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11. Social Provision
and Civic Community

Beyond Fragmentation

Theda Skocpol

We Americans find it easy to dwell on what keeps us apart—and perhaps nowhere is this truer than in recent debates about social policies. Reforming the "urban underclass" and ending "welfare as we know it" have preoccupied Americans since the 1960s. Recently, social security programs for the elderly have also become controversial. To judge from the tone and content of public debates—especially those featured in the mass media that feed on dramatic controversy—irreconcilable conflicts of identity and interest are at work.

Conservatives have denounced "welfare queens, " and liberals suggest that mass starvation will follow the abolition of federal guarantees to aid the poor. Such disputes have pitted conservatives against liberals and bitterly divided blacks and whites, scapegoating millions of single mothers and their children in the process. Meanwhile, "intergenerational warfare" has been fanned by pundits who claim that overly generous Social Security and Medicare expenditures for retirees are certain to "bankrupt" the nation and undermine the economic future of "our children and grandchildren." America cannot help young families, fiscal conservatives declare, unless it radically trims or restructures social programs tied to an aging population of greedy Baby Boomers. Americans, it appears, are hopelessly divided by—and about—social provision.

Contemporary conservatives blame the situation on modern liberalism. In the conservative imagination liberalism has taxed and spent the country beyond its means in order to fund overly generous "entitlements"

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that undermine personal and family responsibility. Liberal-sponsored welfare programs have had an especially scabrous effect, conservatives believe, turning poor people into dependents, penalizing responsible middleclass taxpayers, and undermining the integrity of families. Liberalism is portrayed as the enemy of community and an agent of fragmentation, turning young against old, class against class, and black against white.

Although there may be bits of truth in this indictment, conservative charges against liberalism are remarkably unhinged from a full understanding of what has been most legitimate and effective in the long haul of American social provision. So intense have been recent ideological battles that Americans today barely remember our national history of generous social programs that built bridges across groups while opening opportunities for countless individuals. This history transcends today's disputes between liberals and conservatives because broad and effective American social programs started long before the New Deal, let alone the Great Society.

Since the nineteenth century America's most effective and beloved social programs have given benefits or services to millions of citizens in return for their contributions to the nation and local communities. They have helped individuals and families not in narrowly circumscribed categories but across the lines of class, race, and place. America's most effective systems of social provision have flourished through civic partnerships between government and voluntary associations that enrolled millions of citizens as active members. State and civil society worked together to support families and communities.

We need to be reminded of this hopeful history for at least two urgent reasons. Telling the story of some of our successful efforts to help one another will help us assess what has gone awry in U.S. social politics since the 1960s, as liberals and conservatives alike have abandoned formerly successful formulas for social provision in American democracy. And telling that story will help us imagine bringing ourselves together once more in pursuit of a shared civic vision of opportunity and security for all American families.

THE FORMULA FOR SUCCESS IN AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY

Although some might quibble, most would agree that common public schools, Civil War benefits, early-twentieth-century programs to help mothers and children, Social Security, Medicare, and the GI Bill of 1944

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have been among America's finest achievements in social policy. Each of these milestones has made life much better for a great many individuals, families, and communities.

The story starts in the nineteenth century. The United States was the world's leader in the growth of widely accessible public education, as primary schools, followed by secondary schools, spread throughout most localities and states. Much of this expansion occurred in the decades before the Civil War. After that conflict the nation created another set of massive social programs, Civil War benefits, which included disability and old-age pensions, job opportunities, and social services for millions of veterans and survivors of the massive Union armies that fought and won the Civil War. By 1910 more than a quarter of all elderly men, and more than a third of men over 62 in the North, were receiving regular payments from the federal government on terms that were extraordinarily generous by the international standards of that era.^[1] Federal spending on these pensions constituted 25 to 40 percent of the national budget in the decades around 1900.

