University of Virginia political scientist George Klosko describes the transformation of American liberalism from the Lockean or classical liberalism of the American Founding to the modern welfare state. The former stressed “negative liberty,” or government's limited role of protecting pre-existing natural rights. The latter emphasizes “positive liberty,” or government's unlimited obligation to provide substantive rights, or entitlements. The United States is usually regarded as having a less developed welfare state than European democracies (he puts aside the argument for a “hidden” American welfare state), and Klosko explains the reason for this aspect of “American exceptionalism.” Because the American people remained steeped in Founding-era Lockean liberalism, the founders of the new American liberalism could not justify their project on foreign, communitarian grounds. Instead they made arguments that misled the American people into thinking that our welfare-state programs were based on old-fashioned individual rights.
Klosko very much laments this limitation of the American welfare state. He blames Franklin D. Roosevelt's selling of the Social Security Act as based on individual “contributions,” telling Americans that Social Security was a funded, defined-contribution social “insurance” program when it was in fact an unfunded, defined-benefit transfer program. This he calls “FDR's original sin.” It was a fully conscious one. As FDR explained to an adviser (Luther Gulick) who told him that the payroll-tax system of funding was actuarially unsound, “I suppose you are right about the economics.” But, he added, “those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program” (133).
Though FDR and his successors did on occasion articulate a more direct alternative to Lockean liberalism—especially in FDR's famous “economic bill of rights” address in 1944 (building on his Commonwealth Club address of 1932)—it did not amount to a convincing substitute. So, Klosko says, we have continued to extend the make-believe “social insurance” programs like Social Security and Medicare, whose beneficiaries believe that they “deserve” their payouts, while we stingily fund noncontributory, means-tested “welfare” programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (now Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) and Food Stamps (now the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) for the stigmatized “undeserving poor.”
Klosko should be applauded for being so forthright about the misleading arguments upon which the new American state has been built. He observes very early on that its founders were following the advice of Old Nick, Machiavelli, that “he who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though they are entirely different from the old ones” (7). FDR was playing the fox in the construction of the New Deal, but this fox was too clever by half. After welfare programs “were essentially snuck by the public,” Klosko observes, with “theoretically weak or deceptive” arguments, it was all the more difficult to build a full-fledged welfare state (3).
Klosko argues that it is possible to combine the old and new liberalism into a single theory, but that “to do so successfully requires considerable philosophic sophistication” (149); such a theory, he believes, was eventually provided by John Rawls's Theory of Justice (1971). This is rather doubtful. Locke and Rawls, the Constitution and the administrative state, are like oil and water. The first generation of American progressives—Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, Herbert Croly—recognized this, and were quite straightforward in their rejection of the old liberalism. After the collapse of progressivism in World War I and the 1920s, FDR—who notably rechristened progressivism as “liberalism”—concluded that the American public could not take its Rawlsian pill without some Lockean sugar-coating.
As Klosko recognizes, the politicians who constructed the new American state were not political philosophers. Wilson was the closest to one; FDR probably did have more of an ideological agenda and consistency than he is usually given credit for; and even Lyndon Johnson occasionally got an idea across. (But who needs ideas when you have two- or three-to-one majorities in Congress, as in 1935 and 1965?) More important, these men still had reservations about the potential harm of dependency in a welfare state. FDR called the dole “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit” (112). And LBJ still believed that the Great Society should provide “opportunity not entitlement,” in Gareth Davies's phrase. There might be some basis for the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor.
President Obama had the opportunity to provide a fuller philosophical basis for the welfare state. He came close to doing so in 2015 when he took on the flip side of the “undeserving poor” concept, the “undeserving rich.” (Klosko shows how this argument was elaborated by the English “new liberalism.”) “If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. … If you've got a business, you didn't build that” (143). But this trope did not play well. And the Affordable Care Act joined Social Security and Medicare as a deliberate ruse, designed to hide its true costs from “the stupidity of the American voter,” as one of its principal architects, Jonathan Gruber, put it.
Klosko overlooks a few important arguments, such as Robert Hale's article “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-coercive State” (1923), which helped make the “undeserving rich” case, along with FDR's speeches about rich industrialists’ “regimentation” of labor. He too easily conflates “noncontributory” and “undeserving” programs—nobody believes that all, or even most, “welfare” recipients are undeserving. Klosko should be credited, on the other hand, for not claiming that Americans conflate “undeserving” and “nonwhite,” as scholars like Jill Quadagno do (The Color of Welfare [Oxford University Press, 1994]).
While the book is generally well written, it can be repetitive. Its early chapters are somewhat too intricately theoretical; the later ones too much a cut-and-paste of political speeches. But it is well worth reading as an exposé of the genealogy of the entitlement state and its attempt to redefine entitlements as “rights.” Cass Sunstein advised, in The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (Basic Books, 2004), that “the best response to those who believe that the second bill of rights does not protect rights at all is just this: unembarrassed evasion.” Professor Klosko has made an honest and admirable attempt to square the circle. We can have Locke or Rawls but not both.
