'America's universal mother.' Her CV is festooned with honorifics and awards like a Christmas tree bending from the weight of too many ornaments — the presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, a Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and so on. Her organization is showered with contributions from enormous corporations eager to buy grace on the cheap. Edelman got her start working for the NAACP and eventually found her way to Yale Law School and to Washington, D.C., as the policy- entrepreneur founder of the CDF. She is undoubtedly a kind and selfless woman, deeply religious and steeped in the traditions of the Social Gospel. Inspiring quotations from Edelman are so omnipresent in the welfare, civil rights, and feminist industries — 'industries' being the best word for these self-esteem-building, logrolling, black-tie fund- raiser networks — that they could be combined into a liberal Maoist
While few would question the rectitude of her campaigns for black equality and desegregation, Edelman's greatest influence has been in welfare policy, and there her ideas about how to organize society and American politics have proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many respects Edelman was a basic welfare state liberal, believing no entitlement or transfer payment was too big. Her great innovation was to defend the welfare system from empirical criticism — that is, it doesn't work — by hiding behind the image of poor children. 'When you talked about poor people or black people you faced a shrinking audience,' she has said. 'I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.' Indeed, Edelman more than anyone else can be blamed for the saccharine omnipresence of 'the children' in American political rhetoric.54
The problem is that while this tactic was brilliant strategically, the net effect was to make responsible reform impossible. After all, the reason the 'audience' was 'shrinking' for exhortations to expand the welfare state was that it was becoming increasingly obvious that the welfare state was
Traditional objections to welfare as a violation of constitutional principles and a corrupter of civic virtue — which only gained respectability in the late 1970s — were suddenly beside the point. Edelman, Clinton, and others transformed the debate to one about children. Who cares if — as FDR also believed — 'relief' was ultimately detrimental to adults, sapping their initiative? The effects on adults were irrelevant. Children were the beneficiaries of aid checks, not their parents (even though their parents still cashed them). Indeed, one tragic consequence of this strategy was that the government used child poverty to crush individualism and pride among inner-city blacks. James Bovard notes that when Congress mandated food stamps, welfare 'recruiters' — a hundred thousand of them created by the War on Poverty — went into the cities to convince poor people to enroll. An Agriculture Department magazine reported that food stamp workers could often overcome people's pride by telling parents, 'This is for your children.' It continued: thanks to 'intensive outreach efforts, resistance of the 'too prouds' is bending.'55
Perhaps just as important, this provided vital propaganda value for liberals. Ronald Reagan got traction for attacking 'welfare queens.' But no one would dare attack the unfortunate offspring of these women. Suddenly to criticize welfare policy made you 'anti-child,' thus spawning all of those liberal talking points about balancing the budget on the 'backs of the children.' This fed nicely into the psychological propaganda that conservatives are just bad people and that any break with the welfare state is motivated by 'hate.' Even Bill Clinton wasn't immune. When he signed the welfare reform bill, Peter Edelman resigned as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, and Marian Edelman called Clinton's action a 'moment of shame.' 'Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right,' she proclaimed, pointedly adding, 'Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not right.' The CDF denounced the move as an act of 'national child abandonment,' while Ted Kennedy called it 'legislative child abuse.' The
But the CDF and other remoras of the Great Society practiced the true politics of meanness, because at the end of the day their welfare state — based though it may have been on love, concern, and niceness — resulted in more damage to the black family and specifically to black children than much that can be laid at the feet of racist neglect. Today black children are less likely to be raised by two parents than they were during the era of slavery.
While Hillary Clinton may have learned from Edelman how to use children as propaganda tools for her ideological agenda, she far surpassed her teacher in the scope of her ambition. For Clinton, welfare policy was simply one front in a wider war. The crisis facing children wasn't merely an issue for poor denizens of the inner city. For Hillary, childhood
These two quotations sound at odds, but the intent is exactly the same. It's just that Hillary Clinton in 1996 is a politician, whereas in 1973 she's a radical lawyer. What Clinton means when she says we cannot permit ideologues to 'subvert' the discussion on children is that there can be no debate about what to do about children. And what must be done is to break the unchecked tyranny of the private home, as the progressive icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it.
This 'brilliant hope' — as Gilman described it — is only realizable if children are cast as a class in perpetual crisis. Much as the proletariat were portrayed by Marxists as being in a constant state of war, with the nation under deadly siege by classical fascists, Hillary's children are in unimaginable existential peril. Thus she approvingly quotes the Cornell psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: 'The present state of children and families in the United States represents
Here at last is a 'moral equivalent of war' that modern liberals can rally around, a 'crisis mechanism' no one would identify as fascistic because when you say 'the children' the last thing you think of are storm troopers. Nobody wants to be seen as anti-child. The 'child crisis' needed no definition because it had no boundaries. Even people without children should care about other people's children. Fast foods were targeted because they make children fat — and nutritional decisions can't be left to the parent. 'More than the much-reviled products of Big Tobacco, big helpings and Big Food constitute the number-one threat to America's children,' the
It's forgotten now, but the early Clinton administration was saturated with such thinking. Janet Reno, appointed the nation's top law enforcement official as part of a gender quota, defined her primary mission as a protector of children. 'I would like to use the law of this land to do everything I possibly can,' she declared when nominated, 'to give to each of them the opportunity to grow to be strong, healthy and self-sufficient citizens of this country.' Reno, it may be forgotten, had come to national attention as a crusading prosecutor who won a number of convictions in a series of high-profile child sex-abuse cases. Many of them, it was later revealed, were fraudulent, and Reno's zealous tactics do not look admirable in hindsight. When she came to Washington, the first woman in one of the big four cabinet positions, she was determined to cast herself as primarily a children's advocate, launching her 'national children's agenda.' 'The children of America, 20 percent of whom live in poverty, have no one to advocate for them,' Reno said.60 Reno's zeal as a protector of children no doubt played a role in her disastrous handling of the Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas.
But Janet Reno was precisely the sort of attorney general that, at least in theory, the author of
