American welfare opponents framed socialized risk as a threat to family morality

Evidence

This is one reason that participation in neoliberal life necessitates acting as an entrepreneur of the self: unreserved embrace of (this version of) risk is postulated to be the primary method of changing your identity to live life to the fullest. Contemporary entrepreneurial autobiographies almost always start out with some variation on: “I am not sure what it is about entrepreneurs that makes us risk-taking thrill seekers, but every entrepreneur I know is an adrenaline junkie. We kite board, heli ski, race cars, and keep finding new creative ways to challenge ourselves.” Alternatively, anyone who participates in the welfare state is just a dull drone, lost in a vegetative state. They are debased because they expect the state to shield them from risk, when in fact, they should be reveling in the opportunity to remake themselves. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The neoliberal argument against state welfare was not confined to the economic threat it posed to a free-enterprise system. Rather, neoliberals like Röpke positioned the welfare state as a political threat to a social order founded on the nuclear family and racial hierarchy, and as a moral threat to the values of self-reliance, independence, responsibility and human dignity. From this perspective, while the drafters of the UDHR also dedicated themselves to human dignity, their commitment to social and economic rights would ultimately be its ruin. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 178 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilise the republican valorisation of freedom and independence against a welfare system that was implicitly racialised and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. But the centrality of this myth of independence to neoliberal attacks on welfare goes back much further than Reagan, as does the association of state welfare provision with moral hazard and family breakdown. For Röpke, the most serious symptom of the revolt of the masses was the decline of the family. As the family is ‘the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community’, the German neoliberal argued that women were the real victims of a welfare state that prevented them fulfilling their ‘vital functions’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 175 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Chicago School economists blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for family breakdown — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 210; American neoliberals defended kinship bonds as noncontractual obligations and opposed no-fault divorce — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 214; Family loyalty is central, not marginal, to American neoliberal welfare theory — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 213 (+11 more)

Related

• Neoliberal welfare attacks racialized dependency and framed the family as women’s natural sphere (similarity 0.89)
• Neoliberals attacked welfare as a threat to family, race, and dignity (similarity 0.86)
• Early US anti-welfare arguments framed socialized risk as destroying family moral solidarity (similarity 0.85)
• Neoliberal economists saw the family as a privatized insurance that welfare destroyed (similarity 0.84)
• Neoliberalism paired deregulation with social conservatism to shift welfare onto families (similarity 0.84)
• Neoliberals monetized family practice by treating welfare as perverse incentive. (similarity 0.83)
• Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation (similarity 0.83)
• American neoliberals saw family altruism as a substitute for the welfare state (similarity 0.82)
• Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk (similarity 0.82)
• Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity (similarity 0.82)
• Family loyalty is central, not marginal, to American neoliberal welfare theory (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberals attacked family welfare in the North but the same welfare in the South (similarity 0.80)
• Reagan’s California welfare reform enacted neoliberal family-responsibility policies (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberals gendered welfare dependency as emasculating female domestic servitude (similarity 0.80)
• Chicago School economists blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for family breakdown (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk #exemplifies (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338
• Neoliberals attacked welfare as a threat to family, race, and dignity #exemplifies (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 178
• Neoliberal welfare attacks racialized dependency and framed the family as women’s natural sphere #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 175
• Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation #expands (0.78)
• Neoliberalism induces risk-bearing then blames the victims when risk fails #complicates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 351
• Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity #qualifies (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 176