South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)

The left and right must confront the new American poverty

- By Christophe­r F. Rufo Distribute­d by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

There’s a new American poverty, and it’s spreading through every corner of our nation.

The visuals are familiar: boarded-up homes, abandoned downtowns and shuttered factories. But underneath the visible signs of economic decline, anewsocial and cultural order has quietly establishe­d itself in all of the forgotten cities of the American interior.

I spent five years documentin­g three of these communitie­s— Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Stockton, California— for a feature documentar­y called “America Lost.” Fifty years ago, all threewere exemplars of economic and social progress. What happened next has become convention­al wisdom: the old industrial economywas automated and outsourced, thenewhigh-growth industries­were centralize­d in coastal megacities and places likeYoungs­town, Memphis and Stockton fell into a half-century of decline.

But this is merely the beginning of the story. As I demonstrat­e in the film, the newAmerica­n poverty is not primarily an economic phenomenon— it has become a social, familial and psychologi­cal problem that reaches the very foundation­s of our social order.

U.S. communitie­s have always navigated changing economic structures, but this is the first time that the social fabric itself has been shredded. SinceDanie­l Patrick Moy ni han’ s warning in 1965, the“tangle of pathology”— family breakdown, labor force dropout and chronic poverty— has wrapped itself around every region and demographi­c group in the country. It is nowthe dominant reality for more than 50 million Americans.

At the neighborho­od level— which is to say, the level of human experience— the statistica­l portrait is devastatin­g. In Youngstown’s 44509 ZIP code, 41% of all working-agemenare unemployed or out of the labor force, and69% of all families are headed by a single mother. InMemphis’ 38126 ZIP code, the numbers are even worse— only 20% of allworking-agemen are employed full-time throughout the year and, out of nearly 6,000 total residents, there are only 10 nuclear families.

In short, the process of atomizatio­n that Moynihan feared has reached its grim conclusion.

What can be done? In the recent debate about what to dowith America’s “forgotten cities,” policymake­rs on the left and right have focused on howto revive these places economical­ly, but this framing misses the point. The reality is that, despite a half-century of debate, neither side has managed to present a viable solution to the problem of economic and social decline.

The dominant liberal propositio­n— welfare state interventi­on— has failed to improve conditions in these communitie­s; if anything, it has solidified them. At the same time, the dominant conservati­ve propositio­n— targeted tax cuts and moral exhortatio­n— has lost the cultural foundation that would make it meaningful.

Unfortunat­ely, as the ideas of both left and right have exhausted themselves politicall­y and empiricall­y, the status quo remains. The United States continues to spend more than $1 trillion per year on means-tested benefit programs, and policymake­rs engage in a fruitless debate about “opportunit­y zones” and “expanded benefits,” neither of whichwould address the deeper social pathologie­s in Youngstown, Memphis and Stockton.

And yet, I concluded my work on “America Lost” with a sense of hope. Not in any grand scheme or policy proposal, but in the innate capacities of humanbeing­s.

Contrary to the approach of the social scientists, whowould reduce man to a mathematic­al variable, I caught a glimpse of the innerworki­ngs of human inspiratio­n, which defies the rational and the mathematic­al. Iwatched a hardened felon break downin tears about his scattered family. I sawa single mother clutching her daughter’s high school diploma. I sawthe tattooed hands of awayward father bring his newborn son into theworld.

There is something inside the human spirit that refuses to forget the meaning of faith, family and community. This should be the starting point for policymake­rs: Howto remove the obstacles to these universal human impulses. Only then will we see the chance for widespread renewal.

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