Episode 53: The Moynihan Report

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the rut.

So today, Adrienne, we are kind of tackling one of our white whales.

Yeah.

A document that is sort of the source of a lot of the 20th century gender politics that we talk about on the show, and also something that still has big reverberations today.

Yeah.

And that is the Moynihan report.

One content note before we delve in.

So the word Negro is basically in every single sentence of this fucking report.

I don't want to say it.

So I'm going to say black instead.

I know that's a little squeamish and whatever.

And in some way, I wanted to give you the unadulterated thing.

It's just a me thing.

Like that's not how I want to spend my mornings.

So don't quote what we say here because I'm changing it slightly just out of my own weirdness.

FYI.

And then the other thing we should say before we get going is to please rate, review us on iTunes, follow us on Patreon.

We have cool new content coming out twice a month.

We had a total freak flag episode that is kind of

people loving it.

Yeah, it's rules.

I love that episode.

A 90-minute tour de force of some weird ass Germans,

my forte.

And the next episode, I think, on the Patreon is going to be on basic lupine urology, the Dick Wolf universe.

We're going to be talking about law and order.

We're going to go for something completely different.

All right.

Well, enjoy our conversation about the Moynihan Report.

Give our listeners a little introduction.

What is the Moynihan Report?

So the Moynihan Report was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, about whom more in a second, in 1965.

And it has the title, and I will not be saying this word too often, but I have to say the title, The Negro Family, The Case for National Action.

We'll call it the Moynihan Report from now on because I'm not super wild about that terminology, but okay.

And as you say, like this report is ground zero for so many of our contemporary pathologies, right?

Like one thing I learned in researching this was that, did you know the phrase blaming the victim was introduced specifically in reference to the Moynihan Report?

Wow.

Yeah, by the psychologist William Bryan, 1971.

You're spoiling a little.

I feel like our listeners are getting a little sense of what is in the Moynihan Report, if the phrase blaming the victim was coined to address it.

Yeah, it's blaming the victim, the movie.

Yeah.

And I should say, like, as just a little bit of table setting, this is two white people discussing both a foundational text in discourse about African Americans and a foundational text, even though sort of ex negativo, for black studies and African American studies more broadly.

And it's obviously not awesome to have two white people on the pod constantly saying the word Negro.

But so here's the thing.

Like there is amazing work out there on the Moynihan Report, and Black scholars have been kind of pushing back on this document pretty much since it first was published.

And so we sort of thought it would be a little weird to have someone on just to say that, right?

Like this, the work is out there.

The work can be read.

And I think it's sort of incumbent on us to inform ourselves.

Yeah.

And this is like Jesse Jackson to Hortense Spillers to Carol Stack, Kathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson.

Like this is just a plethora of really smart black scholarship critiquing this document and trying to like debunk some of its assumptions, which have been like really influential in American policy for a long time.

Yeah.

And so we decided we were going to just read through as much of the stuff as we could and synthesize as much of it as we can fit here.

And this may well be a two-parter because of that.

So yeah, so this is an episode about two things.

So about a report that I think most people haven't read, but that had a ton of influence.

Not all of it bad, I would say, but the vast majority of it bad.

And I should say part of what we wanted to do is just really read this document and sort of talk people through it.

In talking about the report, we're also going to be talking about much bigger issues, right?

It's about a particular version of liberalism that produced it and the the version of neoconservatism that it enabled.

And as you say, it is about the decades and decades of brilliant critiques from, yeah, from Jesse Jackson to Roderick Ferguson, basically.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So let's see if we can like zoom out

and just look at the legacy of the Moynihan Report, right?

Because it has become kind of a shibboleth

for people to refer to when they want to signal a kind of like, you know, baseline skepticism of multiculturalism, right?

And it's also become a favorite talking point for people who already have liberal cred if they're about to steal some lines from the Republican Party.

So let's walk you through it.

Like, first of all, let's read a passage from a speech about Moynihan from 1993.

This goes,

and that's what I ask of you.

Do you really like Senator Moynihan?

Do you really admire him?

If you really agree with all of the things that he's written, if you think the time has come to stop worrying about whether what you feel is politically correct and just say what you believe and try to get this country back together again and start saving these children again, then you must become more intolerant of things that we take for granted.

We cannot permit this country to continue to waste the lives of a whole generation of children.

And the crowd goes wild.

And that was, he's referring to Senator Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the author of the Moynihan Report, later became became a senator at the time that he wrote the report.

In 1965, he was working as sort of like a deputy secretary of labor under President Johnson, right?

That's right.

But this speech saying, we need to take our country back, we need to, dare I say, make America great again, that was a speech given by President Bill Clinton

at the SEIU Union Hall.

No, I'm sorry.

I am being informed that it was given actually at a fundraiser at the New York Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

That's right.

It's a speech I know very well because it's the first time Bill Clinton used politically correct, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A real like little Adrian Daub Easter egg there.

That's right.

They were what, like in college or high school at the time, and they were just like, one day there's going to be a gangly German

who bothers the Clinton presidential library about like, when didn't you use that first?

Like, can you find me this, like, this,

can you find me this speech?

Yeah.

so maybe I'll give you the next one if you'd like.

This is a passage from a 2006 book.

The response of liberal policymakers and civil rights leaders didn't help.

In their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, they tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.

Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early 60s when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among the black poor.

This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in shaping the economic success of a community strained credulity and alienated working-class whites, particularly since some of the most liberal policymakers lived far removed from urban disorder.

So that book is The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama.

So I think what we're like sort of dancing around here, right, is that the Moynihan Report is something that is understood as being transgressive against the pieties of the American left, right?

You're not allowed to say that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right.

That's right.

But you and I are, you know, purveyors of reasonableness, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and this sort of center left wing of the Democratic Party that wanted to pitch itself as a kind of like conciliatory realism.

They are willing to buck this liberal orthodoxy and say that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right.

And we should say that what Daniel Patrick Moynihan seems to have been right about in these men's estimation was that black poverty

was a symptom of black gender relations, right?

And namely of the insufficient deference to patriarchal authority within the black family.

And that is like, that is what they're saying is a forbidden truth, right?

Well, they say they say say family structures because they are still Democrats, so they have to euphemize a little bit.

But yeah, that's what's behind it.

I think you're right.

Right.

So like, do you want to just, before we go a little further into the history of this report and its like position in American like political discourses in the decades since, do you want to just like give a 10,000-foot synopsis of the Moynihan report for our listeners?

Because I imagine not everybody is familiar with this.

It's true.

Well, should we talk about him first?

I think it's actually easier to sort of understand.

The document is a little difficult to place in time unless you know a little bit about him, I think.

All right, let's get into the guy.

And there's also this kind of weird insider-outsider dynamic, right?

Like we've just quoted fully half of the Democratic presidents since he wrote the damn report, like endorsing it, and yet they're both presenting it as this like forbidden wisdom that like the left and frankly liberals weren't ready for, according to them.

It's like, well, I don't know if like two out of four Democratic presidents and like all the Republicans, frankly, agree with this thing.

Not sure how heterodox this fucking thing is, but there is something about the way Moynihan goes about it that I think kind of gives us a little bit of a sense of why it had this kind of strange effect, where on the one hand, it has informed, it's been social policy or has informed it in the United States since it came out.

And yet it's always sort of invoked as this like, oh, we, well, we're not allowed to say that he was right.

Okay, so who was Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

So he had a long, eventful life as both an academic and a politician.

And it's frankly so full that it's maybe easier to focus on what he's not because there's a lot of what he's not.

Just to give you a sense, I mean, you're recording this in New York City.

I'm in San Francisco, but I was not three weeks ago at the Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station, named after this guy.

So, you know, that tells you something.

This guy was pretty impactful.

And there are parts of his record that people could point us to.

We're like, well, you guys aren't talking about this thing.

Like, yeah, there's just tons and tons.

And there are contradictions there.

And some of the most interesting critiques of the report sort of point out that really it's not the conclusions, it's the contradictions that Moynihan sort of carries forward that really make this report so interesting.

There's a great book by a historian named Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights, about the afterlife of the Moynihan Report, who makes the point that Moynihan is kind of an unlikely, he's not a likely guy to write this thing, right?

He was not known for family policy.

He was not a specialist on what was then called race relations.

There were sociologists studying Black Americans.

He was not one of them.

He sort of became a expert, quote unquote, expert on race because he wrote the report, right?

Like he constantly was like being invited to speak about it the same way that like, you know, the authors of the bell curve sort of became experts.

It's like, you had a hot take.

And I guess now you're the fucking expert here.

And he also, as you mentioned, was a undersecretary or something like that.

He worked for the U.S.

Department of Labor in any case, which didn't really do research on race or the family at the time and still doesn't today.

There are other parts of the federal government that would be much more obviously the place where you could do that kind of work.

So that's the thing that Daniel Geary points out.

He's an unlikely avatar for this kind of position.

So three points I think are worth emphasizing.

So Moynihan is born in 1927 into a lower middle class family.

And he's born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but he grew up in Hell's Kitchen, where I lived for a little while, which until basically the time I moved here was pretty much a working class neighborhood in Manhattan.

You single-handedly gentrified it when you moved there.

I gentrified it.

I fucking gentrified it.

I was like, where's my juice?

So he grew up pretty poor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think there's some indication.

I didn't read like a full biography of him, but like not just poor, but in a kind of slightly disordered household.

So like there is a little bit of recognition in there.

Like his fixation on family structures is to some extent projection, right?

