While few would question the rectitude of her campaigns for black equality and desegregation, Edelman’s greatest influence has been in welfare policy, and there her ideas about how to organize society and American politics have proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many respects Edelman was a basic welfare state liberal, believing no entitlement or transfer payment was too big. Her great innovation was to defend the welfare system from empirical criticism—that is, it doesn’t work—by hiding behind the image of poor children. “When you talked about poor people or black people you faced a shrinking audience,” she has said. “I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.” Indeed. Edelman more than anyone else can be blamed for the saccharine omnipresence of “the children” in American political rhetoric.
The problem is that while this tactic was brilliant strategically, the net effect was to make responsible reform impossible. After all, the reason the “audience” was “shrinking” for exhortations to expand the welfare state was that it was becoming increasingly obvious that the welfare state was causing dependency among black women and alienation among black men. As a result, defenders of the status quo became ever more shrill in their attacks on opponents. Hence the use and abuse of “the children.”
Traditional objections to welfare as a violation of constitutional principles and a corrupter of civic virtue—which only gained respectability in the late 1970s—were suddenly beside the point. Edelman. Clinton, and others transformed the debate to one about children. Who cares if—as FDR also believed—relief was ultimately detrimental to adults, sapping their initiative? The effects on adults were irrelevant. Children were the beneficiaries of aid checks, not their parents (even though their parents still cashed them). Indeed, one tragic consequence of this strategy was that the government used child poverty to crush individualism and pride among inner-city blacks. James Bovard notes that when Congress mandated food stamps, welfare “recruiters”—a hundred thousand of them created by the War on Poverty—went into the cities to convince poor people to enroll. An Agriculture Department magazine reported that food stamp workers could often overcome people’s pride by telling parents, “This is for your children.” It continued: thanks to “intensive outreach efforts, resistance of the ‘too prouds’ is bending.”
Perhaps just as important, this provided vital propaganda value for liberals. Ronald Reagan got traction for attacking “welfare queens.” But no one would dare attack the unfortunate offspring of these women. Suddenly to criticize welfare policy made you “anti-child,” thus spawning all of those liberal talking points about balancing the budget on the “backs of the children.” This fed nicely into the psychological propaganda that conservatives are just bad people and that any break with the welfare state is motivated by “hate.” Even Bill Clinton wasn’t immune. When he signed the welfare reform bill, Peter Edelman resigned as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, and Marian Edelman called Clinton’s action a “moment of shame.” “Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right,” she proclaimed, pointedly adding, “Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.” The CDF denounced the move as an act of “national child abandonment,” while Ted Kennedy called it “legislative child abuse.” The New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen dubbed it “the politics of meanness.”
But the CDF and other remoras of the Great Society practiced the true politics of meanness, because at the end of the day their welfare state—based though it may have been on love, concern, and nice-ness—resulted in more damage to the black family and specifically to black children than much that can be laid at the feet of racist neglect. Today black children are less likely to be raised by two parents than they were during the era of slavery.
While Hillary Clinton may have learned from Edelman how to use children as propaganda tools for her ideological agenda, she far surpassed her teacher in the scope of her ambition. For Clinton, welfare policy was simply one front in a wider war. The crisis facing children wasn’t merely an issue for poor denizens of the inner city. For Hillary, childhood is a crisis, and the government must come to the rescue. On this she has remained remarkably consistent. In her 1973 article “Children Under the Law” in Harvard Educational Review, she criticized the “pretense” that “children’s issues are somehow beyond politics” and scorned the idea that “families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children.” Fast-forward twenty-three years, to her April 24, 1996. address to the United Methodist General Conference: “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child...For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate.”
These two quotations sound at odds, but the intent is exactly the same. It’s just that Hillary Clinton in 1996 is a politician, whereas in 1973 she’s a radical lawyer. What Clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to “subvert” the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home, as the progressive icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it.
This “brilliant hope”—as Gilman described it—is only realizable if children are cast as a class in perpetual crisis. Much as the proletariat were portrayed by Marxists as being in a constant state of war, with the nation under deadly siege by classical fascists, Hillary’s children are in unimaginable existential peril. Thus she approvingly quotes the Cornell psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: “The present state of children and families in the United States represents the greatest domestic problem our nation has faced since the founding of the Republic. It is sapping our very roots.” She concludes, “At a time when the well-being of children is under unprecedented threat, the balance of power is weighted heavily against them.” The government must do everything it can to “reverse the crisis affecting our children,” she declares. “Children, after all, are citizens too.”
