The Battle Hymn of the War on Poverty

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http://www.thenation.com/article/177932/battle-hymn-war-poverty



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And so in the early days of the war, Shriver launched an all-out effort to shift Americans’ understanding of poverty and transform the language in which poor people were framed. It was an empathy push on a par with that used by abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights leaders to expand the borders of democracy—a campaign, says cognitive linguist George Lakoff, that was in many ways the mature expression of an empathetic language that had emerged over nearly three centuries of Western political philosophy and embedded itself in American political practices. Says Lakoff, “The American conception of democracy developed over a period of time and is based on empathy. Democracy is based on citizens caring about each other.”

Shriver and his team understood this, and as they worked to prevent existing biases from derailing the War on Poverty, they did so in a way calculated to draw on that long tradition. So when Shriver addressed the ad executives on behalf of his boss’s program, he was asking them to use their skills to do the same: to catalyze a collective empathetic surge.

“It simply isn’t true that the poor enjoy poverty,” Shriver told his audience of opinion manipulators, men and women whose talents he was desperate to enlist in this linguistic battle. “Quite the opposite. They resent it. Wherever local communities have started programs to help the poor help themselves, the response has exceeded all expectations…. It is gibberish to say that families enjoy living in rat-infested slums or that they want only a poor education.”

Perhaps the most telling passage in Shriver’s speech was when he lambasted those who blamed poor people for their own plight. As in the Victorian era, when politicians and Social Darwinists conjured a politics that blamed the “undeserving” poor for their twilight existence, in the 1960s many—including liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan—argued that poverty was a consequence of dysfunction. Shriver was having none of it. “Only an ignorant person would maintain that laziness or some other moral defect is the source of poverty,” he asserted. “As if being poor were somehow un-American.”