Programs to help mothers and children proliferated during the 1910s and early 1920s. Forty-four states passed laws to protect women workers and mothers' pensions to enable poor widows to care for their children at home.^[2] Congress established the Children's Bureau in 1912, and in 1921 it passed the Sheppard-Towner Act to fund health education programs open to all American mothers and babies.

The Social Security Act was passed in 1935; subsequently insurance for the elderly became its most popular part, eventually expanding to cover virtually all retired employees and providing survivors' and disability protections as well. Most employees and their dependents were covered by the 1960s. Modeled in part on Social Security, Medicare was added to the system in 1965.

The GI Bill of 1944 offered a comprehensive set of disability services, employment benefits, educational loans, family allowances, and subsidized loans for homes, businesses, and farms to sixteen million veterans returning from World War II. Smaller versions of the GI Bill also extended aid to veterans of the Korean War and to others who served in the 1950s and 1960s. The families of veterans, as well as the veterans themselves, were greatly helped by GI Bill programs.

These popular and effective programs are highly diverse. Emerging at different times, they covered various swatches of the population. Nevertheless, they have important features in common that constitute a recurrent formula for policy success and social unity in American democracy.

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In the first place, those policy milestones and the movements supporting them have aimed to give social benefits to large categories of citizens in return for service to the community (or to help people prepare to serve the community). The most enduring and popular social benefits in the United States have never been understood either as poor relief or as mere "individual entitlements." From public schools through Social Security they have been morally justified as recognitions of—or prospective supports for—individual service to the community. The rationale of social support in return for service has been a characteristic way for Americans to combine deep respect for individual freedom and initiative with due regard for the obligations that all members of the national community owe to one another.

A clear-cut rationale of return for service was invoked to justify the veterans' benefits expanded in the wake of the Civil War and World War II.^[3] Less well understood, though, is the use of civic arguments by the educational reformers and local community activists who pioneered America's public schools. They argued for common schools not primarily as means to further economic efficiency or individual mobility but as ways to prepare all children for democratic citizenship.^[4] Similarly, early 1900s programs for mothers were justified as supports for the services of women who risked life to bear children and devoted themselves to raising good citizens. Back then, women's groups argued that needy mothers (like all other mothers) served the community and thus deserved pensions just as much as former soldiers.

Social Security and Medicare today enjoy a profound moral underpinning in the eyes of most Americans.^[5] Retirees and people anticipating retirement believe they have "earned" benefits by virtue of payroll contributions. But contrary to claims by many pundits and economists, the exchange is not understood as narrowly instrumental. Most Americans see Social Security and Medicare as a social contract enforced by, and for, contributors to the national community. The benefits are experienced as just rewards for lifetimes of contributions through work, not simply as returns-with-interest on savings accounts.

Second, successful U.S. social policies have built bridges between more and less privileged Americans, bringing people together—as worthy beneficiaries and as contributing citizens—across lines of class, race, and region. Even if policy milestones started out small compared to what they eventually became, the key factor has been the structure of contributions and benefits. Financed by broad-based taxes, successful social policies have delivered benefits to more and less privileged Americans at the same

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time, even if some extra help has been provided to less privileged beneficiaries (as in today's Social Security system). America's most successful social policies have been broad and encompassing and therefore not labeled "welfare" programs.

Public schools, for example, were founded for most children, not just the offspring of privileged families, as was originally the case with schools in other nations.^[6] Civil War benefits and the GI Bill were available to all eligible veterans and survivors of each war. Although mothers' pensions eventually deteriorated into "welfare, " they were not originally stigmatized in this way.^[7] During the early 1900s a great many American mothers who lost a breadwinner-husband could suddenly find themselves in dire economic straits. What is more, early federal programs for mothers and children were universal. The Children's Bureau was explicitly charged with serving all American children, ^[8] and its first chief, Julia Lathrop, reasoned that if "the services of the [Sheppard-Towner] bill were not open to all, the services would degenerate into poor relief."^[9]