He's thinking about his own upbringing.

What do you mean by disordered?

I think he had an absent father is like my impression.

And his trajectory is basically that of a child of fairly modest means making major advances due to government programs, right?

To government largesse.

So just to give a couple of examples, right, went to New York public high schools, went to CCNY, which at the time was free to all New Yorkers.

Then he served in the Navy for a bit and he went to Tufts, I think on the GI Bill.

Got a PhD from Tufts eventually and landed various academic jobs.

And I should say, like, you know, congratulations to him, but also like getting a job in the early 60s in academia, they were founding new universities like every week, right?

Like you'd had to be.

a communist to not be back in a U.S.

university at the time, which again, it's not to take anything away from his accomplishments.

It's just to say that he sort of rides this elevator that comes with the enormous expansion of the U.S.

federal government and state governments, frankly, during the Cold War.

And his entire uplift is driven by public funding.

That's very, very important, given that he becomes kind of an avatar for disinvestment in an interesting way, right?

The Moynihan Report is often read as kind of a Bible for disinvestment, right?

We can't give these people more money.

We have to teach them the right values, right?

This becomes kind of like the mantra of Reaganism.

That's not where Moynihan himself is coming from.

Moynihan was absolutely ready to just like throw cash around

because that is how he himself had sort of come up.

So again, maybe I'll quote from Daniel Geary here.

It says, when the civil rights movement's cresting tide pushed policymakers to address racial inequality, Moynihan felt he understood the issue in ways that other Johnson officials did not.

His childhood experience of economic insecurity was unusual in elite policymaking circles.

One hand felt his personal history of being raised in a broken family with economic hardship allowed him to understand African Americans who came from, quote, mostly the same world, end quote, as he did.

His Catholicism further led him to see economic inequality as a social injustice and prompted his belief that, quote, family interests were perhaps the central objective of social policy.

So he's trading on his like working-class credibility, which is probably pretty rare among people who are working in the executive branch of the Johnson administration, right?

And he has a set of ideological commitments to which he is bringing this reckoning with his own history and the recognition that comes with it of, you know, the experience of poverty, right?

So he's seeing this.

as a moral crisis the way some liberals might, right?

Like this is something wrong that's happening, but he's also seeing the origin of this wrongness as being in the breakdown of the quote-unquote family structure, by which he seems to mean like heterosexual nuclear family, right?

Exactly.

I think the Catholicism part here is really, really important, right?

Like this is a kind of Catholic liberalism that's about uplift, but that connects that uplift with moral suasion.

That's saying if people live sinful lives, like there's something that should offend us, right?

And so I do think that's important, that like there is a social conservatism, what we would today think of as a social conservatism, right underneath the surface of what seems to have been a very genuine desire for greater racial equality.

Aaron Powell, I'm going to devote my life, I, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or at least this moment of my career, to

grappling with the moral emergency of black poverty.

But I'm also going to say that this is a product of their marriages being

insufficiently traditional and of men not being in robust positions of authority in these homes, and particularly of like black women being

too powerful.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So Moynihan is Irish Catholic, but it's worth comparing his trajectory to the neocons like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoritz, or Friend of the Pod, Mitch Decter, right?

These are also people who experienced the enormous sort of uplift that the US government was able to generate during the war years and immediately afterwards, and who when they then looked at African Americans, always seemed to ask, hey, why did we do it?

And they couldn't.

Right.

And their answers all began skewing towards like, hey, maybe on some level, we're just better, right?

As time went by.

And Moynihan will be kind of a weird neocon himself.

I think his starting point is further to the left.

I think he doesn't go quite as far to the right, but this is to some extent his trajectory, right?

Like

the idea that there is a culture of poverty that is holding people back and that no amount of government largesse is able to ameliorate.

It's not a shocker that like Podoritz would publish that, right?

He's like, yeah, I fully agree.

The moral emergency goes from the suffering of these black people to their behavior that is seen as creating the suffering.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we'll see.

Like, I mean, like, there are moments in the report where like, you're not even quite sure what the emergency is.

Like, he almost sort of starts sounding like, oh, the lack of a male breadwinner is the crisis.

So it's like, no, no, no.

Like, you mean, like, you want to fix the outcomes, right?

Like, if a kid, I don't know, like, is able to use the public school system effectively and make more money than a lot more money than their mom, like, isn't that the outcome you want?

Like, even if there's no dad in the picture, it's like,

maybe.

It's not even quite clear where he thinks the real emergency lies, right?

So given the second point, given the comparison to the neocons, it is worth saying that.

Moynihan was a Democrat and not some kind of Democrat in name only either, right?

He was a Kennedy delegate at the 1960 convention,

Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and Research under JFK and LBJ,

made major contributions to Johnson's war on poverty, which the Moynihan report sort of comes out of.

He pushed for early affirmative action policies, et cetera, et cetera.

So

not some kind of covert right-winger, right?

Aaron Ross Powell, no, this is a guy who came to his

brand of misogynist racism from like pretty robustly liberal values, which I think is what is so instructive about Moynihan.

Exactly.

And why someone like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama might find so much common ground with him, frankly.

Sorry.

Yeah, there's a really great line in the Daniel Geary book Beyond Civil Rights, which really I can't recommend enough, where he points out that like Clinton and Obama and others sort of keep saying that like people misunderstood Moynihan.

And he says like, no, the controversy had nothing to do with misunderstandings.

It resulted, quote, not from critics' misunderstanding of Moynihan's reformist intentions, but from the report's ambiguities that allowed multiple interpretations, right?

Like in some way, I think what we're saying is this is a liberal who's living the contradictions of mid-century liberalism, right?

And is tapping into a socially conservative vein of that liberalism.

And it's all coming to the surface in that text.

It's not that he's like a closet conservative.

It's not that he's a liberal and like these PC idiots are making too much of a big deal out of this.

No, it's about the conservative strain in mid-century liberalism.

Right.

So the third point I want to make is that by the 1970s, Moynihan did definitely make kind of a new conservative turn.

He left government in the second Johnson administration because he was an RFK ally.

Oops.

Yeah, it didn't go well for the RFK allies.

Yeah.

No, Johnson hated that guy as much as we hate his son.

And eventually he sort of settled down at Harvard where he ran the Harvard MIT Center for Urban Studies, right?

So like you write one report about how black men aren't stepping up to the plate and you get your own center for urban studies.

That's all it takes.

Yeah.

It's got to be nice.

And by then he sounded a lot more hawkish on what was required to deal with urban turmoil and urban decay.

Of course, also between 1965 and 1975, like right like the shape of the American inner city really changes and the look look at the inner city really changes.

White flight really kicks into overdrive, urban unrest and riotings and police crackdowns, all that stuff.

He then joined the Nixon administration and served on the Urban Affairs Council, though his ideas, which included an early version of universal basic income, interestingly enough.

Yeah, so like he's never, right?

Like he's not completely switching.

Well, this, this, um, this also illustrates, I think, the mutual ideological permeation of the parties

in the mid-century, right?

And in a way that is,

I don't want to say it's not happening now.

It's just only happening in one direction.

Yeah, I was going to say John Fetterman seems to be doing it real well right now.

But it's a different relationship to like partisan alignment on these issues in our era than it was in the 1970s.

And I definitely think Moynihan is a product of that political condition.

Yeah.

And I mean, like, it's the kind of crossing of the aisle that flew under the flag of like realism, right?

Like, oh, we tried being nice.

and now maybe what Dick Nixon is saying is what we need, right?

Like there is a, I mean, this is what Clinton's third way was all about, right?

Like the idea that it is realistic to have your sister soldier moment to throw minorities under the bus.

Right.

And the idea that like a white supremacist form of conservatism or a male supremacist form of conservative, like social conservatism in particular, gets the stamp of reasonable authenticity, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And to a degree, like economic or fiscal conservatism, like also has this veneer of responsibility, right?

The liberals are where you go if you're if you're dreamy and idealistic, and the conservatives are where you go if you're an adult is sort of the like emotional mapping of political difference at this time.

Yeah.

And I mean, that's still, that's still the way, right?

I mean, like, and if you think about it for a second, right?

Like the idea that, I mean, we'll get to what exactly the report suggests, but at least there's one reading where you can say, he says giving money to poor people does not make them less poor.

Where you're like, I don't know,

feels like it might, right?

That's, that's idealistic.

That's not realistic.

Forcing people to stay in marriages somehow that is never spelled out, that's realism.

It's like, I don't know, that sounds like fucking fantasy to me.

Like, what, what are you going to wave a magic wand?

What are you doing?

Right.

Like, it's this weird kind of flip where like insane social engineering kind of gets the stamp of realism.

Meanwhile, like people with more money are less poor.

It's like, oh, you hippie scum.

Yeah.

It's like, I don't know, man.

Like, feels like numerically, that's just true.

Like, if I had $10,000 as opposed to $1,000, I think I'd be $9,000 richer.

You know, not a math whiz or anything, but I feel like that's true.

And so, yeah, the way kind of realism gets recoded and also gets kind of like laundered through our education system and through the institutions of higher learning, I think he's very much emblematic of that.

So he's on the Urban Affairs Council.

His ideas never really connect with any of Nixon's inner orbit.

Nixon's busy with other things.

Yeah, he's got some fraud to commit.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, wiretapping, bombings in Southeast Asian countries without admitting to it.

You know, just like king shit.

