The Origins of the Deep State (cont'd.)

In my previous post, I suggested that the “Deep State” originated in the welfare state machinery we imposed on the poor. But more was required before it expanded its grip over the rest of us…

Whatever Happened to Welfare Reform?

Welfare’s dynamic as the breeder of social anomie was recognized early on by serious social critics, and reform was among the Republicans’ top domestic priorities until the 1990s.  Respected scholars and intellectuals, both conservative and liberal, issued urgent warnings. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously prophesied in 1965, “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority…that community asks for and gets chaos.”  That chaos, multiplied over a half century, is what confronts us today.

In those days, liberals and moderates like Moynihan were also concerned about trapping the poor in “welfare dependency” and saw government payments as second best to social reform.  Even Marxists had long denounced “welfarism” as an insidious tool of capitalism, because it placated the poor and working class and dampened their revolutionary potential.  In short, everyone from Right to Left at least agreed that the poor should not remain poor, that government handouts were inherently demeaning, and that poor people should eventually, by whatever means, lead lives of economic self-sufficiency.  From its inception therefore, welfare involved pacts with the devil from all quarters.  A rough consensus of Left and Right regarded it as a temporary necessity that should be rendered unnecessary as quickly as possible.

What happened to this consensus?

The New Ideologues

While the Right and the Old Left were debating poverty, a new ideology had arrived on the scene.  It drew upon socialist narratives but also transformed them.  The new ideologues were not really concerned about poverty at all (which is why we no longer hear much about it), and they understood full well that black impoverishment was not caused by racism or capitalism.  They knew that the problem was family destruction, because, if they did not initiate it, they certainly exploited and exacerbated it.  The new ideologues were devoted first and foremost to sexual liberation.  

It was the feminists who overturned the anti-welfare consensus by shifting the purpose from relieving poverty to promoting women’s empowerment and sexual freedom.  This transformed the welfare matriarchy from a necessary evil into a positive good by intentionally glorifying and proliferating the single motherhood that really created the underclass, its self-destructiveness, and its rage.  If proliferating poverty was the price of sexual freedom, they were perfectly willing (for others) to pay that price.  “Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms,” proclaimed influential socialist-feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, “still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.”¹

Here the feminists were exploiting a basic fallacy and a dynamic that had long been driving poverty and was now becoming conspicuous, but that liberal society was stubbornly reluctant to face.  However the poor (or those who claim to speak for them) may pull on our heartstrings, “the poor” in today’s affluent societies are not starving children with distended bellies.  They are the children of single mothers.  They are the victims, in other words, not of a stingy or oppressive society but of a sexually indulgent one.  The welfare state could not remedy this; it could only make it worse.

Exacerbating this dynamic was the increasing domination of the welfare system by radicalized women.  Previously, private charity had been operated by churches and volunteer women driven by a sense of Christian calling and supported financially by their husbands.  These women did not merely relieve the poor materially; they also enforced Christian sexual morality that could largely eradicate poverty by refusing to condone single motherhood.  Welfare replaced these women with a “new class” of paid professional social workers who quickly developed a vested interest in perpetuating the poverty and connected ills that justified their existence.  Single motherhood was their bread-and-butter and went from an evil to an asset.  Anti-male ideology imparted by ideologues running from Jane Addams to later women’s studies programs dovetailed with bureaucratic self-interest to make single motherhood the desired norm and ensure that the breadwinners, who alone could free the women and children from dependance on state provision, stayed away.  This is why the famous “man in the house rule” never managed to get abolished, though everyone had found it perplexingly self-defeating.  Welfare matriarchs did not want men in the houses, which would make them redundant. 

