How I Stopped Believing in Tough-Love Social Policy
And you can too. Thoughts on the obituary of conservative economist Walter E. Williams.
The obituary of Walter E. Williams was a jarring reminder of what tough-love social policy looks like. Mr. Williams, who passed on December 2, 2020 at the age of 84, was a public intellectual and professor at George Mason University in Virginia for forty years. He supported unimpeded free-market capitalism (a myth, if you read Robert Reich) and didn’t support any kind of government spending, affirmative actions or intervention to help disadvantaged groups or individuals, including minimum wage legislation, believing it is detrimental. While it is out of the ordinary that a Black man who grew up in poverty would hold these views, his obituary sketched the path from his life experiences to his perspectives. There is, of course, a kind of logic and a credibility that comes from being one of the ones who “made it” despite impossible odds that can lead us to wonder: Is he right? Is he, like the unlikely hero of Slumdog Millionaire, someone who managed by virtue of his childhood and early adulthood trials, not to win a gameshow, but to piece together a blueprint for the kind of social contract that can provide the most opportunity to the greatest number people, if only they have the get-up-and-go to seize it?
…a credibility that comes from being one of the ones who “made it” despite impossible odds that can lead us to wonder: Is he right?
There are those instants in our lives that we remember because they have surprised us. For me, one is a sentence, a short description uttered by one of my college professors. As a first-generation college student and a female in a heavily male-dominated field, I was a “no-excuses” kind of student, reluctant to support anything (like affirmative action) that, in my view, put a question mark at the end of my list of qualifications. Likewise, I believed that for those around me, whatever the difficult circumstances of their pasts or presents, success was a matter of hard work, period. I was called out on this mental inflexibility by a marvelous professor, who said to me one day, cheerfully and without accusation, “You think that because you did it, everyone should be able to do the same. That’s what first-generation college students think.”
That’s what first-generation college students think.
Our brains are wonderful organs, allowing us to process what they consume over many years. Imagine the lack of progress we would make over a lifetime if, like our stomachs, they digested for mere hours. A couple of decades of processing “That’s what first-generation college students think” allowed me to realize that people who grow up in a family where college graduation is the norm, not the exception, do not have the expectation that they must get where they are going without assistance. There is an awareness of the many different kinds of obstacles individuals face on their paths to success, and no shame in receiving assistance (private tutors, therapists, having parents foot the bill instead of working through college, what have you).
Imagine the lack of progress we would make over a lifetime if, like our stomachs, our brains digested for mere hours.
But for those in the first generation, we seem to feel that we can only take credit if we can claim we’ve received no special help along the way. But of course, it’s never true that someone has made it “on their own.” What’s truer is that the people who have provided that assistance have simply done so without requiring recognition for it. These are mothers and fathers. These are sometimes sisters who worked jobs so brothers could get an education and “make it,” if you can read between the lines of “Hillbilly Elegy.” And if you can’t manage to read between the lines, Anne Cohen spells it out nicely for you. In Mr. William’s paradigm, those who are disadvantaged can indeed rise to the top, but typically only through great sacrifice by others in their lives. It doesn’t need to be this way, and I’m optimistic it will change, if only because in any family there is only one individual who is the first to go to college and therefore most susceptible to this kind of thinking, but countless individuals who are second, third, fourth and fifth…
Many versions of the following have been said: “When you make it to the top, be sure to extend one hand back down and pull someone up after you.” In Mr. William’s paradigm, sitting atop one’s pile of achievements as a shining example is the extent to which it behooves someone who has “made it” to help pull the next person up. Let us, instead, recognize the factors that have led to real gains for multitudes: civil rights legislation, women’s solidarity, LGBTQIA solidarity, government spending for programs like Head Start that acknowledge hardships and intervene, and, yes, minimum wage laws that help prevent exploitation.
There is a very long list of professors, economists, politicians and sociologists — such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks — who have over the past decades publicly disagreed with Mr. William’s recipe for success, which he described in, among many other works, his 2010 autobiography, “Up From the Projects.” Incidentally, Booker T. Washington, who described his emancipation at the age of six in his 1901 autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” lamented that the federal government had no plan at the beginning to help former slaves begin to build lives as free citizens; “Even as a youth, and later in manhood, I had the feeling that it was cruelly wrong in the central government, at the beginning of our freedom, to fail to make some provision for the general education of our people in addition to what the states might do, so that the people would be the better prepared for the duties of citizenship.” It remains “cruelly wrong” to pretend that the government has no role to play in helping all individuals overcome obstacles to living healthy and productive lives, not least because industrious citizens give rise to a strong nation.
