“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said during a lecture at Harvard in 1986. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Moynihan, an apostle of complexity, lived at the intersection of those two truths, a place where he was free to become one of the most creative American thinkers of the late 20th century. He sensed, and then came to know, that the social problems of what was being called “postindustrial” society would be different from those that came before. He identified these problems, sometimes controversially. In so doing, he predicted the dislocations of the 21st century with uncanny accuracy. He did it with elegance and wit and — this may be a surprise — transcendent humility. His spot-on sense of what truly mattered deserves to be revisited now, if we’re to grope our way past the mess we’ve become as a society.
I knew Moynihan. He was a mentor. He was a delight. He gave me lists of books to read; and encouraged me when, as a young journalist, my reporting ran afoul of convenient assumptions, left and right. Today, nearly 20 years after his death, hardly a week goes by when some new public outrage doesn’t remind me of his prescience — the persistence of ethnicity and racial caste in American life (and in the world), the migration of working-class whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party (which he predicted in 1970), climate change (which he predicted in 1969), the plague of mass shootings, the difficulty of improving public education for the poor, the fragility of family structure in the postindustrial world — and of the aphorisms that he seemed to toss off effortlessly: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” He was equal parts éminence grise and enfant terrible — an intellectual éminence terrible.
He had two defining insights. The first, which he shared with the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, was the persistence of ethnicity in American life. Together — well, it was mostly Glazer — they published “Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City” in 1963. “The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in America was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness and also its credibility,” they observed. “The point about the Melting Pot … is that it did not happen.”
Thirty years later, in “Pandaemonium,” Moynihan took the notion global. The Soviet Union had shattered into ethnic states, as he, almost alone, predicted in the 1970s. Tribalism — the most primitive form of “culture” — was on the rise throughout the world. There were, suddenly, places called Eritrea and Kurdistan. But Kurdistan was not a state and Eritrea was. He was puzzled by this: What determined self-determination? What was to prevent the world from atomizing into ethnic slivers? He had identified the problem, but was boggled by a solution. So are we.
Moynihan’s second great insight evolved gradually. It was the notion that an affluent society where technology was replacing jobs — where the pursuit of happiness had metastasized into the relentless marketing of pleasure — was creating a new form of poverty. “By 1989, it seemed to me to be reasonably clear that the discontents roiling through the land over the seeming incapacity of government to get anything right,” he wrote in one of his last books, “Miles to Go,” in 1996, “might be eased if it were understood that … issues had emerged which old remedies seemingly could not resolve.”
Moynihan’s path to his “postindustrial” insight began in the mid-1960s when he was a not-quite-senior member of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the assistant secretary of labor for policy and planning. A problem loomed: Civil rights legislation had established legal equality for Black people. But the toxic legacies of slavery and bigotry, which he called the white “racist virus,” made true equality extremely difficult. “The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow,” he wrote in 1965. “If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.”
But there were social impediments to equality. There was racism, of course, but also the cultural change that came with the large Black migration from the rural South to Northern cities. Technology was beginning to limit the number of blue-collar manufacturing jobs. Sexual attitudes were changing, loosening across the society. Something was happening, as Moynihan loved to say. He studied the statistics and found this: The rates of divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births were soaring in the Black community. This was creating a “tangle of pathology” — not his phrase, but that of the Black sociologist Kenneth D. Clark. Moynihan predicted increased social dislocation, violent crime, drug use, unemployment, out-of-wedlock births. “The policy of the United States,” he proposed, should be “to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship.”
What could be controversial about that?
But this was the famous Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report was “secret” — that is, an internal government document. It leaked instantaneously, and inaccurately. Moynihan was accused of making a moral judgment about Black people, of “blaming the victim.” But he hadn’t done that. He had used harsh words like “structural distortions” and “pathology,” but he hadn’t blamed anyone. He simply reported statistics — which, in itself, was a new sociological field, and one Moynihan would champion as a way of identifying, if not solving, social problems. (There hadn’t even been accurate unemployment statistics during the Great Depression, he noted.) One of the few balanced reactions to the report came from Martin Luther King Jr., who said it posed “dangers and opportunities.” The opportunities came from the accuracy of its assessment. King hoped the “case for action” would lead to action. A War on Poverty, perhaps. But, he added: “The danger will be that problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.”
The report did give aid and comfort to racists at a moment of white backlash against the civil rights movement. But there were other problems: Liberal academics rejected the painful realities Moynihan had described. Black militants reacted intemperately, and personally, against the messenger. “Just because Moynihan believes in middle-class values doesn’t mean they are good for everyone,” Floyd McKissick, the director of the Congress of Racial Equality, said. “Moynihan thinks that everyone should have a family structure like his own.”
