made more sense than Buckley’s approach. In his 1974 review he admitted “the chance to change the system, as toward a guaranteed income, was botched, and this will not now occur. Nothing much will change.”

Moynihan maintained that Buckley’s solution failed to appreciate that the poor are as likely found in rich states as poor, but Buckley’s point that a rich state, relatively speaking, could afford to take care of its own poor eluded him. At the very least, it made no sense to ask poorer states to send money to the federal government which would then deliver that money to wealthier states committed to alleviating poverty. The point was to streamline the system in order to increase its efficiency.

Whereas Harrington’s approach dominated the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1980s and the election of Reagan new voices were being heard: Jack Kemp, George Gilder, Jude Wanniski, Charles Murray, Michael Novak and Thomas Sowell, to name a few. All of them were influenced by Buckley and his critique of the leftist approach on how to grapple with social issues. Gilder acknowledged Buckley in the introduction to his major work, Wealth and Poverty. Murray and Sowell appeared on Firing Line and Novak contributed regularly to National Review and made an intellectual splash with his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Their arguments were revolutionary in the wake of 50 years of New Deal/Great Society politics. The free, dynamic marketplace had done more to roll back poverty than any socialist-inspired dream, they argued. Federal programs, far from eliminating poverty, created cultures of dependency that appealed to the worst instincts of human nature. After trillions of dollars spent on anti-poverty programs, the pockets of dysfunction and destitution remained and the politics of class warfare continued.  Buckley phrased the key question in his debate with Harrington:

The obvious question is: is it working? We don’t know whether it’s working. It takes two or three years before, as Mr. Theodore White has said, we discover whether or not poverty programs have developed their own ethos. I very much fear that we will have discovered that they don’t, which is one of the reasons why I think that we should be more inventive and look for other means by which to stimulate the drive against poverty.

Harrington, meanwhile, continued the good fight, even as he became isolated from the emerging New Left that rooted its politics in radical activism that attacked middle class and working class sensibilities. Harrington and Irving Howe, though preeminent men of the Left, were just old fogies to the 1960s radicals who were not satisfied with Harrington’s anti-war efforts or his attempts to keep the Left focused on economics. Harrington labored to salvage his leftist credentials and his standing as a leading intellectual. In his book, the Twilight of Capitalism, he sought to rescue Marx from those on both the Right and the Left who twisted his ideas. He would call this the reconstruction of the “new Marx.” While he acknowledged a debt to his spiritual upbringing, he maintained in his book, The Politics at God’s Funeral, that modern man could no longer be satisfied with an old-world view of faith as an avenue for shaping society and its critical issues. In 1984, he revisited the poverty theme in yet another book, The New American Poverty.

The new poverty, he argued, was “more systematic and structured than the poverty of twenty years ago.” To make matters worse, he suggested that Reagan and the neoconservatives had reduced the poverty question to a caricature with distorted and mean-spirited attacks on welfare queens and cheats. This Harrington found abominable, for it not only reduced the poor to an abstraction, it stripped American political culture of its compassion and generosity. Harrington joined Buckley again on Firing Line in 1984 to have these issues out. Buckley continued to press the issue on two fronts: that individual behavior cannot be managed by collectivized power and that the anti-poverty system entrenched poverty. Harrington maintained that other issues were at work, including the reduction of manufacturing jobs, the influx of women (black and white) into the workforce, and the onslaught of technology, which increased efficiency but eliminated traditional high-paying working class jobs. Buckley drove the discussion toward how to best address such challenges – free enterprise, or government-driven programs and policies.

B: Are you really saying that the time has come when economic progress is no longer predictable in the sense that it was in the 19th century?

H: Yes.

B: You are.

H: Even as predictable as it was up until about 1968.

B: What makes you think that a coordinated political intelligence can probe these problems more skillfully or productively than the free intelligence of people guided by their own ethos, ambitions, whatever?

H: Both.

B: If George Gilder were here, I’d say by their own spirit of philanthropy.

H: I would say both. But what makes me think it is that the country in the last 10 years that has had the lowest inflation and unemployment is Austria. I might say it’s small, it’s exceptional, but nevertheless, I think they demonstrate that it is possible to cope with an enormous amount of technological and occupational change better than we have done. We have been on a roller coaster. And I don’t think anything is inevitable. I think how people respond politically will determine what possibilities that now exist are actualized.