Social Security and Medicare are today's best examples of inclusive social programs with huge cross-class constituencies. Although Social Security is the most effective antipoverty undertaking ever run by the government of the United States, its saving grace over the past several decades—during an era of tight federal budgets and fierce political attacks on social provision—has been its broad constituency of present and future beneficiaries, none of whom understand it as "welfare."^[10] Were Social Security and Medicare to be divided into residual social safety nets versus individualistic private market accounts, they would soon be on the road to moral, political, and fiscal demise. America would not just be making a technical or budgetary adjustment. Especially in the case of Social Security, even partial privatization would undercut a successful solid program that, with minimal "bureaucratic" hassle, enhances dignified security for millions of working families.

Finally, broad social policies have been nurtured by partnerships of government and popularly rooted voluntary associations. There has been no zero-sum relationship between state and society, no trade-off between government and individuals, and no simple opposition between national and community efforts. America's policy milestones were developed (if not always originated) through cooperation between government agencies and elected politicians, on the one hand, and voluntary associations, on the other hand. These voluntary associations are not confined to nonprofit, professionally run, social-service agencies but include voluntary citizens' groups as well. The associations that have nurtured major U.S.

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social programs have usually linked national and state offices with participatory groups in thousands of local communities.

Public schools were founded and sustained by traveling reformers, often members of regional or national associations, who linked up with leading local citizens, churches, and voluntary groups.^[11] The movers and shakers behind early 1900s state and national legislation for mothers and children were the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the National Congress of Mothers (which eventually turned into the PTA).^[12] Civil War benefits ended up both reinforcing and being nurtured by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).^[13] Open to veterans of all economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, the GAR was a classic three-tiered voluntary civic association, with tens of thousands of local "posts" whose members met regularly, plus state and national affiliates that held big annual conventions.^[14]

Social Security has had a complex relationship to voluntary associations. During the Great Depression a militant social movement and voluntary federation of older Americans, the Townsend movement, pressed Congress to enact universal benefits for elders. But Social Security definitely did not meet the specific demands of the Townsend movement (which wanted every retired man or woman to be given an immediate pension of $200 a month on the condition that he or she would retire and open up jobs for younger Americans during the Depression).

Today more than thirty-five million Americans fifty years and older are enrolled in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), whose newsletters and magazines alert older voters to maneuvers in Washington, D.C., that may affect Social Security and Medicare. The AARP does not have very many local membership clubs—and this absence is surely a source of some weakness in the association. Still, many elderly Americans participate in locally rooted seniors' groups, including the union-related National Council of Senior Citizens, which has played a key role in advocating for Medicare. Along with unions and religious congregations, federal, state, and local governments have done a great deal in the past thirty years to create services and community centers for elderly citizens. An important side effect has been considerable social communication, civic volunteerism, and political engagement among older Americans.

The final example of government-association partnership in the expansion of inclusive U.S. social provision is perhaps the most fascinating: the crucial role played by the American Legion in lobbying for and shaping the GI Bill of 1944.^[15] In return for service, the GI Bill gave

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benefits, including home mortgages, business loans, and farm loans, as well as training and education benefits and support for families while a veteran studied. The education benefits were designed to maximize opportunities for millions of individual veterans to enroll in any program or institution that would accept them. But the GI Bill became as generous and flexible as it did only because it was championed by a nationwide, locally rooted, voluntary federation, the American Legion.^[16] The Legion pressured conservatives in Congress, who were reluctant to give generous educational benefits to returning World War II veterans. The Legion also reshaped the proposals of the wartime Roosevelt administration, whose "planners" had initially wanted to limit college benefits to one year for all veterans, followed by additional years of college restricted to a small minority approved by the colleges and universities. In the end millions of GI Bill beneficiaries did very well in college; the various provisions of the GI Bill ultimately helped about half of the young families in the postwar United States. But if benefits had not been initially opened up to many more than the Roosevelt administration first envisaged, the egalitarian potential of the bill would not have been realized.