Quite the opposite. Moynihan believed that no one should have a family structure like his own. He was born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1927, and spent his early youth in Indiana and the New York suburbs. His father, an alcoholic journalist, abandoned the family when Pat was a preteen — and the Moynihans experienced one of the most dreaded forms of American poverty: falling out of the middle class. They pitched up in Hell’s Kitchen, in New York City, at the time an Irish slum, where his mother tended bar. Pat shined shoes (he once told me that he set up his kit next to Woody Guthrie, who was busking in Bryant Park). He worked the docks, he graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He started at City College, then joined the Navy — World War II was on — which paid for most of his education. “A 5-year-old boy needs a father,” he wrote in the early days of the controversy. “If he has to live without one, he has been cheated. It does not matter if he goes on to become a Supreme Court justice or a brain surgeon. He has been cheated.”
Moynihan was a cornucopia of incongruities, flagrantly Irish — but with the style of an English toff. He considered himself a working-class guy, but he had studied at the London School of Economics and undergone years of psychotherapy. He considered himself “the last Sachem of Tammany Hall,” the famed political machine; but he was too protean for strict partisanship. My favorite Moynihan story came from Tim Russert, who was the senator’s driver in the late 1970s. One evening in New York, Russert went to pick up Moynihan at the Carlyle Hotel. He was about to knock on Moynihan’s door when he heard a distinctive, percussive laugh: “Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Russert paused. Another peal of laughter. Finally, he knocked and Moynihan opened the door. He had been watching “The Honeymooners,” that grand urban Irish comedy of manners.
A period of bitterness followed the report. Moynihan was flushed from the Department of Labor, exiled to academia, ran for City Council president in New York and lost. In 1969, he published “Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding,” a sour account of the War on Poverty, a rumination on the failure of the liberal “truth” that government could make things better. “The War on Poverty was not declared at the behest of the poor; it was declared in their interests by persons confident of their own judgment in such matters,” he wrote. A new layer of government was proposed during the Johnson administration, Community Action Programs (CAPs). They would involve “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, perhaps even “community control” of antipoverty funds. But many of the CAPs came to be run by left-leaning radicals and eventually Black militants, who tried to organize the slums against the local municipal governments, which was not what President Johnson had in mind. “The antipoverty program came to be associated with the kind of bad manners and arrogance that are more the mark of the rich than the poor,” Moynihan wrote. Indeed, it was the antics of the college-educated leftists that defined “that slum of a decade,” as he later called the ’60s.
Of course, the “bad manners and arrogance” Moynihan complained about were also being directed at him. His home in Cambridge, Mass., was under police guard. The Moynihan Report was canceled by the academic left, ignored for nearly 20 years; its truths would be resurrected only in 1987 by the Black sociologist William Julius Wilson in “The Truly Disadvantaged.” In the meantime, Moynihan went through a period where he found succor among neoconservative intellectuals — former liberals skeptical of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives and appalled by the excesses of the New Left. “The great strength of political conservatives at this time,” he wrote, “is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this.”
His outrage led to what seemed to many of his liberal friends a betrayal: He joined the Nixon administration as assistant to the president for urban affairs. He remained a New Deal liberal, nonetheless. In fact, as early as 1965 — in an article for the Catholic magazine America — he proposed an answer to the family problems he had described in the report: Give poor people a guaranteed income. At the very least, they would feed their children. At the most, men wouldn’t have an incentive to leave their homes. (The existing welfare system gave money only to women who had been abandoned.) This was the Family Assistance Plan that Richard Nixon introduced and nearly passed. It was the predicate for what Moynihan proposed as a period of “benign neglect” of the Black community — a truly unfortunate phrase — that would allow the wounds of the 1960s to heal. Moynihan’s idea of giving people money, as opposed to giving them bureaucrats intent on reforming their behavior, had legs. It has been pursued by President Biden in the form of an expanded child support tax credit, which even some Republicans want to make permanent. Biden’s program may cut child poverty in half.
When Moynihan proposed “solutions” like the Family Assistance Plan, they were simple ones: Give poor people money. Give them jobs. Give everyone health care. The New Deal proved government could do that. But government, he knew, was not so good at changing the way people behaved. He scorned “the desperate notion that possibly the federal government could keep guns out of schools.” He was boggled by drug addiction, though he was able to compare — in his impossibly erudite fashion — the social devastation of high-powered drugs like heroin in the 20th century to the crime wave caused by the development of blended whiskey in the 19th. He assayed hope, without great conviction: “We are going to have to work our way through these issues. It doesn’t follow that we will, but I don’t know that we won’t.” A quarter-century after he wrote those words, we haven’t.