Here at last is a “moral equivalent of war” that modern liberals can rally around, a “crisis mechanism” no one would identify as fascistic because when you say “the children” the last thing you think of are storm troopers. Nobody wants to be seen as anti-child. The “child crisis” needed no definition because it had no boundaries. Even people without children should care about other people’s children. Fast foods were targeted because they make children fat—and nutritional decisions can’t be left to the parent. “More than the much-reviled products of Big Tobacco, big helpings and Big Food constitute the number-one threat to America’s children.” the Nation warned. The Clinton administration and affiliated activists justified its gun control policies based on the threat to children. “No longer will we be silent as the gun lobby refuses to put our children’s health and safety first,” Hillary Clinton barked in a senatorial debate in 2000.
It’s forgotten now, but the early Clinton administration was saturated with such thinking. Janet Reno, appointed the nation’s top law enforcement official as part of a gender quota, defined her primary mission as a protector of children. “I would like to use the law of this land to do everything I possibly can,” she declared when nominated, “to give to each of them the opportunity to grow to be strong, healthy and self-sufficient citizens of this country.” Reno, it may be forgotten, had come to national attention as a crusading prosecutor who won a number of convictions in a series of high-profile child sex-abuse cases. Many of them, it was later revealed, were fraudulent, and Reno’s zealous tactics do not look admirable in hindsight. When she came to Washington, the first woman in one of the big four cabinet positions, she was determined to cast herself as primarily a children’s advocate, launching her “national children’s agenda.” “The children of America, 20 percent of whom live in poverty, have no one to advocate for them,” Reno said. Reno’s zeal as a protector of children no doubt played a role in her disastrous handling of the Branch Davidia
n raid in Waco, Texas.
But Janet Reno was precisely the sort of attorney general that, at least in theory, the author of It Takes a Village would want. Clinton describes an enormous network of activists, advocates, organizations, associations, busybodies, bureaucrats, and meddlers who make up the army of “qualified citizens” whose task it is to protect the village’s interests in our children. “I cannot say enough in support of home visits,” she gushes. “[The] village needs a town crier—and a town prodder.” Again, scrape the saccharine from the sentiment and look underneath. Imagine if, say, the former attorney general John Ashcroft had said. “I cannot say enough in support of home visits.” The shrieks of “fascism” would be deafening.
For Hillary Clinton, the most important front in the “war” to protect children is the first three years of life. These precious moments are so critical that we cannot leave parents to cope with them on their own. Hence a vast array of programs are necessary to plug parents into a social network that alleviates their responsibilities. As Christopher Lasch noted well before she ever wrote It Takes a Village, Clinton “puts her faith in ‘programs.’ The proliferation of children’s programs—Head Start, day care, prenatal care, maternal care, baby clinics, programs for assessing standards in public schools, immunization programs, child-development programs—serves her as an infallible index of progress.”
The twentieth century gave us two visions of a dystopian future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For many years it was assumed that 1984 was the more prophetic tale. But no more. The totalitarianism of 1984 was a product of the age of Stalin, Lenin. Hitler, and Mussolini, the dictators of a continent with a grand tradition of political and religious absolutism. Brave New World was a dystopia based on an American future, where Henry Ford is remembered as a messiah (it’s set in the year “632 A.F.,” after Ford) and the cult of youth that Huxley so despised defines society. Everything is easy under the World State. Everyone is happy. Indeed, the great dilemma for the reader of Brave New World is to answer the question, what’s wrong with it?
There’s a second important difference between the two dystopias: 1984 is a masculine vision of totalitarianism. Or rather, it is a vision of a masculine totalitarianism. Huxley’s totalitarianism isn’t a “boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” as described in 1984. It’s one of smiling, happy, bioengineered people chewing hormonal gum and blithely doing what they’re told. Democracy is a forgotten fad because things are so much easier when the state makes all your decisions. In short, Huxley’s totalitarianism is essentially feminine. Orwell’s was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley’s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the “nanny state,” we still don’t have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.
With that distinction in mind, let us revisit It Takes a Village. On page after page, Clinton extols the idea that just about everything is a health issue. Divorce should be treated like a “public health issue” because it creates stress in children. The very basics of parenting are health issues because “how infants are held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at” determines whether our brains can be “hijacked” by our emotions, potentially making us murderously violent. Mrs. Clinton tells us that Janet Reno issued a report which found that gang violence and gun use are the products of people with badly imprinted brains who become “emotionally hijacked” with little provocation. Quoting doctors, friendly activists, social workers, and random real Americans, in chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born. Children need “[g]entle, intimate, consistent contact” to reduce stress, which can “create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems.” Even well-to-do parents need help because after all everyone feels stress, and “we know that babies sense the stress.”