And he later served as ambassador to the UN, which I feel like is like the still kind of the job you give to a member of the opposite party

if you want to keep him quiet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wasn't that like Nikki Haley's job in the first Trump administration?

It's like, eh, fuck off to New York.

Well, she is in the same party, technically.

I guess that's true, yeah.

Democrats are starting to seem more like Nikki Haley, but I digress.

So

then he goes to the Senate.

He goes to the Senate.

And he comes like our pal Hillary Clinton, the senator from the state of New York.

Yeah, and her immediate predecessor, in fact.

Really?

Wow.

Yes.

So an interesting thing.

He runs in 76, is elected representing the great state of New York, where you can't drive from 60th to 61st Street anymore without giving the government money,

which everyone's losing their mind about.

He defeated James L.

Buckley, who was, fun fact, William F.

Buckley's older brother.

Oh my god, there's like three families.

There's three people in this country, and the rest of us are just living in their goddamn like pool house or whatever.

Yeah, I'm not going to go through his life in government except to say that he continued to publish.

He kept writing for magazines like commentary and the public interest.

You're not convincing me this guy is a liberal.

I don't know.

Yeah, exactly.

So like the reason why Mora is wincing is that that's Podoritz's and Crystal's outfit, respectively.

So like, yeah, not exactly the nation, right?

And he served in the Senate until 2001 when he was succeeded by one Hillary Clinton.

So what you're saying is that this report is just a real sliver of his long career, in which we can trace some of these themes overarching throughout his decades in government.

But we can also sort of see this as a particular historical moment in March of 1965 when he's working for the Johnson administration before the Senate, before all these time in the UN, before Harvard.

He is but a lowly bureaucrat.

And this is when he makes a name for himself.

But like, what about this exact moment when he publishes the report?

Yeah, so right, like 1965, I think there's a lot of kind of historical baselines that our readers will be able to supply, at least American readers.

This is the high point of the civil rights movement.

It is a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

It's published in March of 1965.

We're still kind of at a moment when a lot seems possible.

Johnson's been in power, has been president since November of 1963, and the war on poverty becomes this kind of signature effort.

Well, that in Vietnam,

it's two signature initiatives.

So it's really coming out of a moment that we all kind of look back wistfully, right?

Like as like a government really sort of

staking a vociferous claim to defending the civil rights of all citizens and really using both the punitive power of the state and its monetary capacities to make that happen, right?

The immediate reason.

for the report it was not entirely clear to me but i think it's the following and i'm i'm steel manning this document quite a bit and i'll be doing that for a little bit because i don't want to just beat up on it but we'll get there um so there appear to have been provisions in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the A FDC program, that were contingent on there being, quote, no man in the house.

Yep.

Right.

And Moynihan, I think, at its most basic, like, obviously he's trying to do more with this report, but at its most basic, the report was trying to argue that this way the federal government was basically incentivizing the breakdown of black families, right?

That the federal government was destroying families through its attempts at ameliorating racism.

So, like, one of the things you do have to know about welfare programming in the decades before the Clinton welfare reform bill is that, yeah, it was dependent in order to get it.

Welfare recipients didn't just have to prove that they were poor.

They had to prove that they were poor and that there wasn't a man who could be supporting them and wasn't, right?

The idea was that women in children's poverty was not the collective responsibility of the state or the community to ameliorate, that it was the responsibility of whichever man had fathered those children, right?

Or whichever man that impoverished woman was supposed to belong to, right?

So you really had to do quite a bit of work to prove your own chastity, to prove your singleness, to prove that there wasn't some guy you were sleeping with who should take on your children as your own, to prove that you didn't have

a man who just didn't want to work, right?

Like you had to make it so that your poverty was a problem that your citizenship might entitle you to some sort of remedy for.

Almost a war to the state.

Yeah, as opposed to it being a man's problem, right?

So like women are not construed as like people who have their independent claims that they can make on the state in this sort of worldview of how the family functions, right?

Men are supposed to be the first intermediary.

Yeah.

But now a question for you.

How do you prove the absence of a man, right?

Like I guess Moynihan seems to think, and I mean, maybe he's right, but there are hardly any people interviewed and no people interviewed in the report.

He just kind of looks at some data.

But like, wouldn't it be easy to say, oh, there's no one, you know, you just like tell your boyfriend to like go take a walk if like someone visits?

Or like, how was this tested?

There are reports of not only like home visits, which are still a feature of a lot of like welfare administration, right?

To like check if there was a man in the house, but there's also reports of people like talking to your family and friends, you know, yeah, like to try and figure out if you were lying.

You know how like, not that this is a problem you ever had, but like a friend of mine did a green card marriage.

Right.

And

one of the things she had to do

was like buy an extra toothbrush and use it a lot.

So it looked like this person she was marrying to get a green card.

Not only that they were in a relationship, but like that they were living together constantly.

This is something that she had been told to do by other people who had gone through.

You know, the level of surveillance is more expansive and intimate than you would think when you're trying to get money.

Yeah.

Or become mayor of New York City.

Poor Eric Adams had to fake an entire fridge.

So Moynihan's objection to this, oddly enough, doesn't appear to have been that this is sexist.

It appears to have been that it incentivizes the breakdown of family structure, right?

Right.

Women are just going to throw out their husbands because they can get more from the government by being single than they can by having a dual-income household?

Is that all crazy, right?

So, I think so.

But I think it is all like fairly philosophical.

This is where, like, the fact that this is

you mentioned he's a bureaucrat who goes into academia.

It's not quite true.

He's an academic who goes into government and then goes back into academia.

And I think the fact that this is like, this is kind of a theory in search of like actual data, it seems to me, right?

Many, many such cases, yeah.

Here's how he put it in the God Ken lectures that he gave at Harvard in the 1980s, which were published in 1986 as the book Family and Nation.

The individual had been our primary unit of measurement, men, women, children, all lumped together.

Our employment statistics counted as equally unemployed a father of nine, a housewife coming back into the labor market in her 40s, and a teenager looking for a part-time job after school.

The minimum wage required by law to be paid to any of these persons was exactly the same.

If they should somehow have the same level of earnings, which would have been easy enough, and were to lose their jobs, the amount of unemployment insurance paid to each would have been exactly the same.

American arrangements pertained to the individual, and only in the rarest circumstances did they define the family as the relevant unit.

This was a pattern almost uniquely American.

Most of the industrial democracies of the world had adopted a wide range of social programs designed specifically to support the stability and viability of the family.

So, wait, he's saying this sounds like an argument for the family wage as applied to like the welfare, right?

Like no, no, no, no, no, we should be paying the man with nine children more than we should be paying the single mother or the housewife just coming back into the labor force.

Yeah, like on the one hand, like the idea that families with dependents might need extra help seems totally uncontroversial, but like there's more going on here, right?

Like A, he's saying, well,

these people are not themselves equal, right?

It's not that like, oh, some people might require a little bit more of a leg up.

He's saying like the fact that we're treating them equally is a problem, right?

Like there's a kind of corporatism almost going on here, where the family as a unit is sort of like the central node of society for him, right?

Like, why shouldn't a person losing their job get unemployment based on how much they made?

Right.

Like, does it matter whether they're a single mom or whether they're a dad or whether they're a kid that only had that one job?

Well, it matters if you see the role of the government as to incentivize a specific kind of conduct in private life, right?

Like if you see the government as

having an interest

in encouraging heterosexual marriage, if you see them having an interest in encouraging childbearing, right?

This is not a wildly divergent set of assertions about like what the government's interests are and what the government can do in pursuit of those interests from what you see in terms of like the briefs filed by anti-abortion state attorneys general now saying things like, well, you know, our birth rate is declining and our teen pregnancy rate is a part of that.

And we need to, you know, this is out of Idaho.

Like we need to encourage a certain kind of personal conduct and we get to use the resources, our state resources to encourage that kind of private sexual and reproductive conduct.

You know, this is straight up like the breakdown of the family stuff we see today.

Exactly.

In fact, would you be shocked to learn that a few pages later, Moynehan basically bemoans that, quote, at some level of awareness following the Second World War, the quote-unquote bourgeois family had become politically suspect in the intellectual circles where a good deal of social thinking began.

Ding, ding, ding.

I know.

He's like, you're mad at ladies in your circle again.

Like, this isn't actually about the black family.

This is about like women who have jobs around you and you're being real weird about it.

This is about women he knows

who who read The Feminine Mystique, which came out two years before,

and who are getting grand ideas that maybe domestic life is not all that they are suited for.

Exactly.

But all of it in the name of a group that he's very much not describing.

This is the other part that I really wanted to highlight for you, that like he's not just saying, hey, the way we're delivering help to our poorest members of our society is ineffective, right?

He's really saying elite thinking about this is to blame.

And that is really, really important.

That like, right, there is an anti-elitism here.

Like he, I mean, I'm maybe psychoanalyzing here too much, but like that was the overall energy of the Johnson administration, I feel like, right?

Like Johnson personally hated the sort of best and the brightest, right?

Like the Harvard club that basically had taken over the Kennedy administration, right, in 60 to 63.

And so maybe Moynihan is sort of trying to go against that.

But at the same time, it is kind of hilarious to assume that a good deal of social thinking began in these like intellectual circles where the quote-unquote bourgeois family had become politically suspects.

Like, yeah,

sure,

among the masthead of the partisan review.

I'm not sure if that's how the administration thinks through its delivery of aid to families.

I mean, I think feminists at the time would have had some things to say about the gender politics shared and distributed among the masthead of the partisan review.

