Dismantling the War on Poverty: Race in Nixon’s Retrenchment Strategies

• In Event: White Backlash and State Violence

Abstract

This paper expands upon Paul Pierson’s (1994) pioneering study of conservative welfare retrenchment strategies in the Reagan and Thatcher regimes by focusing on the earlier efforts of President Nixon. My analysis identifies President Nixon’s precedent-setting efforts to dismantle federal social welfare policies in the War on Poverty, and the particularly potent role of race in those efforts. By focusing on Nixon’s successes in institutionally weakening, fiscally diminishing, and politically delegitimizing the War on Poverty, I highlight an emerging set of strategies in the early 1970s for achieving welfare-state retrenchment, strategies that would be extended by Reagan and subsequent conservative political leaders. At the same time, I uncover an under-examined aspect of this process: the strategic transformation of a policy’s political character, and in particular the role of racialization in that process. I argue that this should be understood as a fundamentally important instrument for conservative welfare state retrenchment efforts.
This research also highlights the leadership of the presidency in each of these strategies and tactics of retrenchment. Examining presidential leadership in the process of diminishment of the state, rather than state-building, widens the scope of how we view presidential leadership of the public. In the case of Nixon, his involvement in the process of public persuasion began at an early stage, building on waves of growing public frustration and resentment towards public welfare, strongly connected to negative racialized welfare stereotypes, and seeking to erode public and elite support for social welfare programs well in advance of efforts to pursue concrete retrenchment.

Author

• Scott Spitzer, California State University, Fullerton