In reading the list of “wars on” (drugs, terror, pedophelia) in E Hayot’s recent post about the shift from “wars against” to “wars on,” I thought, “but what about the war on poverty?” Does its rhetoric follow a similar logic of metonymic contamination whereby a social problem is given profilable human features?

The phrase comes from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union, where he unveiled his ambitious “War on Poverty” program, which led to, among other things, the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start. The rhetoric of war is pervasive in the speech, but the assumptions behind the declaration of “unconditional war on poverty” seem notably different from those behind the more recent wars on drugs and terror. If the vision is a little paternalistic, a little too optimistic in retrospect, LBJ’s speech nonetheless imagines, and asks its listeners to imagine, a united America that works together against an enemy that, though it targets the weak, the unlucky, the unskilled, nonetheless affects the nation as collectivity, a collectivity with a moral conscience:

The imagined community is expansive, inclusive, its moral mission undergirded by sturdy practicality—“this investment will return its cost manyfold to our entire economy.” In its initial incarnation, then, the war on poverty is actually a war against, (in fact, LBJ uses “war on” and “war against” interchangeably): all the resources of the nation-state are called upon to mount an assault on a known and formidable foe that threatens the group from outside it. It is lack of opportunities and lack of skills that stand in the way of “our people.” Not by accident, the language rises to mythic heights, with poverty—“the most ancient of mankind’s enemies”—like a many-armed dragon that the entire kingdom must slay in order to save one village: “But poverty is not a simple or an easy enemy. It cannot be driven from the land by a single attack on a single front” (emphasis added).

Forty-plus years later, the legacy of this war on poverty is mixed; public housing and welfare did not fare as well as Medicaid or Medicare. While the phrase “war on poverty” continues to enjoy currency, with global wars on poverty declared and waged with some regularity, LBJ’s original conception of the war has met with criticism on many fronts. In particular, it seems a favorite punching bag of conservative commentators and free market libertarians, whose assessments of the “war on poverty” as an unmitigated disaster (the evils of big government, unchecked spending, etc.) amount to a war on the war on poverty. The arguments are familiar—the job training and housing programs, the education initiatives are “entitlement” programs that create dependency and laziness, benefits only a recalcitrant underclass, and puts an unfair burden on the hard-working Americans who don’t rely on hand-outs. I am no economist or historian, but it seems to me that the shift E Hayot identifies from “wars against” to “wars on,” where “a war on is always against an enemy within,” takes place with the Right’s assault on the progressive agenda as envisioned in the War on Poverty (itself an extension of the New Deal).

In an on-line reader’s guide to history sponsored by Houghton Mifflin, I found this summary of one view of the historical shift in attitudes that has only gained momentum in the past decades (as you may recall, the Civil Rights Act was also passed in 1964):

A few more clicks of the mouse and one finds a recent “analysis” of the War on Poverty from the conservative City Journal (the author, Myron Magnet, has also edited a book with a meme subtitle, Modern Sex: Liberation and Its Discontents) where we can see the backlash narrative in action. Magnet’s premise is that while the Civil Rights Act equaled the playing field and almost immediately translated into “dramatic gains for the vast majority of African Americans,” the War on Poverty legislation, itself “the pure emanation of the new culture’s [i.e. the 60’s counterculture’s] worldview,” was the principal cause of the formation of a Black underclass who simply didn’t want to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

The “enemy within” is imagined and deployed precisely by dividing the Black community against itself--those who help themselves by joining the mainstream vs. those who refuse--which is possible only when you erase racism as a reality. Magnet writes,

According to this logic, since racism can be eradicated with a simple piece of legislation, and “as a practical matter American society, and the opportunity it afforded, was now open to all,” the only explanation for this persistent underclass is “self-defeating behavior” and “the counterculture’s contempt for the ‘system,’ the celebration of drugs, dropping out, and rebellion” that condoned this behavior. Poverty in this scenario becomes, like homosexuality, a lifestyle choice of the depraved. Here, we can understand how a war on drugs is a natural outgrowth of this larger war on values.

The war on poverty, evacuated of its moral principles and its historical specificity, becomes, like the other “wars on,” a floating signifier open to endless metonymic displacements. Once you shift the problem of poverty from a social responsibility to “personal responsibility,” once the poverty of circumstances is recast as a poverty of character, the metonymic slippage from “war on poverty” to “war on the poor” is all too easy. We need only consider the highlights of Bush’s new budget (along with the tax cuts for the wealthy that are due to become permanent and the campaign to privatize Social Security) to see what an “ownership society”—governed by a privatized, corporatized state—might really mean.