But this is also something that you see a lot because, like, technically,

he's blaming the cultural attitudes of the elites for the cultural attitudes of the poor

while claiming to stand in for a better, more virtuous, or more authentic poor, right?

Right.

He is positioning himself, again, from a position within the Department of Labor, like, yeah, as a salt-of-the-earth, authentic guy, right?

Like, I grew up in poverty, I know what this is like, right?

But he's also positioning himself as the superiors of this racially marginalized group of poor people, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So he's the good kind of white person blaming the bad kind of white person for the behavior of black people.

Congratulations, you're JD Vance.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, you know what?

This reminds me of, actually, is a book that we did an episode on with Rebecca Tracer called The Marriage Pushers, right?

Yeah.

A lot of that at the time was about the rollout of this 2023 book by an economist named Melissa Kearney,

who wrote this book called The Two-Parent Privilege, right?

Saying, you know, elites have soured on marriage, but they are the ones getting married and reaping the benefits of marriage, but their bad attitudes about marriage are seeping down to the poor who are therefore not getting married, right?

It's like, it's weird.

causally convoluted populism, right?

They can imagine that like feminists are broadly influential among the elite, that they are substantially degrading the institution of marriage, which, you know, like I fucking wish, and then like see

that they are then like brainwashing the poor into doing things that are bad for them, right?

Feminists famously so effective at brainwashing people who are not feminists into doing their bidding.

Oh my God.

But like Kearney also sort of blames this on a cultural or a values pathology, right?

And the critique of her book was that it mistook correlation and causation, right?

Like you're saying that people are poorer because they're not getting married, when in fact, what's happening is that they're not getting married because they're poorer.

Yeah.

And I wonder if there's something similar.

Like, that book very much seems like the granddaughter of the Moynihan report, right?

Like, it also seems to have a correlation-causation difference.

It does, although we'll get there.

I think Moynihan does acknowledge that this is the output of poverty as well.

I think this is what the quote I read earlier is referring to when it says contradictions.

Like,

the report is just not clear.

You can read it kind of both ways.

Like he does seem to say, like, of course, how could the family not break down in a situation in which this brutal system of racial oppression and capitalist exploitation creates all the preconditions for people's families to come apart?

Right.

And he's and he's really quite forthright about that.

But then that's...

That's somehow not the thing he wants to address.

It's, well, maybe he thinks that's going to get addressed anyway.

I don't know.

It's kind of bizarre.

Like if we just make women suffer a little more, somehow all these economic problems and racism problems will just be like click into place and be solved.

Well, part of the pose of the report, I think, is to say, hey, this other stuff didn't work.

Right.

And that's the thing, right?

Like Obama in 2006.

Clinton in 93, they're always like, well, we tried and look where we are now, right?

Black people are just as poor, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, Moynihan, for those of you playing along at home, home, writes this like a full 12 months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Right.

So he's declaring the Civil Rights Act's failure.

Yeah.

Like within a year of it being passed.

Yeah, right?

Like it's, it's kind of nuts, right?

Like on the one hand, it makes sense that like Clinton could say this with some.

I mean, I don't think it was justified, but you can sort of see how he got there saying like, oh, well, we've tried for 30 years, right?

Like we tried for 12 months and not even that hard, frankly.

It's kind of nuts, right?

So here's what he writes.

I'm quoting from Moynihan here.

The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms, the circumstances of the black American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better.

Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive.

The gap between the black family and most other groups in American society is widening.

I think that's pretty remarkable, right?

The U.S.

has just passed a huge act, barely, we might add, enshrining civil rights for african americans and here's moinhan saying hey i don't know it's been like almost a couple of months and black poverty still exists so that uh clearly didn't work right the other thing that we might flag for listeners we're going to get back to that in a second is notice that he says like indices of dollars of income standards of living and years of education deceive i'm going to say more about that later it looks like it's getting better but i'm here to tell you that it's not right you're like i don't know man like i don't know what those numbers were doing in 1965.

But like, if dollars of income, standard of living, and years of education are going up, I don't know, that feels good, man.

Isn't that what we want?

But are they getting married enough?

Yes.

So it's not really a correlation causation.

It's what philosophers call the petitio principi, right?

Like it's a circular argument, right?

Like he keeps redefining what he's measuring to make it fit the ideological project that he has going in.

It's also interesting to me that like he's kind of, I don't know, this is just a very like Democrat thing to do, even though this guy agreed with and hung out with Republicans a lot.

This is such a Democrat thing to do because he's working for Lyndon Johnson and publishing a big report about how Lyndon Johnson's like signature civil rights program has failed.

He's like, you know, because Democrats always secretly believe that the Republicans are right and deserve to govern and deserve to win more.

So he's just like shooting his boss in the foot, right?

Yeah.

Like the Moynihan report is positioning itself as being like kind of opposed to the rest of the Johnson administration's civil rights regime, right?

Possibly, possibly not, right?

Like, I think this is, this is another place where there's a kind of split personality here.

On the one hand, like, it can easily feel, given what happened with the report afterwards, it can easily seem like this is kind of a fifth column within this kind of liberal project, and this is how it's going to all get killed.

But he says at the end of the report, there is, however, a profound change for the better in one respect.

The president has committed the nation to an all-out effort to eliminate poverty wherever it exists among whites or black people, and a militant, organized, and responsible black movement exists to join that effort.

So he's kind of, he's either super pessimistic about like, oh, this is never going to work, but at the same time, he's also almost too optimistic.

He's like, look, we have a civil rights movement that's doing a great job.

We have an administration that's finally taking this stuff seriously.

And it's true, this wasn't something that had been on previous administrations' radar, right?

So he either thinks like the Johnson administration is going to last forever, or he thinks like he's already preparing for what comes after, maybe both at the same time.

I should say that this is Roderick Ferguson's point, I think, in his book Aberrations in Black, where he says like, it's easy to look at this document and think, hey, this is a closet reactionary who's just trying to roll back civil rights.

That is indeed a thought I had, yes.

But Ferguson points out that more probably we have to take the report seriously as a part of the liberal project.

That is to say, we have to believe Moynihan to some extent when he claims not to be a reactionary.

Basically, Ferguson says that like, quote, Moynihan displaced the contradictions that framed the civil rights era onto the African-American family.

End quote.

Like, I think that's, that to me seems right.

Because like, if you read something like, right, now we have this president who's committed to eliminating poverty, like, he seems to believe this to some extent, right?

And he does seem to think like, hey, we have a huge opportunity here with this militant, organized, and responsible movement, right?

Like, he means those all as positive, right?

He's saying, like, like, there will be people holding our feet to the fire and that's a good thing.

Like there is a kind of like what if mid-century liberalism but forever going on here.

Like he's not, I think Ferguson's exactly right.

It's not as easy as like, this guy is just a fake.

Like it's it's scarier than that in some way.

So do you want to tease out a little bit of like what are the contradictions that he's like bringing to the fore that he's a product of so we can think a little more deeply about like this moment in like American capitalism and how it's coming to bear on the black family.

Yeah.

So I think the contradictions are basically what is the role of racism in organizing American public life and what can be done to overcome it, right?

There is a question of like, is the difference that you observe between black and white families in 1965 just a coefficient of racism or is there something else going on, right?

And I think Moynihan in different chapters of this report, which by the way, for our readers is available available on Wikipedia and is not very long, like it very consistently gives both answers.

I think that's what Ferguson is thinking about.

And right down to the question of whether it's sanguine about this project or ultimately a defeatist project, right?

Like, is it trying to explain why this won't have worked in a few years?

Or is it saying, hey, if we do it this way, I think it will work.

And given that we now have eternal democratic majorities, I think we can finally do this, right?

It's both.

I think he usually sort of occupies both sides of these kinds of like pretty stark questions.

And as Ferguson is saying, the reason it doesn't become obvious and the reason that someone like Obama or someone like Clinton can draw on this stuff or someone like Kearney can draw on this stuff is that these contradictions are kind of all displaced onto the black family.

Like it becomes this kind of basically it does whatever Moynihan needs it to do at any given point in the report.

Aaron Ross Powell, that might be a good moment to segue to talking about Moynihan's method, right?

Because you talked talked about how he says that, you know,

by

all of these empirical measures, black people seem to be doing better, but they're not really doing any better.

Is that true?

What does he mean by that?

Like, what is he talking about?

Right.

The claim is exactly the community has, in recent years, has probably been getting worse, not better.

I should have talked to Astorian before this.

I can't speak to whether that's true or not, though I'm guessing Moynihan is probably not totally wrong.

Just sort of thinking about what I've learned in economics, right?

The New Deal and post-World War II programs, if you think about the Federal Housing Administration, if you think about GIA Bill, et cetera, et cetera, were of course huge wealth generators.

And black Americans were often excluded from those, right?

There's that wonderful book by Richard Rothstein, Color of Law, sort of points out that the federal government, in fact, was making sure that they were excluded from it.

So easily could be true, right?

That like if the massive wealth generation of the time is largely tied up in things that African Americans are precluded from, well, it would stand to reason that their relative wealth shrinks, right?

So maybe possible.

But it's interesting that Moynihan doesn't seem to be referring to any of that.

Because as I said, he says, indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive.

The gap between the black community and most other groups in American society is widening.

And as we were saying, I feel like dollars of income, standards of living, years of education seem like pretty good gauges for whether a community is doing better or worse than before, right?

A little strange to say like, well, don't look at any of that stuff.