Moynihan remained a neoconservative hero through the 1970s, especially during his stint as United Nations ambassador, when he battled on Israel’s behalf against those who would have equated Zionism with racism. He was elected to the Senate in 1976 and served for 24 years, with broad popular support. But he quickly grew impatient with the neoconservatives, especially as they bloated the Soviet threat and supported Ronald Reagan, who wanted to gut programs for the poor. “I watched all this with a combination of incredulity, horror and complicity,” he wrote in “Pandaemonium.” The Soviet Union — and the Marxist fantasy — was collapsing, and yet Reagan persisted in a war against Communism in Nicaragua: “all this in the cause of fighting a Cold War that was over.”
By the 1990s, Moynihan began to mesh his two great insights. Ethnic and caste conflicts were on the rise in the United States and the world, accompanied by the postindustrial social issues he had anticipated. Could these be linked? The problems seemed worse than ever, and had extended to the white working class, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was higher than it had been in the Black community when he wrote the Moynihan Report — indeed, poverty was becoming entwined with cultural behavior patterns passed from one generation to the next. Gun crime was epidemic, fueled, in part, by crack cocaine, a disastrous new drug technology. The Clinton administration’s response to these problems was, he believed, punitive: more prison for Black men and less welfare for Black women. He was infuriated by Clinton’s welfare reform plan: He called it “boob bait for bubbas.” He predicted millions of children would be sleeping on subway grates, which proved an exaggeration — although thousands did slip through the holes in the new, less sturdy safety net. “We are at the point of knowing a fair amount about what we don’t know,” Moynihan wrote in “Miles to Go.” “The past quarter-century has been quite productive in this regard. On the other hand, our social situation is considerably worse.” Deviancy — by which he meant antisocial behavior — was being “defined down.”
Twenty-five years later, we live in a world that was Moynihan’s nightmare: Postmodern tribes — with their own fake “facts” — have gone virtual; affinity groups are organized by cable news networks and social media platforms. Cynicism about government’s ability to do anything useful abounds. It remains to be seen if Joe Biden’s postindustrial version of the New Deal — which Moynihan would have voted for enthusiastically, as it reduces inequality with a minimum of social engineering — will heal the wounds. He would, I suspect, be busily foraging for statistics to prove that tax increases have little or no impact on economic growth. Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton proved that (and even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when few were looking).
Moynihan didn’t leave us many policy prescriptions, but he did bequeath a method: the gathering of statistics about family and poverty, accompanied by a cleareyed analysis of what they indicated. “Progress begins on social problems when it becomes possible to measure them,” he wrote. Statistics might even, from time to time, contain some good news — and, in fact, the past 40 years have seen great progress in the area that concerned him most: equality for African-Americans. In his 1970 “benign neglect” memo to Nixon, he foresaw “extraordinary progress” for Black people. And that has happened. There is now a solid Black middle and professional class — nearly half of African-American families have incomes over $50,000 — although disproportionate rates of poverty persist and wealth disparities remain.
Racism persists, too; uglier than ever, as the white majority fades. But even culture can change over time. The Black out-of-wedlock birthrate stands at 70 percent, but Black women are graduating from college at a stunning rate — and they are making mature choices about when and how to have children (teenage births have plummeted). According to the Princeton sociologist Kathryn Edin, many of these women are “stabilizing their family arrangements” and finding partners over time. It would be fascinating to know Moynihan’s thoughts about this. He might even be pleased.
“With any luck — and why not? — there will be examples of successful adaptation, compromise, evolution,” he wrote in “Pandaemonium.” “Not every [change] will be without grief. But humor and intellect help.”
♦
BOOKS IN THIS ESSAY
BEYOND THE MELTING POT: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (1963), with Nathan Glazer. The breakthrough study of ethnicity in America.
THE MOYNIHAN REPORT AND THE POLITICS OF CONTROVERSY (1967), by Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey. The original text of Moynihan’s report on the Black family crisis, with commentary by those who denounced it.
MAXIMUM FEASIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING (1969). Moynihan’s bitter account of the War on Poverty.
PANDAEMONIUM: Ethnicity in International Politics (1993). A survey of the rise of global tribalism.
MILES TO GO: A Personal History of Social Policy (1996). Moynihan’s overview of government’s responsibility to the poor, and its limitations.
BOOKS ABOUT MOYNIHAN
THE GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK (2000), by Godfrey Hodgson. A biography by one of Moynihan’s friends.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (2010). Moynihan’s correspondence, edited by Steven R. Weisman, formerly of The New York Times.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN: The Intellectual in Public Life (2004). A collection of pieces on Moynihan’s career, edited by Robert A. Katzmann.
OTHER BOOKS OF SIGNIFICANCE BY MOYNIHAN
CAME THE REVOLUTION: Argument in the Reagan Era (1988)
ON THE LAW OF NATIONS (1990)
SECRECY (1998)
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