Nixon abandoned welfare reform due to inflation and political calculation, not policy objections

Evidence

What defeated the plan, however, was not so much these specific objections as Nixon’s own decision to abandon the politics of consensus on welfare in a context of rising inflation. In the first year of his presidency, Nixon had surrounded himself with policy advisors such as Moynihan and Robert Finch, who convinced him that an expansion of the family wage was the best way to placate racial tensions while simultaneously allowing him to wrest the white working class from its traditional allegiance to the Democratic party. By his second year in government, the economic outlook had soured and Nixon was less convinced that this strategy would work. Instead, he decided, behind closed doors, to abandon any attempt to reform AFDC while simultaneously overseeing some of the most generous expansions to Social Security in the program’s history. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does Nixon’s generous Social Security expansion square with the standard neoliberal-retrenchment narrative that this chapter presumably complicates? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Nixon as an ambiguous welfare actor bears on the book’s fracturing of neat left-right and pro/anti-market binaries central to this collection. — connects to: Nixon abandoned welfare reform while expanding Social Security when inflation soured his consensus strategy. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234; Nixon’s welfare reform failed because it satisfied no political constituency — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 233; A Nixon welfare plan briefly united figures across the political spectrum — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 230

Broader Connections

• Nixon abandoned welfare reform while expanding Social Security when inflation soured his consensus strategy. #corroborates (0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234
• Nixon’s welfare reform failed because it satisfied no political constituency #contradicts (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 233
• A Nixon welfare plan briefly united figures across the political spectrum #qualifies (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 230