In The Contest Between Taxeaters and Taxpayers, City Journal contributing editor Steven Malanga discusses his new book, The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today:
The original framers of the War on Poverty were well-intentioned if naive and ultimately wrongheaded. Sargent Shriver declared back then that we could end poverty in a decade and President Johnson declared that massive urban aid would help create ‘cities of spacious beauty and living promise.’ But somewhere along the way the War on Poverty got hijacked by a new brand of social service professional just starting to come out of our college and university social service departments at a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they were becoming radicalized. These folks were intellectually at war with our free market system and wanted to use the War on Poverty as a means of ramping up government spending which would force taxes higher, thereby helping redistribute income in our country, they believed. They did things like help turn welfare from a program of temporary assistance into a permanent ‘civil right’ for many recipients. They introduced the notion that the poor in our cities were not only suffering economically but that our system had robbed them of their sense of community and inner worth, which could only be revived with the help of government social service programs. Not only did these kinds of changes in attitude, especially about welfare, wreck havoc on the lives of millions and create a new kind of urban, inter-generational dependency, but they created a whole economy of people whose profession revolved around government funding to fix social problems.