AFTER WORLD WAR II: RACIAL DIVISIONS AND GENERATIONAL IMBALANCE

Given the repeated success of broad social provision in American democracy, one might imagine the concept would endure, especially after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s cleared the obstacles to African-American participation in elections and other civic institutions. But for complex reasons both of circumstance and strategic choice, liberals and conservatives turned away from the best tradition of inclusive social provision, fanning instead the flames of racial and generational controversy. The Democratic Party and liberals abandoned a long-standing formula for successful social policy making and became entangled in controversies of race and generation that have increasingly fragmented Americans into camps of black and white, old and young, middle class and underclass.

As these divisions have become bitterly politicized, moreover, socioeconomic gaps have grown, dividing the most economically privileged and politically influential Americans from all others. Contemporary liberalism has been woefully unable to highlight this very real problem or to bring the majority of Americans together to address it.

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The contradictions that have gripped American social politics since the 1960s were not immediately foreseeable in the aftermath of World War II. During the Depression and the war many Western nations launched comprehensive systems to guarantee citizens full employment and social provisions. In the United States, too, New Deal reformers battled for broad protections for all citizens or wage earners. But by the 1950s the United States was left with only one relatively universal permanent program—Social Security's contributory disability and retirement insurance. Other attempts to institutionalize broad social programs were defeated, and America was set on the road to a "missing middle" in social provision—the relative absence of protections for working-aged adults and their children that pertains today.

For many younger American families the GI Bill of 1944 and subsequent veterans' legislation temporarily filled such gaps in protection. Hearty postwar economic expansion, coupled with the age-cohort-specific social investments promoted by veterans' programs, ensured the "rising fortunes" of many young American adults after the war. Especially well served were those working-and middle-class whites who entered the labor force, married, and raised children from the late 1940s into the 1960s. But after that the impact of the GI Bill faded, just as the national economy was about to take a turn for the worse for young workers and families.^[17]

CONFLICTS ABOUT "WELFARE"

As the generational imbalance in U.S. social provision became apparent with the waning of the effects of the GI Bill, there was an obvious solution: the United States could have done more for all parents and children rather than simply expanding preexisting, New Deal-style Social Security for the elderly and "welfare" for a few of the very poor. This might have happened starting in the 1960s, but racialized disputes over "welfare" sidetracked the nation.

A new era of cross-racial politics might have blossomed after African Americans finally achieved civil rights between 1955 and 1965. Briefly in the mid-1960s liberal Democrats gained executive power and majorities in Congress, and some dreamed of "completing" the social and economic agendas left over from the unfinished New Deal reforms of the 1930s and 1940s. Active full-employment programs might have been designed to make sure that every American adult could get job training and a job with wages and benefits sufficient to support a family. Such employment

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programs would have aided the poor along with other Americans, offering help to all nonelderly adults willing to serve the nation through work. Progressives in the 1960s might also have fashioned new security programs such as universal health coverage—a social benefit vital for any family trying to raise children.

But this was the path not taken. In the immediate aftermath of the civil rights struggles in the South, it proved impossible to unite unions and civil rights activists, despite efforts by leaders like Walter Reuther, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. National-level policy making went forward in already-well-worn grooves. The legacies from the New Deal era encouraged policy makers to model Medicare on Social Security, thus restricting universal health coverage to the elderly. Existing patterns of macroeconomic management encouraged the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to use "commercial Keynesian" tax cuts to stimulate the national economy.^[18] Tiny job-training programs and targeted welfare efforts were all that remained to help the very poor. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s millions of needy single-parent families were added to the welfare rolls, becoming eligible as well for Medicaid and other means-tested assistance.^[19] This helped countless poor mothers and children but left millions of other poor and less privileged families out in the cold.