The New Leftist Gendarmerie

Welfare was now “empowering,” less for the single mothers who received it, than for the female functionaries who dispensed it.  This became terrifyingly evident as the feminist social workers acquired new quasi-police powers that originated tamid the dysfuntional chaos of single-mother homes and welfare communities and which they found far more “empowering” than just doling out money: child protection, domestic violence programs, and child support enforcement.  These programs elevated the social workers to the status of plainclothes police.  They also displaced the fathers by usurping their roles of protectors and providers for the women and children.  Indeed, fathers became the principal targets of the new police powers. Their status was quickly transformed from being protectors of women and children to being “batterers” and “pedophiles” who abused them, and from being their providers to being “deadbeats” who ran away.  Now – most “empowering” of all – the matriarchy could eliminate them by force and incarcerate them without trial.

Welfare was no longer merely a government dole.  It now became a leftist gendarmerie, with the gendarmes largely unconstrained by the constitutional restraints we normally place on uniformed policemen.  In good bureaucratic fashion, the social work gendarmes thus found that, on several levels, they could create the very criminials whose existence “empowered” them — consigning black men to both criminality and criminalization.  Having used welfare payments to leverage the removal of the fathers from the mothers and children and turn the adolescents into delinquents, they now criminalized the fathers too.  A third stage of criminalizing their rivals – legitimate policemen trying to keep order amid all this – is now in full swing.²

This shifted the entire ideological alignment of our politics. The victims changed from the gender-neutral “poor” and “working class” to “abused children,” “battered women,” and “heroic single mothers,” and the villains transmigrated from capitalist plutocrats and bloodthirsty militarists to working-class fathers: “pedophiles,” “batterers,” “deadbeat dads”.  With feminism displacing socialism as the Left’s reigning ideology, the same working men who had been cruelly sacrificed in imperialism’s wars or laid off as victims of heartless capitalism were suddenly and ignominiously absconding from the bastards they had sired.

#MeToo’s Gestates Among the Poor

Augmenting the new police powers were new hysterias claiming imminent and catastrophic harm to women and/or children and demanding draconian “crackdowns” on “child abuse”, “domestic violence,” and unpaid “child support”.  No public outcry had demanded government action on these matters, and no public perception of a problem even existed.  In each case, the hysteria was generated by the newly empowered feminist apparatchiks (blindly followed, invariably, by stupid conservatives).  Concrete evidence presented by responsible journalists and scholars proving that all these hysterias were hoaxes and serious miscarriages of justice, undermining constitutional freedoms, was never refuted but simply ignored.

Knowing that very little child abuse occurs in married, two-parent households, the child-protection gestapo was incentivized to encourage as much child abuse as possible, which it proceeded to do with ruthless efficiency by removing the fathers who are the children’s natural protectors.  (Those shocked that today’s Left readily endorses the physical mutilation of children in the name of “transgenderism,” or that health authorities single-mindedly demand the injection of healthy children with unnecessary and lethal “vaccines” that can cripple and kill them, should understand that most child abuse has long been government-orchestrated.)  

Not to be outdone, the domestic-violence gestapo devised similar techniques of using patently trumped-up accusations against fathers in welfare families, which were even more effective in removing them. 

The Larger Impact on Our Politics

As this technique of empowerment-by-accusation was adopted by the larger feminist Left, and then the Left generally, it transformed our politics profoundly.

University students and servicemen soon became targets of similar accusations, plus new ones: “rape” (constantly “redefined”), “sexual assault,” “sexual harassment,” “stalking,” “bullying,” “sex trafficking,” most recently “needle spiking,” and more.  Accusations began to get serious media attention when the #MeToo operation went after high-profile men: politicians like Judge Brett Kavanaugh, celebrities like Bill Cosby and the Prince of York, whistleblowers like Julian Assange and others whom the larger state machinery targeted for elimination.

And now they have trained similar guns on Donald Trump, his supporters, and various other “deplorables”.

Yet fabricated accusations are only part of the legacy. Much more will be explored in future posts.

1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Garden City and New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986), 197 (emphasis added).

2. The policeman convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd is only one example.  Here too, misplaced charges of “racism” drip further poison even into the black community itself.  Five black policemen now face murder charges in the violent death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis.  See the penetrating commentary by Jason Whitlock.