Those who know me know I support reproductive freedom. I clarify this not so much to avoid arguing with those who oppose abortion, but to remind those who support the right of women to control their reproductive capacity that I do, too. (Some of my essays on the subject: The Fetus is a Person. Now What?; Abortion is Really About Freedom; Liberty is America’s raison d’être: Preserving Reproductive Freedom for the Sake of Preserving the Republic; George Richard Tiller (1941–2009); Protecting the Lives of Women: Addressing Counterarguments Concerning Reproductive Freedom; The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities; Abortion is Not Murder. At Least According to the Bible. It’s Not Even Criminal; Segregating Liberty by Sex and the Matter of Religious Freedom; The End of Roe and Beginning Again.)
Having gotten that out of the way, the point of this essay is to critique a cartoon that has crossed my eyes over the years (there are a few variations on the theme), in which white conservatives are depicted holding signs demanding the protection of fetuses while snubbing poor and homeless children. In the one I saw yesterday, which I share below, one child is black (he is begging for handouts, a depiction telling us already that the cartoonist hadn’t completely thought through the implication of his composition). Another child is behind him sleeping in what appears to be a broken cardboard box. Those representing the “pro-life” movement are white. One of them is wearing a crucifix and they all have angry faces. I want to use this cartoon as a vehicle for criticizing progressive urban social policy. Think of this essay as yet another installment in my campaign to delegitimize the Democratic Party.
The premise behind the cartoon is fallacious for a few reasons. First, it assumes conservatives who oppose abortion don’t care about children. I’m sure there are conservatives who want to force women carry the fetus to term as punishment for having sex and have no interests in the fetus beyond that, but most conservatives will say (and I believe them) that their opposition to abortion is because the procedure takes the life of a child (I agree that it does, but I have a different reason for my support for a woman’s right to an abortion, as the essays linked to earlier explain). Second, the cartoonist cites child poverty as a reason abortions should be allowed (a cartoon I share below assumes this is a more obvious way). A rational person would ask whether killing born children is an acceptable response to poverty. If not, then why is it okay to kill unborn children? Third, the cartoon implies that conservatives are the cause of child poverty; not only because conservatives oppose anti-poverty programming, but also because a major cause of poverty is children.
It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood clinics are overrepresented in areas with higher concentrations of poverty and minority populations, partly due to the organization’s mission to provide accessible healthcare to underserved communities. However, there appears to be another reason for this. Margaret Sanger played a major role in founding the precursor of Planned Parenthood, the Birth Control Federation of America. A eugenicist, Sanger promoted birth control as a means of improving the quality of the population and to reduce poverty. In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America initiated the Negro Project. In a letter she wrote to Dr. Clarence Gamble in 1939, Sanger writes, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Defenders of Sanger often try to rationalize her aims and attitudes, but the body of her work makes it difficult. In any case, the cartoon in question implies an affinity between the artist and Sanger’s aims and methods.
Approximately 78 percent of poor people in the United States live in urban areas, highlighting a significant concentration of poverty within cities. Urban poverty is a particularly challenging social problem due to the high costs associated with housing, transportation, and basic goods and services. In these areas, job opportunities are limited, making it difficult for residents to secure stable employment. Additionally, urban poor populations often contend with a host of social issues, such as high crime rates, overcrowded living conditions, and inadequate public services, including subpar education and healthcare systems. Racial minorities, especially black Americans, are disproportionately affected, frequently residing in disorganized and under-resourced inner-city neighborhoods. This concentration in impoverished urban environments exacerbates social inequalities and creates persistent barriers to economic mobility and overall quality of life.
Who runs these cities? Conservatives? No. These are blue cities. They’re run by progressives. Democrats dominate politics there. Progressives designed and implemented the policies that have, for example, drastically increased the number of children in single-parent households, three-quarters of which are female-headed, a situation that especially affects boys due to father absence. The percentage of children are born to unmarried black women now exceeds 70 percent. For white non-Hispanic children, the percentages is less than 30 percent. The desire to distract from the destruction of the black family is ultimately what lies behind the recent attacks on Florida congressman Byron Donalds (a black man), who condemned progressive urban policy by pointing out that the black family had to that point even survived Jim Crow segregation, a fact confirmed by no less of a historian of the black experience than Herbert Gutman. In his 1977 book The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, Gutman examined the resilience of African American family structures from slavery through the Jim Crow period, challenging notions that slavery had destroyed black family life, instead showing that blacks maintained strong familial ties despite the oppressive conditions of slavery and later, the harsh realities of Jim Crow.