A fierce political backlash against liberalism soon gathered force. As many Americans faced declining economic prospects from the early 1970s, and as more and more women entered the wage-labor force, welfare programs directed at poor mothers, who were often stereotyped as black, could easily be portrayed as unfair. Conservatives played this theme for all it was worth, and many ordinary Americans responded. It has hardly mattered that most welfare mothers have had to work part-time off the books simply as a matter of survival.^[20] The point is more cultural and political: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits, originally conceived as "mothers' pensions, " lost their legitimacy in an era of racial conflict, declining wages, and widespread female entry into the wage-labor market.

For more than a generation welfare served as a spectacularly successful conservative political battering ram against "liberals." Republican president Richard Nixon expanded welfare benefits (as well as affirmative action), then turned around and criticized these policies to spark conflicts among Democrats. Ronald Reagan featured antiwelfare appeals as part of his winning campaign for the presidency in 1980. Intellectual and political attacks on welfare subsequently deepened and spread to

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Democrats—culminating in the bipartisan congressional majorities that voted to "end welfare as we know it" in August 1996. In U.S. politics it has always been difficult to justify social benefits for the poor alone and never more so than in recent decades.

Liberal Democrats missed opportunities and worked themselves into a political impasse. The long-standing formula for successful American social provision—giving support to people across classes who are seen as "contributors" to the community—was not extended after the GI Bill into new programs for the nonelderly. Welfare programs proliferated instead but soon became racially controversial and culturally delegitimated in an era of changing roles for women. After the 1960s nobody in the Democratic base was happy. Welfare efforts failed to reverse economic and family trends that meant poverty for more and more families, and millions of downscale Americans were left without forms of assistance (such as Medicaid) that were available to some of the very poor.^[21] All of this placed the Democrats in an untenable situation: they came to be seen as champions of ineffectual poverty programs rather than as advocates of opportunity and security for all families. Republicans, meanwhile, turned more and more toward racially divisive maneuvers and efforts to shrink government and cut taxes on the rich. No one, it has seemed, is able to speak up on behalf of a social politics that would benefit the less privileged while bringing most Americans together.

ADVOCACY DISPUTES OVER "ENTITLEMENTS"

The War on Poverty and Great Society could be dismissed as "mistakes" made by liberals, who failed to replace the fading GI Bill with broad new social programs for all working families, black and white alike. Broad social programs, the core of the New Deal, survived and even expanded. Social Security pensions for the elderly became more generous in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as benefits for the poor were raised and retirement pensions were indexed to inflation. Medicare, moreover, was added to Social Security, offering considerably more access to adequate and affordable health care for virtually all elderly citizens.

But even these achievements, championed by liberal Democrats, became a source of renewed political controversy from the 1980s onward, as conservatives learned to highlight the sharp generational imbalances in U.S. social provision as a whole as part of a broader right-wing strategy, as Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis have shown, to undermine popular support for Social Security.^[22] Late-twentieth-century America ended

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up with generous social supports only for the retired elderly, making it possible for opponents of a strong governmental role in social provision to appeal to young working adults and parents as taxpayers rather than as beneficiaries of public social programs.

Taken together, the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and many of the social-policy initiatives sponsored by moderate Republican president Richard M. Nixon aimed to help poor children and working-aged adults, especially African Americans who had not been fully incorporated into the economic growth or social insurance protections of the postwar era. But when the dust settled, the broadest and costliest achievements focused on the elderly. The most important federal innovations were Medicare, enacted in 1965, and the 1972 indexing of Social Security pensions to inflation. During the "Reagan era" of the 1980s, moreover, cutbacks occurred primarily in welfare programs for the poor and not in these popular social insurance programs, which covered the middle-class elderly along with working poor retirees.