It’s fair to say that a state empowered to eliminate parental stress is a state with a Huxleyan mandate. And a state with an extreme mandate must logically go to extremes. Hence Clinton argues for the diffusion of parental training into every nook and cranny of public life. Here’s one such suggestion: “Videos with scenes of common-sense baby care—how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable—could be running continuously in doctors’ offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any place where people gather and have to wait.”
Imagine if these sorts of ideas were fully implemented at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the passport office, and other places “where people gather and have to wait.” Giant flat screens at the airport pumping breast-feeding advice? The JumboTron at football games? At what point would the Brave New World seem to be heading down the pike?
Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers. Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot and tittle of child rearing: no detail is too small, no nudge too condescending. “The Child Care Action Campaign...advises that ‘jigsaw puzzles and crayons may be fine for preschoolers but are inappropriate for infants.’ ” The Consumer Product Safety Commission. Clinton helpfully passes on, has concluded that “baby showers with a safety theme are a great way to help new and expectant mothers childproof every room in their homes.”
Rousseau wanted to take children away from parents and raise them in state-owned boarding schools. Clinton doesn’t go that far, but then again, she believes by the time kids are old enough to go to boarding school, it’s too late. Hence her passion for day care. Of course, there is a second agenda here. Day care is also the holy grail for baby-boomer feminists who believe not that children should be liberated from the family but that mothers should be liberated from children.
In order to crack the spine of patriarchy, feminists have had to rely on Sorelian myths, noble lies, and crisis mechanisms to win their battles. For example, in 1998 President Clinton proposed a $22 billion federal day-care scheme to cure what Hillary was calling “the silent crisis” of day care. Clinton also used the “silent crisis” formulation in It Takes a Village to describe the plight of children generally. These crises were silent for the same reason unicorns are silent—they don’t exist. Except, that is, in the hearts and minds of progressive “reformers.” Even though eight out of ten children were cared for by family members, only 13 percent of parents polled said finding child care was a “major problem.” Shortly before the W’hite House held its crisis-mongering Conference on Child Care, which was intended to lay the groundwork for Hillary’s plan, a mere 1 percent of Americans named child care one of the two or three most pressing problems government should fix. And surveys of women conducted since 1974 have shown that growing majorities of married women want to stay home with their children if they can.
Perhaps one reason women would prefer to raise their own children is that they intuitively understand that, all things being equal, day care is, in fact, not great for children. Dr. Benjamin Spock knew this as early as the 1950s. when he wrote that day-care centers were “no good for infants.” But when he reissued his Baby and Child Care guide in the 1990s, he removed that advice, caving in to feminist pressures and concerns. “It’s a cowardly thing that I did.” he admits. “I just tossed it in subsequent editions.” If, as liberals often suggest, the suppression of science for political ends is fascistic, then the campaign to cover up the dark side of child care certainly counts as fascism. For example, in 1991 Dr. Louise Silverstein wrote in American Psychologist that “psychologists must refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care.” The traditional conception of motherhood is nothing more than an “idealized myth” concocted by the patriarchy to “glorify motherhood in an attempt to encourage white, middle class women to
have more children.”
It’s not that Clinton and others advocate policies they believe are bad for children. That would make them cartoon villains. Rather, they believe in good faith that society would be much improved if we all looked at everybody’s children as our own. They sincerely hold, in the words of the feminist philosopher Linda Hirshman, that women cannot be “fully realized human beings” if they don’t make work a bigger priority than mothering. In a sense, Hirshman is a feminist version of Michael Lerner, who sees work as a “locus” of meaning. Her contempt for women who don’t completely dedicate themselves to work is palpable.67 And as other feminists note, if women are made to feel “judged” or shamed by their choice of day care, this negativity will be paid forward in the form of brain-warping stress.
Some couch their progressive utopianism in pragmatic language. Sandra Scarr is possibly the most quoted expert on “other-than-mother” care in America and a past president of the American Psychological Society. “However desirable or undesirable the ideal of fulltime maternal care may be,” she says, “it is completely unrealistic in the world of the late 20th century.” That sounds defensible enough. But her larger agenda lurks beneath the surface. We need to create the “new century’s ideal children.” Uh-oh. Beware of social engineers who want to “create” a new type of human being. These new7 children will need to learn how to love everybody like a family member. “Multiple attachments to others will become the ideal. Shyness and exclusive maternal attachment will seem dysfunctional. New treatments will be developed for children with exclusive maternal attachments.” Can you see the Brave New World over the horizon yet?