Family Values

August 4, 2017 12:48 PM

All in the Family Debt: How Neoliberals and Conservatives Came Together to Undo the Welfare State by Melinda Cooper at Boston Review. The essay is adapted from Cooper's book Family Values: Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, published in 2017 by Zone Books.

couple of reviews:
Modern Family (James Chappel, Dissent)
Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Andy Seal, Society for US Intellectual History)
The Neoliberal Economics of Family Life (Angela McRobbie, Truthout)

in addition:
An interview with Cooper (30 min audio).
Moral Economies of Neoliberalism: A Workshop around Melinda Cooper's Family Values (Vimeo).

posted by sapagan (9 comments total)

After they pulled themselves up out of poverty with it! Thanks, guys!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:32 PM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Really interesting! That excerpt alone was a very lucid explanation of the dynamic. I'm looking forward to tracking down and reading the book.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 2:48 PM on August 4, 2017

Zone Books! I didn't know they were still around, that's awesome
posted by thelonius at 3:28 PM on August 4, 2017

Terrific except. Will check out some of the links when I have time. Thanks, sapagan!
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:38 PM on August 4, 2017

As president, Reagan attempted to translate his Californian project in welfare reform onto the federal stage, without success. Instead Reagan’s project was brought to final fruition by President Clinton, whose monumental welfare reform of 1996 effectively federalized the poor law tradition, turning America’s welfare bureaucracy into an immense national apparatus for policing and enforcing child support obligations amongst the welfare poor. The New Democrat Clinton achieved at a federal level what Reagan achieved only partially at a state level. Indeed, he went further: Clinton not only federalized the neoliberal principle of familial responsibility, he combined it with a social conservative focus on the active reconstitution of married, family life. His efforts in this direction later flowered into a multitude of pedagogical programs designed to sustain healthy marriages, responsible fatherhood and pre-marital abstinence amongst the welfare poor. Clinton’s welfare reform can be said to reflect both social conservative and neoliberal views on poverty management.

[...]

Today the effects of this shift in public finance is experientially self-evident. The New York Federal Reserve recently published a report seeking to account for the fact that a growing number of young adults are living at home with their parents well into their 20s and even 30s—a demographic trend it attributes first and foremost to college debt. The shift from public to private investment in so-called human capital has forcefully reinvigorated the importance of family debt networks and inherited wealth in the shaping of social destinies. The effect of more than three decades of neoliberal economic reform has been to reinstate the legal and economic function of the private family as the first line provider of welfare, very much in keeping with the four-hundred year old poor law tradition, but distinct inasmuch as it involves expanding opportunities for personal indebtedness. As a result, neoliberalism has reinvented the poor law tradition in the idiom of intergenerational debt. We can only escape the tyranny of inherited wealth by including kin within our own debt servitude. It is this predicament, more than rampant individualism, which defines the experience of our times.

Hot stuff.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:40 PM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I just ordered this book. For years now I've been trying to connect what happened in the '70s and '80s that ended the environment of cultural innovation and experimentation I grew up in, and resulted in the kind of stultified culture we've got now. I know Reaganism played a big part of it, but this looks like the sociological explanation of why so many people bought into it.
posted by morspin at 7:57 PM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

oh yeah this looks like a barn burner of explaining how we got to the current mess.
posted by The Whelk at 3:37 AM on August 5, 2017

Jello Biafra used to refer to Bill Clinton as "the best Republican President we've had." Welfare 'reform' was a big part of that.
posted by delfin at 6:40 AM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

That's the thing that prett much sourced my mom on politics forever, welfare kept us alive. And she was being asked to support the person taking it away.
posted by The Whelk at 6:56 AM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]