Today grand schemes for reconstructing U.S. social policy are promoted in generational terms. The fiscally conservative Concord Coalition, for example, proclaims loudly that too much is being done for the elderly and calls on the nation to balance the federal budget by slashing "middle class entitlements."^[23] At the other end of the political spectrum groups like the Children's Defense Fund insist that more must be done to uplift poor children. The United States stands out among advanced industrial nations today for the prominence of arguments about generational conflict. There is no evidence that younger Americans actually resent adequate provision for their parents and grandparents through Social Security and Medicare. But advocacy groups and partisan politicians can readily create public controversies about the sharp imbalance between America's relatively generous and comprehensive social programs for all of its elderly citizens and its paltry efforts to help only a minority of nonelderly adults and children. The majority of American working-aged adults have a right to wonder how their values and interests are reflected in all of this.

Ordinary Americans have even more reason to wonder about this now because how the United States "does politics" has changed just as much as the nature of the programs liberals or conservatives propose. Partnerships between broad citizen membership associations and government have eroded since the 1960s. Especially at the national level, U.S. politics has become the affair of professionally run, top-down advocacy groups. Once American social policy discussions were carried on by, and

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through, political parties that had some popular organizational roots and among nationwide membership associations (like the American Legion, or the AFL-CIO trade unions, or farmer or business groups) with a presence in localities and states, as well as in Washington, D.C. No longer. Now American political parties—and especially the Democratic Party—are little more than collections of fund-raisers, pollsters, and media consultants.^[24] And the groups active in social-policy disputes—especially on the so-called liberal side of battles—are almost invariably professional offices situated in Washington, D.C., or New York City, concentrating on media relations and congressional lobbying.

Ordinary citizens rarely belong to these groups. At most, they are mailing-list members, periodically asked to send checks to keep the operation going. Certainly, ordinary citizens have few organized venues in which to talk among themselves or talk back to national leaders. Thus, battles over such fundamental matters as the future of Social Security are largely waged among think tanks, foundations, and detached advocacy groups such as the Concord Coalition and the Third Millennium.

In sum, in the period since the 1960s the long-standing formula for successful social policy making in American democracy has vanished. New social programs have not been devised to bridge social divisions; nor have they been justified as returns for citizen service. Surviving broad programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, have been stigmatized as generationally divisive—a message that has had some resonance among younger Americans because there is, indeed, a vacuum in U.S. social provision for working-aged families. Buffeted by ideologically polarized arguments, Americans speak less and less of social programs as rewards for, and supports for, individuals' contributions to the national community. And partnerships of voluntary membership associations and government have been displaced by a national politics increasingly run from the top by professional consultants and advocacy groups.

GETTING AMERICA BACK ON TRACK

Given these troubling recent developments, what can Americans now do to fashion social policies that would bring most of us together and address social inequalities, rather than fuel continuing partisan and racial conflicts? The answer may be that little can or will be done, that current divisions and fruitless battles over revamping U.S. social provision will continue. The country may well be headed toward doing less and less to support most families through government. We may simply encourage

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citizens to sink or swim in competitive labor and capital markets: working-aged citizens must get ahead through wage-work alone, and elderly retirees must increasingly rely on private savings and investments. Much of what is advocated by conservative Republicans and by "New Democrats" of the Democratic Leadership Council points exactly in this direction.

But it doesn't have to stay this way. There are stirrings among progressives and other Americans who care about broad and equitable social programs that could reestablish the old formula for successful social policy in a new era. Already existing security programs may end up being reformed in ways that retain their shared character and generous guarantees to the retired elderly. And new social supports for all working families may be fashioned in the era after welfare "as we knew it."

Many Americans are bestirring themselves to support Social Security and Medicare, refusing to heed the call of advocacy groups trying to push us into deeper and deeper generational warfare. Social Security and Medicare, argue many liberals and key groups like the AFL-CIO, can be adjusted for the future in cautious ways that preserve their cross-class nature and their moral legitimation as socially guaranteed rewards for lifetimes of work. Social Security and Medicare are the most important "family" supports the United States has right now, and we can be sure that most nonelderly Americans, especially women, are just as aware of their value as are current retirees. The American public remains cautious about major changes in these programs, and, especially given the vagaries of an uncertain world economy, calls for sharp cutbacks in Social Security or for restructuring it into a series of individual market-investment accounts may not carry the day, especially in the wake of the economic downturn that followed the recent economic boom.