But that's because Moynihan wants to build up to his main point, which is, quote, the fundamental problem in which this is most clearly the case is that the family structure.

I should say this isn't the whole of Moynihan's argument here, but I wanted to sort of spell it out this broadly.

Because there is this risk of circularity in this argument.

All these other indicators we might look at deceive us, right?

The only indicator that tells us true is the one that I've decided is the indicator I want to focus my report on, right?

Because, you know, I care about it.

The family is important because the family is important, right?

It's circular, but it's also, it's a tautology, right?

He's not really...

Does he make a case for the significance of the family on the merits or does he consider that self-evident?

Well, so this is where I think he's full on correlation equals causation.

He does have data where he tries to show that basically what he calls illegitimacy rates are higher and divorces are higher, right?

And we can get into those specific data in a second.

But then he's like, oh, and see, that's the only thing that could explain this.

And you're like, yeah, or I don't know, like the racism that all these people were living in, right?

In the end, Moynihan, he's like mostly responding to difference, even though.

as he'll make clear, he's aware that this difference is not innate or cultural, but he kind of seems to notice two differences.

Like, well, obviously those both must explain each other, right?

He knows that it's an output of racist policies.

Why do more African-American families in 1965 live in multi-generational households?

Well, it's because it's an effect of redlining, right?

Matriarchal structures can be effects of incarceration, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Or like low-pay itinerant labor.

Exactly.

I mean, it's also interesting to me that he's not just identifying these differences, right?

Like, it would not be crazy to me that these empirical differences in the typical style of American families across racial lines are like demonstrable, right?

That doesn't sound, that doesn't sound crazy.

It doesn't sound crazy to me that they would have some downstream economic effects, right?

Like, if you are forced exclusively into

low-wage, low-status jobs, that I imagine would make it harder to take care of a kid, right?

Exactly.

But his solution,

his solution to the problem of like single mothers are more likely to be in poverty than married couples raising children are.

His solution to that is not make it easier for single mothers.

It's compel people to remain in marriage, right?

Yeah.

So there's a value that is like predating the data is, I guess what I'm trying to say.

Exactly.

And a norm, right?

Basically, his prescription is make them more like the white family, right?

He says the white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.

By contrast, the family structure of lower class African Americans is highly unstable and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.

It also assumes that white middle class families is working out really well

for everyone, which I think there is a nascent social movement emerging that is about to contest that idea.

See free dad, Betty.

Yeah, but this idea that like the white middle class nuclear family is a perfect ideal that needs to be aspired to and maintained and even enforced through policy and law is like, it's just very conspicuous to me.

I also love complete breakdown.

Like, what's a complete breakdown?

It sounds so catastrophizing, right?

It also looks at single black mothers raising their children with limited resources and does not see the fortitude or determination or ingenuity or thrift of those women.

It sees the moral crisis of their sex lives.

Yeah, worse yet, it sees their strength as kind of phallic, as Horsehand Spillers will point out.

And hence hence pathological.

Yeah.

Hence pathological, right?

Like the very fact that they're doing this, the very fact that they're managing is horrifying to him.

Right.

They should be dainty flowers who are suffering more, I guess.

Like, this is something that we talked about before: anti-black racism tends to be a masculinizing racism.

That's right.

You see it really clearly in the Moynihan report, where black women are masculinized and thereby rendered monstrous.

You know, they are women who are independent.

Yeah.

And that's, and that's, you know, so horrible.

Yeah.

exactly.

So you were asking about method.

How does he propose to show the complete breakdown, right?

So I'll give you two data points, right?

On the urban frontier, great phrase, the non-white illegitimacy rates are usually higher than the national average, and the increase of late has been drastic.

In the District of Columbia, the legitimacy rate for non-whites grew from 21.8% in 1950 to 29.5% in 1964.

Oh, I'm clutching my pearls.

Yeah, that's not that huge.

Yeah, it's not that big.

It's over like a pretty broad space of time.

It's like 14 years.

It's one, frankly, kind of small city.

It's only in the District of Columbia.

Yeah.

Only for non-white births.

But also, I'm just not, I mean, the implication is that an illegitimate child has no male provider, right?

Which is probably not always

or even very,

you know, consistently true.

Yeah.

But also, it's just, I'm just not really understanding how this is a crisis of sexual morality, right?

I can see it as a crisis of economic justice.

If you need, you know, more support for these kids than they're getting.

But I just don't understand.

It's like, no, no, no, ladies, you have to get and stay married to whoever will have you.

Yeah, right.

I mean, like, illegitimacy rates measure whether or not the parents are married at time of birth, right?

In a society which 1964 still, you know, people got pregnant fairly early, these people could get married the next day and they would still show up in the 29.5% here.

It feels very, very strange.

And again, like the increase really seems fairly marginal.

Here's a second data point.

Quote, divorces have increased of late for both whites and non-whites, but at much greater rate for the latter.

In 1940, both groups had a divorce rate of 2.2%.

By 1964, the white rate had risen to 3.6%, but the non-white rate had reached 5.1%.

Oh, sorry, I can't get to that.

I can't get through that.

What is the divorce rate now?

These numbers seem, if anything, extremely low.

It's also just like, it's not clear to me why these figures, like slightly more divorces, slightly more babies born out of wedlock.

It's not clear why this has such a strong explanatory power for Moynihan.

Yes.

That's a great question.

I was wondering that too.

And I think this is where we really get into like just like the ideological underpinnings of this.

Like that's the real point of this like he he pole vaults over his data like very very quickly to get to the family right yeah and he says quote the role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked the family is the basic social unit of american life it is the basic socializing unit by and large adult conduct in society is learned as a child I mean, so like, sure, learning how to be an adult happens in childhood.

Daniel Patrick, like fair play to you there.

The thing that comes after is shaped by the thing that came before it.

Yes, that is how linear time works.

It does not follow, as he seems to think it does, that families with illegitimacy or families with divorce

are modeling dysfunction or incapable adult behavior.

Well, and also, I think there's an interesting point to be made here about like what exactly, what behavior is he talking about, right?

He says, quote, a fundamental insight of psychoanalytic theory, for example, is that the child learns a way of looking at life in his early years through which all later experience is viewed and which profoundly shapes his adult conduct.

Right.

There's a version of this argument that's made today where it's like, well, kids who grow up in these kinds of households may have a harder time sustaining a relationship like that later in life, which I also don't buy, but like you could see that argument.

But like, notice that that's not the argument he's making.

He's not saying, oh, Americans are setting themselves up for an even higher divorce rate.

He's saying they're setting themselves up for poverty, right?

You don't show up for your job because like your parents did not mommy daddy correctly, right?

Like it's, it's kind of insane.

Right.

It's not like, okay,

being born or growing up in poverty makes you more likely to be poor because you have fewer resources to devote to like education and vocational training.

You have like fewer opportunities for networking.

It's growing up in poverty makes you more likely to be poor as an adult because you only saw adults being poor.

So that's the only way you know how to be.

It's just like the causal mechanism is so bizarre.

Still think being poor is cool kids.

And I have to say, it's just mid-century as fuck, right?

Like some Americanized Freud is thrown in here, right?

But basically, it's this moral theory of the family, right?

Nobody thinks more about what it's like to be rich than a poor person, by the way.

Like they actually like spend a tremendous amount of psychological energy on the notion of like how to not be poor anymore and what it would be like to live as a rich person.

And like i guess this is like where monihan like also being like a kid of the lower middle class like matters probably because like think of the fucking kennedys like what kind of behavior are they modeling for their kids like those are rich people have messed up families like yeah dynastic succession creates all kinds of incentives to divorce yeah i hear there are high rates of illegitimacy among early modern monarchs you know like they tend to they tend to have a lot of bastards and a lot of wives yeah yeah and if you if you're thinking that maybe people should aspire to be more like the family on succession, then I mean, I guess fair play too.

Yeah.

But it's, you know.

There's at least three wives, yeah, in there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, but that's the thing, right?

Like, there are all these things where we can say, like, okay, like.

I can see how a Freudian could make this argument, right?

But it's very important to note that I don't think he's saying that the problem with the non-normative family is that it can't take care of kids as well.

It's that non-normative families have a harder time socializing kids, right?

Like we're starting to get a little bit of the like super predator stuff here, right?

Like these kids are so like incapable of like functioning in society that we're creating this like...

Like I notice the he, he, he throughout.

Like on some sense, on some level, that's just like generic masculine in 1965.

But on the other hand, like he's imagining an African-American boy who will grow up without social attachments, who will rove the streets of whatever part of town Daniel Patrick Moynihan is afraid to go into.

You know, like this is sort of the incipient young black male body of backlash politics, right?

You're talking about, you mentioned earlier, like mass incarceration as being one cause of like unstable heterosexual partnerships in black communities.

in our time, right?

Yeah.

He's running before the age of mass incarceration, right?

Yeah.

When there's tremendous amount of poverty, but black men are not incarcerated at anything like the rates that they are now.

What he is doing, in fact, is seeding the logic that will enable mass incarceration to become public policy later, right?

That's right.

These young black men are depicted as animalistic.

in this later politics of like tough on crime legislation that increases the black incarceration rate.

And he is supplying this like Freudian justification for treating them as animals, right?

They were raised by single mothers and they were not properly socialized and now they wear their pants too baggy and we need to put them all in prison.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Anyone who was put away for a three-strike scenario should visit Daniel Patrick Moynihan's grave and piss on it.

It's got to be in New York City, right?

