There are no shortcuts to abolishing poverty

Matthew Desmond’s new book “Poverty, by America,” coming on the heels of his Pulitzer-winning “Evicted,” is being noticed in all the right places: in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and in prominent feature articles and in an opinion essay penned by Desmond himself. And the new book is indeed a useful book: clearly written and compact, at 194 pages, with 76 dense pages of notes to back up Desmond’s main assertions.

Desmond’s goal is to investigate and demystify why it is that deep poverty persists in a country where the total amount of welfare spending, on a per capita basis, is second only to that provided by France. What he uncovers is what many of us already suspected: most of our welfare spending flows into corporate coffers and both directly and indirectly into the pockets of middle-class and wealthy people. Relatively little reaches the people who need money to survive.

Although now ensconced in an endowed chair at Princeton, Desmond is preacher’s kid who grew up in economic precarity in Winslow, Arizona. He has lived with and worked with the poorest of the poor as a sociologist. And he has something of the evangelist in him: this book is written as a cri de coeur, a powerful call to wipe clean the moral stain, the disgraceful obscenity, that is widespread grinding poverty in the midst of so much American wealth. This reader, at least, hears in Desmond echoes of Isaiah: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field until there is no more room, and you alone are left in the land!”

“Lift the poor by rebalancing our social safety net,” writes Desmond; “empower the poor by reining in exploitation; and invest in broad prosperity by turning away from segregation.” In focusing on these three drivers of poverty, Desmond fills in relevant details. He documents how most public welfare spending currently flows to the affluent in the form of gigantic tax breaks for homeowners and other middle-class subsidies; he calls pointed attention to the triple-headed assault on the poor through labor exploitation, housing exploitation, and finance exploitation; and he paints a damning picture of the “walls” erected by the affluent — most especially by affluent liberals — to enforce social separation and quarantine the poor in misery zones of systemic deprivation and dysfunction.

What is interesting and different in Desmond’s approach is his steadfast refusal to let his own class — affluent liberals — off the hook. He punches through all of the consoling myths: that the core problem is that social benefits have cratered since the Reagan era (they haven’t), that the issues are “complex” (they aren’t), that educational opportunity will eliminate deprivation (it won’t), that scarce housing is the main reason the poor pay more for shelter (it isn’t: the poor pay more because they can be gouged), that the poor enjoy living on government benefits (in fact, most of the U.S. poor despise dependence and decline available benefits), and that providing income support at an adequate level would sink the economy by destroying the incentive to work (a false fear: there is no evidence to back this hoary claim). Refreshingly, Desmond calls out the self-serving and delusional belief of today’s rich that their privilege is merited because they work hard for the money, in contrast to the idle rich of the past.

Desmond recognizes how disturbing and even rude it is for him to suggest that the comforts enjoyed by upper middle-class and wealthy people — i.e., those perched within the top 20 percent of the income distribution — are made possible by various “takings” from the poor, but he doesn’t flinch from saying it again and again:

To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves.

The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not … For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it.

This book is Desmond’s call for repentance; he is urging middle-class people of conscience to become “poverty abolitionists.” He wants us to separate ourselves from businesses that can clearly be seen to rest on exploitation. He wants us to renounce what C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality”: to change our personal behaviors and create new norms and in this way effect structural change:

If enough of us took some responsibility for this problem in our personal lives, and began mobilizing our workplaces and faith communities and schools to do likewise, a commitment to poverty abolition would spread, sparking a national moral reckoning and pressuring the most exploitative actors and agencies to divest.

A national moral reckoning: of course, that is what is needed. A basic culture change, of course. My concern is that Desmond’s sense of what such a reckoning would look like is still too restricted, despite being more capacious than most.

What if this country’s moral injury goes far deeper than Desmond imagines? At numerous points, Desmond acknowledges the wounds of white supremacy. He recognizes that anti-Blackness plays a central role in keeping social benefits low; he understands that centuries of unpaid enslaved labor lies behind the low-wage hell that afflicts people of color most but that also touches everyone working for wages in this “land of opportunity.” Despite his seeming racial awareness, Desmond doesn’t do nearly enough to wrestle with the brutal legacies of settler colonialism and centuries of racially-encoded chattel slavery. He does not drill down sufficiently on what white “freedom” means (for many, it includes the unimpeded right to exploit and demean and torture); he doesn’t explore the psychological satisfactions afforded by the maintenance of a racialized caste society and a herrenvolk democracy.