Even as they defend and update Social Security and Medicare, Americans who care about equality and social cohesion realize that they need to address the "missing middle" in social provision. Of late, some voices have been raised on behalf of working families and, above all, working parents. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West have argued, it is time for the United States to devise a new "GI Bill"-style set of supports not just for poor children but for all families with children.^[25] Working parents could be at the center of a new round of inclusive social policy making that stresses vital contributions to the nation and extends support across lines of race and class. And they could also be key actors in institutions and associations that helped to bring about such social supports.

The rationale for a new round of inclusive social supports is powerful.

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The twenty-first-century United States will have a growing economy able to support pensions and health care for the elderly only if the workers of today and tomorrow are healthy, well educated, and productive. Parents must do well at their uniquely important job if a good national future is possible. Families need a sense of security; working adults have to have opportunities to get ahead; and mothers and fathers must be able to afford to spend time at home and in their communities. Children need safe, good schools and supportive activities. Parents are the ones who must take the lead, working with teachers and community associates to ensure good schools and engaging activities. Businesses, in turn, might benefit over the long run from a society more supportive of families raising children, the workers of tomorrow.

Currently, America treats parental work as a kind of private luxury. Higher incomes and glamorous freedoms go to individuals who take off on their own or shirk their responsibilities. Workplaces and the economic rules of the game make life hard for family men and women. Parents end up making disproportionate sacrifices—to do the very work of raising children, on which we all depend! The nation has a stake in fashioning a more family-friendly economy and society. Public social supports and our employment system could honor and facilitate the work of parents, recognizing that parental service to the community and nation is vital.

This is not the place to detail technical policy prescriptions; it is possible, however, to outline the goals of a national partnership with parents that will promote security and opportunity for all American families. Work in the United States should be made more hospitable than it now is to family life. In a nation that values work as highly as the United States does, parents need to provide for themselves and their children through work. Adults must therefore be able to find jobs and take advantage of opportunities for education or training. All jobs must have decent wages and health and pension benefits that make family life viable. There could be rights to paid family leave on terms that make it truly available to all employees. Because parents need time as well as money, we as a nation could work toward the norm of a thirty-five-hour workweek (with pay remaining at least at the level it was before the reduction in hours).

U.S. family structures have changed markedly over the past few generations, and social programs will surely be adjusted in response. Ways could be found to bridge conservative and liberal concerns. Public policies—taxes, benefits, and marriage rules—can be structured to support married parenthood. At the same time, Americans recognize that

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there are many divorced and single parents doing the best they can. If marriages fail, there can be social supports to help children and the parent who takes responsibility for them, including automatic systems of child support that allow a custodial parent to work less than full time and still provide for children.

Another area of possible partisan convergence focuses on making communities safe and supportive for families and children. Today liberals and conservatives agree that there must be tough crime laws and active measures to make neighborhoods safe, clean, and orderly. Americans want schools that are held to high standards and are able to afford small classes with administrators and teachers free to innovate.

Pursuit of family security through a partnership with all American parents could revitalize the tradition of successful social policy making in U.S. democracy. Americans have long believed in linking national social provision with important individual contributions to community wellbeing. Responsible parents are critical to the nation's future, yet today their efforts are undervalued and poorly supported. Mobilizing government to work with nongovernmental institutions to better support parents could strengthen Americans' sense of community across classes, races, and places.