Is it out in Queens?

Probably.

I mean, we'll put it in the show notes if you need it.

They probably don't publish it because they don't want people pissing on it.

Well, he has the whole train hall.

Maybe you could pee there.

There's nowhere to sit down because they're hostile to the homeless and to just me trying to go to Boston.

Moynihan would have been so proud.

He's like, a man can't lie down.

I think I got my wings back.

I think I came a little bit.

Moynihan.

Anyway.

But it's also worth noting, right?

Behind all this, I think that Moynihan is also kind of metabolizing sort of rising awareness of U.S.

multiculturalism, right?

Like the question becomes like, where do we, quote unquote, all become Americans, right?

Like, does public education draw us out of our individual communities and families and teach us kind of the civic virtue that sustains the United States?

Or does that have to happen in our communities?

And I think Moynihan is very much on that latter side.

Like, we're not creating Americans the way we need to.

Well, not just in our communities, but in our homes, like by our mommies and daddies, our who make us citizens.

It's like from

the revolutionary era concept of Republican motherhood, but like applied to the institutions of the nuclear family itself, right?

That's right.

Republican marriage, Republican parenthood is this civic duty that creates capable citizens and at which black people are seen to be failing.

Exactly.

And this difference is what he's trying to explain.

What is this perceived failure that he wants to diagnose, right?

And we should be clear.

What people have drawn out of this report for going on, what is it, like 60 years now,

is that it's kind of black people's fault, right?

And it's definitely in there.

And we've been making fun of that.

At the same time, it is important to note that this is very much a Johnson administration document in the sense that he's fully acknowledging the role of racism in all this.

Yeah.

So like what is Moynihan's book of Genesis for like

racial difference in marriage patterns?

Like where does he see this disparity disparity and, you know, to his mind, inferiority of the black family as coming from yeah.

So he says, quote, there are two reasons.

First, the racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us.

So that's the first reason.

All right.

Yep.

All right.

And then here's the second part, and it's so strange.

Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatments have taken their toll on black people.

The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competition of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing.

End quote.

What?

So he's saying like being treated as inferior has in fact made them inferior?

Yeah.

It's almost like epigenetic.

It's like,

it's weird.

Well, I mean, he's making an argument about intergenerational trauma, right?

He's thinking, I mean, this is what Hortens Spillers will draw on and sort of say, like, well, there is,

he makes a connection between the way white slave owners broke up black families or slave families habitually, the way that sexual assault was wielded in the slave economy, and modern African-American family structures.

That's the argument.

Now,

you can see why people, especially who work in Afro-pessimism, are interested in this, because this is kind of a, yeah, you're right, it's an epigenetic account of intergenerational trauma.

At the same time, I do think it ends up in a really odd and problematic place that I think we'll have to talk about.

For now, I think it's important, because we're just still kind of talking about methods here, I think this is where Roderick Ferguson is exactly right.

This feels like a kind of liberalism that acknowledges the huge problem of racism and the fact that what we're experiencing as inequality in the present day are largely outputs of historic injustices, but then gets super tetchy about not always being in charge of how that problem is supposed to be mitigated or addressed.

Right?

The Moynihan Report doesn't talk to a single black mom or any other member of the families it's supposedly so interested in, right?

Like it comes out of a certain racial liberalism.

On racial issues, it is liberal, but it is part of a gender backlash, right?

Like our anti-racism must be about restoring black men to their rightful place of superiority within the family.

Exactly.

The very basic contention of the report, right?

And I'll remind people of this, at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of black society is the deterioration of the the black family.

That contention presupposes that racial hierarchies are not real and necessary, and racial inequality can be ameliorated.

This is also, you know, a legacy within liberalism that lives on to this day.

You know, Matt Iglesias' manifesto

that he recently published said,

what was it?

Race is a social construct, but sex is not.

That's it, right?

Gender hierarchies in the family, he thinks, are natural, and any revision of them is deleterious, right?

Like, as you were pointing out earlier, this is a year after the Civil Rights Act.

It's also two years after the feminine mystique.

Like, maybe that's the more significant inner text to consider here, because in the end, this is a text about gender backlash, including, frankly, for white people, right?

While still sort of like doing it all in a service of supposed racial liberalism.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Right.

And it does something that a lot of gender backlash does, which is it takes a group of women or a subset of women who are already seen to be deficient or contemptible, right?

In this case, it's black women.

In our era, it's often trans women, but black women also still very popular scapegoats for this purpose.

And it makes them responsible for the deterioration of what is seen as a broader gender order, right?

If only these black women were more feminine, more complacent with the gender hierarchy, more amenable to this dictative power that men or black men by rights have over them, then this racial oppression would not be so acute.

This is, by the way, like a strain of thinking that you do see in black nationalist thought over the couple decades around this, right?

There is a black nationalist or black masculinist tradition that does sort of blame black women's independence or resilience for like black men's like perceived lesser status.

Yeah.

And I think it's important to note, again, Ferguson is so right.

There are two strains running through this that contradict each other, right?

On some level, Moynian is saying what happened to African Americans is sui generis.

It could never happen to any other group.

And so therefore, obviously they're going to be in a different position than others, right?

Like he says that.

It's just like it's so rebarbative what was done to these people or to their ancestors, right?

It's just so unparalleled in human history, he thinks, which I think is frankly pretty admirable.

So many people can't get themselves to say that today.

But at other times, he's basically saying, like, oh, if white women were to start living like black women, we'd have the same problems, right?

At which point, like, you're like, shit, like, now this is just a straightforwardly gender conservative text, right?

Right.

This might bring us to a nice point that I think Corten Spillers makes.

Yeah.

When she suggests that the gender hierarchy that Moynihan is advocating and sort of making himself a defender of in this report becomes this kind of like backdoor way of restabilizing those racial categories.

So ethnicity, she writes, in this case, freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the effects of the eternal.

So she thinks this is a basic American myth in a new getup.

And I think the reception of the report has pretty much borne out that verdict, right?

Like we talk about the black family to talk about what black people are like, Because the post-Civil Rights Act era, it's more acceptable to moralize gender than to moralize race.

Yeah.

Spiller's article, by the way, we should say, is mama's baby, papa's maybe.

It's essential.

Everybody should read this.

Yeah.

Everyone should read it.

It is also fiendishly difficult.

It is

really, really hard.

Dense.

beautiful, but difficult text.

You have to read it a few times before it starts to click.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I should say that there's every chance that we're misreading certain parts of it.

But like, this is what I take her point to be.

Like, I was sort of steel manning it again and saying, like, look, there's a difference here between there's a racial liberalism entwined with a gender conservatism.

And Spiller's point, at least in that part of the article, I take to be, no,

that difference actually cannot be maintained, right?

This is her intersectional point.

Basically, he uses the gender stuff in order to reintroduce racial difference as natural in ways that like, if you pressed him on it, he probably wouldn't own up to, right?

But he can do it sort of through gender.

Spillers also, I think, points out that essentially Moynihan is kind of recapitulating a very specific gaze that does feel like pretty a real American obsession, let's say, right?

Moynihan's Negro family, she writes, borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations, from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past that come to surround and signify the captive person, right?

The problem with blacks to Moynihan is the black body, right?

It's his job as a G-man, as a sociologist, right?

To assess its value and its contribution to the American polity, right?

And Hortense Spiller is basically like, huh,

wonder where you learned that.

Looking at black bodies and evaluating how much they're worth.

Yeah.

How much they're worth and how to integrate them into a white American project.

Right.

She says, quote, a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless.

She's not saying like, oh, he's being a slave owner or slave purchaser in that moment.

She's like, he cannot but be.

Like the obsession with and the readiness to evaluate black bodies, black life in the United States, like it always partakes of this, right?

It is always a recapitulation.

And the fact that he's kind of calling for...

daddy and he's calling for white daddy like is not an accident here right like and that that in some way the federal government is supposed to be the one that helps stabilize the black family right like is plantation logic behind this on whatever level of awareness she says i think

yeah i i don't know what what moynihan thought about about hortense spiller's point but the fact that this guy kind of as i said earlier like was really touchy when it came to the people he was talking about speaking back to him, that he was really ready to sort of know what was best for black people and that he seemed deeply invested in that is a total through line.

I found this interesting article in the New York Times while researching this.

So in February 1990, Moynihan had a kind of cancel culture controversy.

He had a lectureship, a distinguished lectureship at Vassar,

and he had to quit that because he was apparently giving a lecture on his old topic, the U.S.

as a model of ethnic cooperation, says the New York Times.

I don't have the actual title, right?

And a county official who was of Jamaican descent challenged him on racial inequality during the QA.

And his reply to her was, according to the students who were there, if you don't like it in this country, why don't you pack your bags and go back where you came from?

Yep.

I cannot emphasize how much a train station is named for this man.

One that opened two years ago, by the way.

Yeah.

Anyway, the point of the anecdote is not just that Moynihan sucked shit.

It's that gender and ethnicity for him clearly were ways of raising questions about who belonged, right?

And about the terms on which someone could be part of what he would probably call the American experiment.

This is someone who feels very empowered to assess and it feels very allergic to difference on its own terms, right?

Like it has to be sort of shot through a majoritarian, benevolent, beneficient white liberalism.

So that might take us to chapter three.

Yeah.

So we're going into chapter three of the Moynihan Report, where we sort of get to the parts that where you can tell that it's not a total fake out, right?

It's not a total bad faith object.

