Welfare rights victories turned erstwhile New Deal supporters against the family wage consensus.

Evidence

When Nixon retreated from the agenda of reforming AFDC then, the extraordinary consensus that had formed around the project of the expanded family wage came apart and reshuffled into distinct political positions. As the expanding economy of the mid-1960s gave way to the soaring inflation of the 1970s, AFDC became the touchstone for increasingly acrimonious debates about the very feasibility of welfare redistribution. In particular, the rising demands of the welfare rights movement—along with its successes in the federal courts—convinced many former pragmatic supporters of the New Deal welfare state that a crisis point had been reached. The importation of “sexual freedom” arguments into welfare rights law opened up the distinct possibility that the federal government would now be compelled to subsidize the existence of women who wantonly chose to live without the support of a man, thereby greatly increasing the burdens on state coffers. In this regard, the phenomenon of stagflation (combining inflation and unemployment) began to be understood as much more than a macroeconomic problem in the conventional sense of the term—what it reflected was a breakdown of moral order itself, an unsustainable inflation of monetary and libidinal demands beyond the limits established by the Keynesian consensus. If one could imagine an expansion of welfare state spending to include nonwhite men within the category of breadwinner, one could not question the normative premise of the male breadwinner family itself without completely defeating the arithmetic of restrained public spending—and thus generating runaway inflation. … Turning against the New Deal welfare state tout court, they now called for the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor law tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of welfare reform, changes to taxation, and monetary policy. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the family-wage genealogy in the reader’s welfare/family-policy knowledge and to Melinda Cooper’s argument that family values politics fused with market liberalism. — connects to: American welfare opponents framed socialized risk as a threat to family morality; Right-wing discourse redefined unemployment as an effect caused by welfare itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1688; The welfare state’s success provoked conservative opposition to reverse it

Broader Connections

• American welfare opponents framed socialized risk as a threat to family morality #expands (0.85)
• The welfare state’s success provoked conservative opposition to reverse it #expands (0.85)
• Right-wing discourse redefined unemployment as an effect caused by welfare itself. #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1688