What explains the situation of urban black families today? The problems stem from urban policies devised and deployed by progressives over the course of the twentieth century as blacks, during what has been dubbed the “Great Migration,” moved from the rural South to urban centers in the North, Midwest, and West between the 1910s and 1970. Driven by the search for better economic opportunities and to escape from the oppressive conditions of Jim Crow segregation, millions of black Americans left the agrarian South for industrial jobs in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped the demographic and cultural landscape of the United States, fostering the growth of vibrant black urban communities and contributing to significant cultural movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance. (I write about this and many other things in dissertation Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States, published in August of 2000.)
Franklin Roosevelt’s urban policy during the New Deal era (1930s-40s) had profound and lasting impacts on American cities. Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the federal government implemented practices that systematically denied mortgages to residents of predominantly black American neighborhoods, a tactic known as redlining. This policy entrenched racial segregation and economic disparities by disinvesting in urban areas deemed “risky” due to their racial composition. Discriminatory housing policies perpetuated inequality and segregation, shaping the urban landscape by promoting suburban growth for white families while confining black families to underfunded, marginalized urban neighborhoods. The legacy of these policies contributed to the entrenched racial and economic divides that continue to affect American cities today. This is the period Richard Grossman identifies as the consolidation and institutionalization of progressivism in federal and city governments in the United States (see Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore).
Douglas Massey discusses these issues extensively in his 1993 book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, co-authored with Nancy Denton. The book examines the systematic racial segregation enforced by policies such as redlining and how these practices have created and perpetuated an urban underclass. Massey and Denton analyze how government actions, including those during the New Deal era, contributed to the spatial separation of black and white Americans, leading to significant disparities in wealth, education, and overall quality of life. They argue that these policies institutionalized racial segregation and entrenched the socio-economic disadvantages faced by black Americans, shaping the enduring patterns of urban poverty and segregation observed in contemporary America.
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society regime, launched in the mid-1960s, ostensibly aimed at combatting poverty and racial injustice through ambitious social welfare initiatives, accelerated the destruction of the black family while establishing the system dynamics maintaining a permanent and racialized underclass. The War on Poverty, a key component of the Great Society, proved unable to eradicate poverty as initially promised, and the expansion of federal programs led to bureaucratic inefficiencies and perverse consequences. Welfare benefits disincentivized work, as individuals received comparable or higher income from welfare compared to low-wage jobs. Welfare thus discouraged job-seeking and weakened labor force attachment. If individuals did work and transition off welfare, they faced higher effective marginal tax rates and regressive sales taxes; the loss of benefits outweighed the gains from work. Moreover, in areas where there was significant capital out-migration, often the result of crime and disorder, but also the consequences of the pull of globalization organized by the corporate state, low-wage jobs become scarce.
The permanent underclass is thus perpetuated by a vicious circle. Long-term reliance on welfare benefits fosters dependency on government, where individuals and families across generations rely on public assistance instead of seeking employment and self-sufficiency. The availability of welfare benefits thus undermines the work ethic, leading to a decreased willingness to engage in the labor market and a diminished sense of personal responsibility, complicating all the problem identified in the previous paragraph. Welfare programs perpetuate poverty by creating environments where individuals do not experience the necessity to seek employment, thus remaining trapped in a cycle of dependency. This dependency can be further exacerbated by the erosion of traditional family structures, where welfare benefits discourage marriage by incentivizing single parenthood. Urban policies, such as child welfare, cash supports, and housing programs, create a culture of dependency by disincentivizing work, fostering generational reliance on government assistance, leading to adverse social consequences, for example high rates of crime and violence (which I have covered extensively on Freedom and Reason).
The conservatives holding those signs in that cartoon are not responsible for these consequences. They didn’t formulate and implement the policies that produce and perpetuate poverty. Democrats held majority control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for much of the time from the 1930s to the 1980s when this dynamic was established. Cities during this period were for the most part strongholds of Democratic power and influence. This trend was reinforced by demographic shifts and the rise of social welfare programs under Democratic administrations and major initiatives such as Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Indeed, conservatives and Republicans long opposed the policies formulated and implement by Democrats because they believed and continue to believe, correctly, that two parents are better than one and boys need fathers and that the best social welfare program is a job. Standing there with that sign demanding the protection of fetuses, those depicted in the cartoon also stand there believing not only that the solution to reducing poverty is the two-parent family, but that, moreover, even if poor, a two-parent household provides the stable environment conducive to law abidingness, personal responsibility, and a successful life.