It is, as both Ferguson and Spiller point out, it's a more complicated object than that, right?

He says there, American slavery was profoundly different from and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than any recorded servitude, ancient or modern, right?

Moynihan seems genuinely horrified by U.S.

racism, unlike most of the people who draw on him, right?

He doesn't deny that the U.S.

has a long history of racism and that much of his and our contemporary world is its output, right?

Okay.

This reminds me a little of stuff you've said about Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, right?

They're like, it's so terrible, it's so terrible, it's so terrible.

And in a way, the performative, like quasi-self-flagellating reckoning with the past becomes a way to not have to like confront its ongoing legacy in the present.

Yeah, it becomes a way of elevating yourself as the ultimate arbiter.

Right.

I'm so anti-racist, me, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All you black people need to shut up.

A white man is talking about racism.

The real anti-racism is talking here.

Yeah.

Me, a white guy from the labor department.

Exactly.

So like, I think you're exactly right.

Like there is this curious thing that I've noticed with non-Jewish Germans and their relationship to Jewish people.

They are really like so wildly against anti-Semitism that they come back around and start yelling at a lot of Jewish people.

Exactly.

Right?

Yeah.

And so, Mora's referring here to an essay I wrote in July for M1 called Psycho Zionism.

It's excellent.

We should link that in the show notes.

All of our listeners should read Psycho Zionism.

It's one of my favorite Adrian pieces, of which there are many.

Please read it.

I'd love to have more readers on that.

And

yeah, I point to this weird sort of secondary narcissism in basically not allowing someone who is different from you and against whom you or your own ancestors have committed a historic wrong to be anything beyond what you or what your parents or grandparents or whatever, whatever their butchers made them, right?

There's a narcissism involved in thinking that a person, a group, or people is mostly the sum total of your injuries against them.

And that is how I read Moynihan.

Like he is genuine in his horror at American slavery, but he's unable to read any difference that he perceives in the African-American community as either people making do with imperfect situations in a world structured by racism and economic inequality that often is overlaid over that matrix, or people just living lives differently for reasons that may not be of concern to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, right?

Like all of it has to be an output to this historic wrong that's been committed against them.

It reminds me a little bit of Spiller's point, right?

Like, because he sees black people

not as Americans who have value for the American project in their own right, but as like this problem to be solved, right?

So he's always trying to find an ideologically coherent explanation for their behavior or a policy fix for the problem that is black people, which is different really than seeing black people as like your fellow citizens.

Exactly.

And it all boils down into the figure of the missing black father, right?

So he says, unquestionably, these events worked against the emergence of a strong father figure.

The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut.

Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style, not for the black male.

The sassy, I'm going to bleep that, was lynched.

In this situation, the black family made but little progress towards the middle-class pattern of the present time.

Right.

So notice he's saying like defective black masculinity is an output of racial terrorism, basically, right?

Right.

He's making a few claims here that I think we could challenge.

He's saying that men are, you know, naturally and inherently aggressive, but that aggressive black men who are fulfilling this masculine prerogative are subject to racialized punishment, right?

Yeah.

The sassy n-word was lynched, he says.

Yeah, and we should say this is the only time in the entire report that he does use the big N word.

Yeah, he uses the little N word all the time.

But there's a difference.

You can tell the difference because there's one that we're saying and one that we're not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's this weird mix, right?

It's this weird mix of like fully reckoning with

this is the deliberate output of white America's treatment of African Americans and kind of like, and this is why they're defective.

right like that that that's what i was talking about like there's this weird kind of narcissism like the idea that like people might develop coping strategies that are themselves kind of beautiful and generative.

Like, that doesn't play into it, right?

Like, oh, that's a classic, like, fight within feminism, right?

Like,

if you understand gender as a like

system of hierarchies enforced by violence, do you then have to also say that we have to get rid of all of the gender coping mechanisms or like strategies of survival that have emerged?

And I think that's, you know, you can ask a parallel question

about anti-blackness.

Well, and homophobia, right?

Like, there's a reason why Spillers is sort of at the precipice of like queer of color critique and queer theory, like why queer theory gets interested in this.

Because they're like, well, our whole point is we get rejected by mainstream society.

And in being rejected, we discover cool and awesome ways of relating to each other that are not as boring as what Betty Friedan wanted to escape so badly, right?

Like Boyn has like, no, no, no, that's defective.

And I feel like a lot of liberation movements from the 60s 60s and 70s onwards have been like, no, like this is fine, right?

Like our coping mechanisms can be, like things can be a conditioned response and still be productive and maybe better, right?

And it's worth pointing out also, I don't want to sort of have Ferguson and Spillers kind of here sort of disembodied and sort of taken out of context.

Spillers is kind of making the point, as I say, at the beginning of kind of what we think of today as intersectionality studies, trying to sort of point out that like here gender and racial categories really overlaying in interesting ways.

Ferguson is doing this in the book that kind of establishes queer of color critique in the scholarly debate.

And his point is to say that really the kind of simplistic queer theory resistance to the family in some way has to grapple with the fact that the black family has been problematized in the way that Moynihan does, meaning like maybe that rejection does not come as easily or is actually not as unproblematic as it would be for like an Armisted Maupin or you know an Adrienne Rich or something like that, right?

So just to give people a very, very quick precei of where these folks are coming from, but like that's why they're intervening there.

But I think it's so, so interesting that he's both very attuned to historic injustice and he seems incapable of seeing anything positive in rearranging your family structure for whatever reason.

There's also that kind of a weird strain of anti-urbanism here.

He observes that, of course, a lot of this, right?

Like one reason we didn't bring up why the DC numbers are so strange is because this is still happening during massive migration waves, right?

Like these are not the same people necessarily that are living in the District of Columbia between 1940 and 1964.

Meaning he's starting to think of the African-American family as the urban African-American family, right?

Like these are the people he has to see on his way to work.

in New York or whatever, right?

He's not thinking about black sharecroppers or something like that.

He's thinking about the black people who are on the subway with him.

Right.

And there too, I think we're starting to get into the mass incarceration era in some way, right?

Where the paradigmatic African-American male that's being imagined is also an urban individual.

Right.

Should we maybe talk briefly about his chapter on the tangle of pathologies?

Oh, fun.

So this is the part where Hortense Spillers is like, I'm just going to quote all this because

this is extremely my shit.

So he says, in essence, the black community community has been forced into a matriarchal structure, which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the black male and in consequence, on a great many black women as well.

This is momism, right?

An overbearing mother, a too strong phallic mother who is not sufficiently chastened by paternal authority in the home will create a sexually dysfunctional,

like socially maladjusted male child.

This is Dr.

Freud.

This is American Freudianism all over again.

Yeah, except like what I think is funny, I've been for another episode we're going to do, I've been reading like theories of homosexuality, and it's the same explanation for why kids are like total sissies.

And he's like, they're getting super strong and they're going to kill you.

And then like other Freudian psychologists, like, oh, the overbearing mother will make you weak and namby-pamby.

And you're like, I don't know, man.

What is it?

We have to do an episode on momism because, like, the bad mother or the wrong mother, especially of a male son,

is just this like

well of scapegoating and pathologization that is just like, they never define their terms, but they do make her responsible for everything they don't like.

It's, it's amazing.

Yeah.

So he says that it's a matriarchy.

Okay.

Matriarchy.

And what our listeners are listening to is all of Morris' feminist spidey sense going off.

Yes.

Oh, I came in mad.

But, right, the idea that a matriarchal structure is a sign of pathology, that a matriarchal structure is in fact something to be overcome, right?

It's a super old one.

It's wrong, it's unnatural, it's

bad for the economy, it's bad for the human soul.

Who is gonna, you know, mine your

coal or whatever men say when they are trying to scold women out of independence, right?

Like, who's gonna mine your crypto?

Who's going to play those video games, Karen?

I know some women who can play them fine on their own.

What?

Even this you've taken away from them.

It's this idea that male characteristics, but really specifically male leadership and male authority that commands deference is what is like, you know, psychologically, but really like civilizationally important to human development.

Yeah.

I think that's important, right?

Like this is in an important way, not just to racistics, it's the sexistics.

Oh, yeah.

There's misogynoir at work here, but there's also kind of a broader point about non-black women being made, right?

Right.

And this is where Spillers is exactly right.

This is about way more than the black family.

Like this is his theory of society, right?

The patriarchal family is like on the back of the black family, basically.

The patriarchal family is, for him, what distinguishes white culture from black culture.

It's what keeps white culture from following black culture into, quote, the deterioration of the social fabric, right?

I would love him to describe what he thinks that means, like the total deterioration of the family, the deterioration of the social fabric.

What does that mean?

Is it the Dionysian revels?

Are we all just going to be fucking each other?

You know, you let women have a little control over the household money or a little bit of independence and dignity in the public sphere, and suddenly, you know, everything's on fire.

It's just chaos.

And again, this is 1965, right?

Like all the stuff about like no-fault divorce and feminists burning their bras and shit is like kind of still in the future.

There's some stuff, but it's yeah, there's a very small, largely like reformist, incrementalist, liberal feminist movement that's emerging around like DC and like Democratic right politico.

So like women, Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have met at parties and work events who would have annoyed him, right?

Yeah.

And the reason I bring this up is because I think in this way, it is really already a backlash text, right?

Like so much of disinvestment, neoliberalism, and sort of de-industrialization was kind of done to African Americans and in African-American areas first, and then happened to everyone else, right?

And usually their suffering from it was then relentlessly personalized and moralized.