The point is not simply the vast mass of potential voters that can be culled from all the individual parents. Not every American adult is a parent (in fact there are more U.S. adults living alone and proportionately fewer families with children than ever before). But demography has never been destiny for social policy. All kinds of Americans will find the themes of responsibility and social support for parents morally compelling. Even retirees—who may not be active parents now and vote against active parents in school budget referenda—are often grandparents who care about their children and grandchildren. Elders also understand the nation's and their own stake in productive workers.^[26] It is an odd feature of U.S. politics today that so many pundits are declaring "generational warfare" just as the country faces the prospect of more elders but fewer dependent children per adult worker. Retirees, working-aged adults, and children can all flourish together. An aging society is not a zero-sum game.

Some liberals may feel that it is best to avoid talking about families, lest we exacerbate racially charged divisions between dua-land single-parent families. But family-friendly policies are vital for both sets of families, and public leaders need not adopt a morally relativist stance in discussing them. We can acknowledge that two married parents are best for children, even though most of us are personally acquainted with mothers

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(or fathers) who have to soldier on outside of this ideal situation. As policies are formulated to help parents and their families, Americans can acknowledge the tension between ideals and second-best necessities, while extending support to all working mothers and fathers.

History tells us that a morally grounded appeal to shared concerns will always do better in American politics than any explicit call for race-or class-based mobilization. The needs of less privileged Americans must be at the center of national concern, but a politics focused on class or racial redistribution alone will not achieve this goal. The entire history of successful social policy making in American democracy suggests that the best way to help less privileged or formerly excluded groups is to include them in broad civic and governmental efforts that encompass the middle class at the same time. Encompassing social policies not only avoids isolating and stigmatizing the poor, but it also builds social legitimation and political support across lines.

Unions, religious congregations, responsible business people, parent-teacher associations, and community groups of all kinds can surely find common ground in support of parent-friendly programs. As concrete victories are achieved, parent-friendly policies can generate new resources and social connections—in local communities, at workplaces, and across the nation. Such resources for parents—and connections for and among parents—would not be overtly partisan. But in real life they would help family-friendly politicians to run for office and, equally important, prompt such politicians to do worthwhile things once they get into office. More civic infrastructure centered on parents can only be good for the future of democratic politics in the United States. This is not a trivial consideration in the wake of dwindling numbers of eligible voters who have participated in recent elections. Institutions and associations involving families and parents and grandparents along with children could conceivably become new civic partners with government in the next round of broad American social provision.

BRINGING OURSELVES TOGETHER

Commentators on American life often stress the ways in which political and policy disputes reflect divisions created by underlying interests of race, culture, class, or partisanship. But this classic assumption must be turned on its head, not simply out of some moral impulse but because American history requires it. Politics and the state are not helpless witnesses to those divisions. Government efforts—especially social policies—can

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either exacerbate conflict or diminish it. Throughout American history, from schools and Civil War benefits through programs for mothers and children and the elderly, there have been broad, encompassing social policies that furthered social unity even as they helped huge numbers of Americans. And they succeeded because they invoked an enduring moral principle: those who serve the community (or are preparing to do so) deserve the nation's succor in return.

Alas, in the decades after the 1960s Americans lost sight of this wisdom. They forgot what they once knew. Instead of healing the rifts between black and white, rich and poor, old and young, U.S. welfare policies divided Americans. And so in the wake of the 1996 decision by President Clinton and the Republican-dominated Congress to end the federal government's commitment to "welfare as we knew it, " we face a fork in the road. Liberals and conservatives can continue to wrangle about narrow programs to help or discipline the very poor, about whether the elderly or poor children deserve public generosity. Or Americans can understand the futility of such debates and turn instead toward a broader conception of support for all American families—devising ways to help all parents, while expecting them to contribute through work and responsible nurturance of the young. Social Security and Medicare can be adjusted for the future and supplemented with broad new protections for working-aged adults and families raising children.

For those of us who want to help the vulnerable while furthering a new sense of national unity, the goal of "Family Security for All" is an excellent beacon on which to set our sights. History shows that this objective holds promise for revitalizing the best possibilities of inclusive social provision known to American democracy.

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