As widely read as Desmond is, it seems to me he could have paid more attention to W.E.B. DuBois, or to the radical Martin King, and to contemporary scholar-prophets like Isabel Wilkerson, Ibram X. Kendi and Carol Anderson. He quotes James Baldwin without fully comprehending what Baldwin had to say about what whiteness does to the soul: how a fraudulent white “possessing” leaves whites spiritually dispossessed. He doesn’t address how John Locke’s conflation of sovereignty with property still leaves its mark in this culture.

These are more than mere quibbles. If you are setting your sights on real transformation and seeking a major culture shift, you have a responsibility to reckon with the full range of psychological, spiritual and ideological obstacles standing in the way of transformation. Not once does Desmond mention the powerful ideology of neoliberalism that for nearly 50 years has ruled not just our politics has also shaped academic and everyday public discourse, implanting in all of us a false mental map of how the world works and should work.

Far worse: not once does he deal with the militarism and imperialism that so clearly carry forward the core concept — one might even say the core daemon — of settler colonialism. He doesn’t think it’s necessary to cut this country’s massive spending on war and weapons of war in order to find the resources necessary to end domestic poverty. In fact, he thinks that this familiar talking point — defund the Pentagon in order to fund social services — is yet another distraction from getting the job done in a much simpler fashion.

Knowing the whole story — and confronting the very worst in ourselves and in our culture — is the precondition for moving forward.

But what if it’s necessary to wind down U.S. global hegemony for another reason? What if it’s necessary in order for the people of this country — including the white people — to recognize themselves, at long last, as ordinary human beings who require cooperation rather than conquest in order to thrive? What if it’s necessary to expose the terrifying links among imperial militarism, our veterans’ mental health, and abusive policing practices that make poor communities poorer while inflicting actual torture on people of color?

Martin Luther King Jr. could see with blazing clarity how militarism abroad feeds racist brutality and economic deprivation at home. He spoke powerfully toward the end of his life about how these evils grow from the same poisoned root and bespeak the same spiritual poverty. Our best historians, going back at least as far as William Appleman Williams, have seen the manifold reasons for ending our garrison state. Matthew Desmond ought to be able to see them, too.

Perhaps Desmond feels that bringing in these toxic legacies would cause his readers to think of American poverty as an utterly intractable problem, as introducing them would reveal why so much violence and cruelty remain embedded in our common culture. If so, he is wrong about that, too. Knowing the whole story — and confronting the very worst in ourselves and in our culture — is the precondition for moving forward. It is the prerequisite for the cultural turning that Desmond — and the rest of us — urgently seek.

At one point, and very much to my surprise and delight, Desmond quotes from theologian Walter Brueggemann’s now-classic 1978 text, “The Prophetic Imagination.”He cites Brueggemann’s provocative question about whether “our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and so coopted … that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.” But Desmond fails to share with his readers Brueggemann’s central point: that reckoning with the death-dealing effects of imperial violence — and dwelling in deep grief and mourning over this violence — must necessarily precede any proclamation of a redeemed future, any real release of the prophetic imagination.

Desmond wants what I would call a half-way repentance, just enough behavioral change on the part of the comfortable to put some money into the hands of the poor. Theoretically, as Desmond makes clear, we could end poverty without actually resolving the question of who belongs, who matters, and whose faces really reflect God’s glory. But that would be what theologians call cheap grace.

There are no shortcuts to real deliverance from the vise-like grip of racial capitalism. And in this country, we are still very far from seeing an end to the existential struggle between those who are committed to a politics of plenty and an ethic of communion and those who still cling to a politics of scarcity and an ethic of acquisitive individualism.

Today’s anti-corporate, anti-fascist and anti-racist activists aren’t looking for shortcuts. They are determined to uproot the whole stinking system in order to create a culture of peace and plenty in a land where a culture of extreme violence and deprivation has prevailed ever since the European colonizers first planted their flags of conquest. It’s the easiest thing in the world to dismiss our uncompromising young activists as quixotic, utopian and (in the preferred tag of the political class) “unrealistic.” But they are the real poverty abolitionists. And in the end, they will win.