Americans on welfare Whatever his faults, Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly a gifted communicator. His ideological preferences often came wrapped in memorable anecdotes. Reagan justified his antipathy for the social safety net — and capitalized on the racial anxieties held by many white voters — by invoking the infamous, Cadillac-driving welfare queen and the “strapping young buck” who lived large on T-bone steaks purchased with food stamps. Reagan didn’t actually coin the term “welfare queen” — that was the Chicago Tribune. (He did in fact use the term “young buck” — derogatory slang for a young black man.) Reagan merely took advantage of an existing media frenzy surrounding the case of a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor who may have been guilty of murder as well as welfare fraud on a massive scale, according to Josh Levin’s profile on the real “welfare queen.” By that time — well over a decade since Lyndon Johnson had launched his “War on Poverty” — Americans’ attitudes toward welfare had changed. Those changing attitudes were playing a major role in the realignment of our two major parties, and led to the rise of what Thomas Frank described as “backlash conservatism.” Put simply: many Americans came to hate welfare, and saw it as representing the worst aspects of liberalism and the social safety net.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 06:53:39 +0000
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