What the cartoon is really saying, then, is that progressives would rather poor people abort their fetuses than see children born into the poverty that progressives themselves created while signaling that they’re not going to do anything about, that this is the status quo. It is becoming all too obvious that progressives aren’t going to do anything about it because poverty is functional to the credentialed class that is the Democratic Party base. Perhaps this explains the erosion of support for the Democratic Party about non-whites over over the last dozen years; urban dwellers are waking up to the fact that their lumpenproletariat status was not so much the result of a system abolished over 160 years ago, but the work of the politicians they have been voting for over the last several decades—politicians belonging to the same political party that represented the slavocracy all those years ago.
What do I mean when I say that poverty is functional? Sociologist Herbert Gans, in his essay, “The Positive Functions of Poverty,” published in 1972, noted several functions of poverty that explain its persistence. On the economic front, poverty ensures a cheap and vulnerable labor pool that can perform low-wage, undesirable jobs that are essential for the functioning of the capitalist economy. These jobs often involve hard, dangerous, and dirty work that affluent individuals typically avoid. The existence of poverty allows for the availability of cheap goods and services, which subsidizes the lifestyle of the more affluent. Poor people work in industries that provide low-cost labor for wealthier consumers, such as agriculture, domestic work, and service sectors. Poverty generates a range of economic activities that might not otherwise exist. The poor often create informal markets and economies, which can lead to innovative survival strategies and business practices that foster and take advantage of them (e.g., the laundering of stolen vehicle parts).
Some of the functions of poverty in the mid-twentieth century when Democrats created the urban racialized ghetto are not longer functional. In the past, those who did this work, mostly black men and women, have been replaced by foreign labor abroad and at home. Capitalist flight and cheap immigrant labor means that, today, unemployment rates among black Americans living in urban areas is extraordinarily high even during times of economic expansion. Under normal conditions, high-poverty urban areas have unemployment rates significantly higher than the national average; in recent history, certain urban neighborhoods have experienced unemployment rates three and four times greater than the national average. High unemployment in these areas contributes to a cycle of poverty, where lack of jobs leads to further economic decline, which in turn leads to even fewer job opportunities.
There are also political functions. Poverty contribute to political stability by providing a population that is less likely to challenge the status quo—except when organized into riotous action to benefit the Democratic Parry, such as during the 2020 election with the death of George Floyd. Poor people, who often have fewer resources and less access to political power, may have limited capacity to organize and advocate for significant changes that may result in a trend towards collective prosperity. As I explain in The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left the successful war waged against the black movement in the 1960s and 1970s by the CIA and FBI (COINTELPRO) devolved the black community to gang warfare. At the same time, Democrats perpetuate poverty to maintain a reliable voting base. By providing extensive social welfare programs and support systems in place of gainful employment, Democrats incentivize dependency on government assistance among those living in these communities. This dependency ensures continued electoral support from urban voters who rely on these programs for their livelihoods. Put simply, a demographic that works for a living has been replaced with a demographic that votes for a living.
As we have seen, Democratic policies create a cycle of poverty by disincentivizing work and fostering reliance on welfare benefits. Focusing on expanding welfare programs rather than promoting economic growth and individual responsibility, Democrats perpetuate conditions where individuals are more likely to vote based on securing government support rather than economic policies that promote job creation and self-sufficiency. Democratic governance in urban areas leads to a reliance on government handouts instead of fostering an environment conducive to economic empowerment and upward mobility. By emphasizing entitlements over economic opportunities, Democrats cultivate a political allegiance rooted in maintaining dependency rather than achieving long-term economic prosperity. Democratic urban policies hinder socioeconomic progress and perpetuates divisions by promoting identity politics and victimhood narratives among minority communities. By keeping urban populations reliant on government assistance and distracted by grievances, Democrats secure electoral support based on promises of continued welfare benefits rather than policies that encourage independence, economic growth, and broader societal integration.
Conservatives are not responsible for this situation. Indeed, they are vocally opposed to it. And for their principled opposition to policies that maintain the permanent racialized underclass, they are smeared as bigots and racists. The smear sticks because progressive Democrats control the academy, culture industry, mass media, and administrative apparatus. That’s the same hegemony that thwarts efforts by populist Republicans to make widespread their alternative for America—a national economic strategy built upon self-reliance and sovereignty, the restoration of a national culture rooted in the values of classical liberalism, and a return to the democratic-republican machinery necessary to actualize that culture in sustained prosperity.
freedom and reason 