B: Aha, but mustn’t they respond politically in such a way as to welcome the possibility of pluralist thought, which pluralism, of course, is impossible in a socialist society?

Buckley was making a larger point, one that he made off and on throughout his many years as a participant in the national discourse about cultural and political challenges: the idea that politics or government can solve all of our social ills is misguided. Individual initiative and effort are characteristics most effectively taught in the cradle and the home, places the government can reach only at great cost to individual freedom and dignity. Buckley suggested that some problems are intractable – and attempts to address them through government activity only made them worse.

Who got the better of this fundamental debate is an interesting question. In his book, The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson offered a middle way between Harrington and the Buckley/Murray position. While Harrington made the mistake of associating poverty and economic issues with race, Wilson argued that Charles Murray’s influence was particularly important and distressingly harmful: “Probably no work has done more to promote the view that federal programs are harmful to the poor” than Losing Ground. He continued: “Losing Ground not only attributes increasing poverty to programs such as those of the Great Society, it also explains increasing rates of joblessness, crime, out-of-wedlock births, female-headed households, and welfare dependency, especially among the ghetto underclass, in terms of such programs as well.” (Wilson, p. 16).

While it was certainly true that government programs had some negative consequences, Wilson agreed with Harrington that the real causes of poverty were structural changes in the job market – the shift from manufacturing to service jobs; the influx into the job market of women who competed for better jobs and immigrants who competed for lower paying jobs; and the urbanization of American culture in which migrants from rural areas got stranded.

But Buckley continued to be persuaded by the Murray analysis and the general notion that welfare/entitlement policies had deleterious effects on the attitudes and behavior of people. In a speech made in May of 1995, Buckley revisited the critical issue from his perspective.

Can we, through politics, effect an evolution of the ethos, and if so, how? As a practical matter, how can we generate the spirit and the practices that have the effect of reducing poverty? Two facts that may contribute to the persistence of poverty have been isolated. The comprehensive effect of state welfarism on protracted poverty is in dispute, but Charles Murray has arrested our attention in concluding that welfarism generates attitudes and activity different from those anticipated. What no one disputes is the contribution to poverty of single-parent families. A child growing up with a single parent is likelier, by a factor of six, to sidle toward illiteracy, crime and drug addiction than the child raised by two parents.
– Let Us Talk of Many Things, pages 397-398.

By the 1990s it did appear that Buckley and the conservatives had won a critical short-term policy debate. Bill Clinton, a two-term Democratic president, announced in the early 1990s that welfare as we know it was over. He would negotiate with Newt Gingrich a welfare reform bill that embraced the assumptions of Buckley and Murray — federal anti-poverty programs must include incentives to break the cycles of dependency encouraged by public assistance. Buckley continued to believe that equipping people to compete in the free market was the best palliative for poverty and a society mobilized around a love of liberty the best cure for dependency.

Still, after all their years of disagreement, Buckley liked and respected Harrington. When Harrington was struck with cancer in the 1980s, and his health situation became precarious, Buckley wrote him a note wishing him well – but in the spirit of their past debates, he refused to concede intellectual ground.

I saw you briefly on tv yesterday (you were making a brief appearance in behalf of socialism), and I rejoiced both that your appearance was brief, and that you looked so well . . . I have said a special prayer for your recovery . . . Meanwhile, take care of yourself: You are a brave and admirable man, the daemons to one side.
– As quoted in Isserman, p. 358.

Harrington did not long survive his struggle with cancer. He died in 1989, at the relatively young age of 61. Buckley has now joined him. And though each man witnessed an intellectual victory of sorts – Harrington in the 1960s and Buckley in the 1980s and 1990s – the debate over poverty and how to resolve it goes on. The poor will always be with us, Christ taught, and as long as there is a single poor man to be found, the ingenuity of the Left in leveraging him for a vote, a reform or a new government program will be with us as well. However well intended, Buckley felt these efforts were destined to fail. People will not be lifted from poverty by collective action, but by individuals taking responsibility for their own material and spiritual destiny.