South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
The left and right must confront the new American poverty
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.