Over the past few months I’ve read by John McWhorter and by Heather Mac Donald. One thing that both books assert is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a proactive campaign by the National Welfare Rights Organization to get as many people on the rolls in places like New York City as possible. McWhorter also notes that there seems to have been a special emphasis on recruiting black Americans to heighten and exacerbate the racialized dimension of the problem. But getting poor people on welfare was only a means to an ends, and that ends was bankrupting the government and overturning the established social order. In other words, to overthrow the Great Society welfare state (and presumably replace with something more politically revolutionary). But in any case, the only reason I bring this up it that as I was reading this I was struck by an analogy to the Starve-the-beast philosophy promoted by Grover Norquist, except in the opposite direction. The key goal in both cases is to “break it” so that you can build it anew….
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