While
attention focuses on Paul Ryan’s remarks about inner city culture,
another dog-whistle theme continues its slow roil: food stamp abuse.
More even than Ryan’s twisting narrative, the brouhaha around food
stamps helps make clear that conservatives seek to conjure a much bigger
bogeyman than “lazy” minorities.
Ostensibly worried that too many
people prefer welfare to work, House Republicans this January stripped
$8.6 billion from the food stamp program. This threatened to reduce
monthly food assistance by an average of
$90 per family — from households that are barely hanging on, with average gross monthly incomes of just
$744.
Yet far from conceding defeat, states are joining battle by adjusting
their programs in ways that evade the cuts, bringing the food stamp
debate back.
Just last week, House Speaker John
Boehner warned
that “states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing up people
for food stamps,” and he implored his colleagues “to stop this cheating
and this fraud from continuing.” Cheating and fraud constitute stock
themes in the conservative assault on food stamps — tropes applied
indiscriminately to both recipients and government. And therein lies a
clue to the real target.
To see the actual agenda clearly, though,
it helps to reach back to Ronald Reagan, for he perfected today’s
conservative assault on food stamps.
Reagan frequently stumped by
sympathizing with the anger of voters waiting in line to buy hamburger,
while some young fellow ahead of them used food stamps to buy a T-bone
steak. With this tale, Reagan invoked the stereotype of the welfare
recipient who abuses government benefits to live in luxury (Reagan’s
other version: welfare queens).
The comedian Jon Stewart recently compiled a
montage of
contemporary conservative talking heads spinning just these sorts of
yarns about food stamps. It would have been funnier if people weren’t
actually being pushed into hunger.
Going
to the racial dimensions of these hackneyed fictions, when Reagan
initially told the T-bone steak story, he identified the food stamp
abuser as a young “buck,” a term then commonly used among Southern
whites to refer to a strong black man. This veered dangerously toward
open racism, and in any event proved unnecessary. Even after Reagan
dropped that term from future renditions, the racial element continued
just below the surface, with welfare recipients implicitly colored
black.
But this was not a simple plot to demonize minorities.
Rather, Reagan had another scapegoat in mind, and here we come to the
heart of dog-whistle politics. Ostensibly, even more than grasping
minorities, the greatest enemy of the middle class was liberal
government. After all, it was government that was reaching into
taxpayer’s pockets and wasting their hard-earned dollars.
By
“darkening” government itself, Reagan provided the kindling for a
taxpayer revolt that ostensibly would cut off funds to the lazy and
irresponsible — but that in fact generated enormous windfalls for the
very rich. In the 1980s, by one estimate, the top 1 percent of Americans
reaped tax cuts worth a trillion dollars, and they’ve received a
further trillion dollars from the Reagan tax cuts in each ensuing
decade.
Tax cuts for the very rich were just the beginning. By
trashing safety-net programs as massive giveaways to undeserving
minorities and thereby engendering a general hostility toward
government, the right has systematically attacked New Deal programs
across multiple domains — from education and housing to marketplace and
workplace regulation — undoing in area after area the policies that once
promoted an equitable distribution of wealth.
Perhaps to
understand the full devastation wrought by modern racial politics, we
should bring forward another figure from the shadowed background of the
T-bone steak story: the cashier. In the 1970s, she was more likely to be
unionized and relatively well-paid, with good benefits. Today, whether
white or black or some other race, she is likely working without union
protection for a minimum wage whose value has sharply fallen and that
cannot sustain a small family above poverty. Indeed, like many Wal-Mart employees, it’s the cashier who today is on food stamps.
When
House Republicans war against food assistance, just as when Ryan tilts
at government poverty programs that don’t work because of a tailspin of
culture in our inner cities, their real target is progressive
government. Yes, race-baiting superficially aims at minorities and hits
nonwhite communities hard, including the
24 percent of
food stamp recipients who are black. But just as cuts to food aid also
afflict the 38 percent of program participants who are white,
dog-whistle politics savages Americans of every race.
And it
devastates every class, too, for this sort of racial politics doesn’t
just slam the poor, it imperils all who are better off when government
protects the broad middle rather than serves society’s sultans. When
conservatives blow that dog whistle, government is the target, and
you’re a likely victim.
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