Like, well, like, it's their fault, right?

And then suddenly it happens to everyone else.

And they go, oh, no, this is a social problem, right?

Like, it's like, no, it's always been a social problem.

In some way, Moynihan, I think, is an early pioneer of that kind of theoretical move.

All the freaking out about divorces, out of wedlock, birth stuff that people will do about the sexual revolution is in the future.

But he's trying it kind of out on African Americans.

Right.

They're guinea pigs for like the backlash politics of the future.

Exactly.

Which will then be transferred to white women, to

Latino women and Asian women, et cetera, et cetera.

This is the place where you try out your backlash politics first because people be racist and

you can workshop it there before you apply it to everyone yeah you know like the notion of taking a marginalized community often the black community I don't want to like draw too close a parallel because I think these bigotries function differently but I do see a lot of anti-trans yeah stuff as being like oh clearly you're auditioning to say this about cis women but you're saying it about trans people first or you're making this argument that applies to cis women yeah in an argument about like whether you're gonna let this fucking 16 year old play volleyball you know um And that has a much broader implication.

Exactly.

You're exactly right to say that

it's not the same oppression, but like the move.

The tactics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The zoom out that they're about to do, I think to me feels identical.

Backlash is very repetitive.

Something I've learned about from writing about it for quite some time is that it's got a few chess moves that it does over and over and over again, like Lucy pulling the football.

It just always works somehow.

And you can't really build up cultural tolerance to it because it's just too diffuse.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I mean, that's kind of the temporality of the last 70 years.

This is something that I've been thinking about writing a piece about the fact that like it's this enervating repetition compulsion, right?

Backlash.

It doesn't really go back.

It just kind of like it tries to stall things.

I mean, it does in the end also go back, but it won't admit that, right?

It's not like I want to do this thing again.

It's kind of saying it's sort of not honest about its own temporality.

And I think that's what makes it so deeply corrosive to like a society to like no longer be able to tell when it's moving ahead.

Like say what you will about Moynihan, like he did have some sense of like what he thought ought to happen next and what wasn't happening.

I think he and I would be shouting at each other about the details of this until the cows came home.

But

the Johnson administration still had a kind of sense of like, well, obviously, like when he's saying like elimination of poverty, who would say that today, right?

He's just like confidently like, yeah, that's what the president wants to do.

So let's do it.

We're putting a man on the moon and eliminating poverty.

And you're like, whoa, okay.

Right.

Like, there is a, there are benchmarks.

There's an idea of like what progress will look like.

But he's already in this kind of almost tragic way sort of seeding the kind of backlash temporality that will undo all of that.

Yeah, the backlash is,

it claims that it's trying to prevent a bad future, right?

It always intervenes before that future has even like been articulated, right?

Like we conceive of backlashes as coming later in time from the social movement that provokes them when in fact they tend to emerge like near simultaneously, right?

Yeah.

And it sort of can evoke an

alternative way of life with grounding in an imagined past

that is better.

But in what it actually does is sort of like warp something for a different, worse future.

Exactly.

The first article about whether Me Too had maybe gone too far happened like a week after the first article that used Me Too.

A Harvey Weinstein, yeah.

And it was about preventing further disclosure.

Oh, actually, the first, no, the first article about whether Me Too had gone too far happened before it was called Me Too.

Wow.

Before that phrase was coined.

Yes.

The anxiety about the excesses of our moment of reckoning, as it was called for about, you know, 72 hours.

Yeah, no, it's about trying to stop something from happening.

Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

It's about trying to prevent the future rather than like restore a past.

Exactly.

So what does he say that the future should look like?

I feel like the Moynihan report is like a lot of nonfiction writing and then at the end they have to have a proposal for the future beyond just diagnosing the problem.

They have to have a prescription and then this is always the weakest part of the book.

They're like, it's like always like, oh, we must.

imagine differently.

And they make that into like five or 8,000 words.

And you're like, wow, you really had no idea what to say here.

Yeah.

But does Moynihan have anything to say?

He does.

I found this part extremely confusing.

So maybe I'll just read you a first- Because he doesn't know what his argument is.

Sorry.

So he basically says, quote, here's where the true injury has occurred.

So in the family structure, basically.

Unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.

Right.

Okay, so we need to fix the black family according to his metrics in order to uplift black people more broadly.

That's his idea.

Okay.

So what does he propose we do?

Aha.

Glad you asked.

Quote, in a a word, a national effort towards the problems of Black Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.

Okay, but like how?

He's like, no, this needs our attention.

We must fix the problem by giving it our attention.

It's just like, let's get some content, buddy.

So Moynihan quotes the sociologist E.

Franklin Frazier, quote, the disorganized families have failed to provide for their emotional needs and have not provided the discipline and habits which are necessary for personality development.

What does that mean?

Well, you might think, like, oh, more discipline or something?

Should the government replace the father function?

And no, definitely not.

Quote: Since the widespread family disorganization among black people has resulted from the failure of the father to play the role in family life required by American society, the mitigation of this problem must await those changes in black and American society, which will enable the black father to play the role required of him.

Oh my god.

So it's just like restore the hierarchical gender order of the private sphere.

It's just man on top of woman.

That's it.

I guess, but I would say that.

And like, how would you even measure?

How would you even affect that?

How would you be able to measure when you had achieved it?

Like, give me an actionable step for your misogynist little fantasy about black women.

Like, you're not even like saying what you want to do.

It sounds so nuts, right?

Because he's kind of saying there's definitely a reading here that says we shouldn't do welfare until they fix their shit, right?

But if they fix their shit, they won't need welfare.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, what the the fuck is even happening?

Like, are you just rolling back the war on poverty or what, what's the plan here?

Like, I don't think that's ultimately what he's arguing, but like, you can see why, you know, stalwarts of like small governments have liked this.

Like, cause it really does sound like he's saying, just pump the brakes on all the do-gooder shit until there's a culture of poverty here.

We can't, we can't buy our way out of it.

Like, there has to be a change in values first, right?

Like, JD Vance could be saying this tomorrow, right?

I think that's not the only thing he's saying, right?

Charitably, we could say that there's like an ambiguity here.

As again, Daniel Geary's book points out, Tanahasi Coates called out Obama's invocation of Moynihan when Obama sort of offered it as kind of a call for black self-help.

But Coates himself draws repeatedly on the report to point out that national action on black men's unemployment and incarceration surely wouldn't go amiss, right?

Like, there are implications here that one can like, right?

Right.

There has to be a way to talk about uplifting black men that does not credit or draw on or legitimize the idea that their problem is black women.

Yeah.

Like I think that that should be easy.

And maybe drawing on Moynihan is not the way to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also, this is where the 1965 part to me is so vexing.

Like it can already sound like stuff we'd read.

during the Reagan years.

Yeah.

But at the same time, he's writing this at a time when the federal government really is just like cutting chicks, right?

Like if all he's saying is like, hey, let's also turn on a money hose and direct it at black men, like, sure, more money is good.

Do it, you know?

So maybe that's understood because he's writing in the Johnson Labor Department, but he's not really saying it.

I have to say, it does sound like he's saying maybe we should cool it a little bit with all the support until the moral problem, which is really what this at heart is, the gender problem, is fixed.

Yeah.

And then he's like, oh, but I also like, given that it's 300 years of racism that created this problem it may not be fixed that quickly so you're like okay so we're just not giving them anything okay great great yeah it seems like he's throwing up his hands a little bit that's the other part where it's just split down the middle it's on the one hand the temporality of backlash we're talking about and it has the temporality of a kind of mid-century liberalism that still sort of lives in the wake of the new deal right that's like we built the bay bridge we built the golden gate bridge like we put a man on the moon like let's do this next right yeah he does have that that spirit comes through i don't think he's completely faking it, but there's also already the temporality of like, eh, it's all very intractable.

And like, anyway, they're just going to waste that money anyway.

And like, because you know, black ladies are in charge, we really shouldn't give them anything.

And it's too bad, really too bad, right?

It has both of those.

And I think that's why it's such an incredibly enduring document that people can draw both things out of it.

And I think that's what I came away with finally reading this really, you know, from the first word to the last.

The scary thing is

the way way those two things got knitted together.

The scary part is that it contains these two multitudes, right?

Like they're ambiguous texts, whatever, that's fine.

This is ambiguous in exactly the way that America has been lying to itself about what it's doing about racial inequality for going on since 1964, basically.

And that is, to me, the most deleterious thing about this, right?

Like the racism, whatever.

He's in 1965.

He's a white guy.

He's going to be some racism in there.

The scary part is how it, like, it's not just straightforwardly neoconservative.

It can, it, it, it knows exactly how to speak the language of liberalism and of concern and of penance for, you know, racialized plunder, for racialized violence, for racial terrorism.

And yet, the solutions it comes to are ones that a Ronald Reagan could look at and be like, see, we're doing all that, namely nothing.

You heard it here first, folks.

Liberalism.

It can smuggle conservative ideology within it.

I am shocked.

I think that might be it for us.

That might be it.

Adrian, thank you so much for this wonderful discussion.

I learned a lot.

I think our listeners will too.

So now the next time you hear the words Moynihan report, you'll be armed and dangerous and ready to argue.

And the next time you're at Penn Station, you'll have another reason to be mad.

Like yet another.

And Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Exactly.

If you listen all the way through, you should rate and review us on iTunes and subscribe to our Patreon and support us and love us because we love you.

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Love you all.

In Med with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Genuine Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.