Word: moynihan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...black power advocates, even liberals have been pushing "community control." Such localism has inevitable racial overtones, which may one day result in intricate warfare. Whether or not it increases the self-reliance of the blacks, in the white areas localism means law-and-order and school segregation. Moynihan ignores these unhappy political realities. To him, the neighborhood-oriented approach is self-defeating if the neighborhoods are human cesspools. Though he may be right, the relocation proposal is foolishly bucking a powerful trend on the most volatile of issues...
This old fashioned plea for integration sounds quaint at a moment when ethnic power and "positive polarization" are carrying the day. It sounds curiously quaint from the man often credited with the rediscovery of the ethnic community ( Beyond the Melting Pot ). Perhaps Moynihan could soft-pedal his policy as "the creation of black suburbs." The creation of black suburbs, though, has been going on for many years; to some extent, it has aggravated the social disorientation of the blacks left behind. Moynihan actually has in mind a federally financed migration out of the ghetto. But to where- the white suburbs...
...Moynihan's association with the Nixon Administration has caused many people to label him-perhaps unfairly- a conservative. He does accept some key conservative doctrines: the need for economic incentives, the reduction of federalism, and the return to local initiative. He scored the old welfare program for breaking up families. He stands opposed with many Republicans to the provision of services through the federal government. The government, he holds, is good at collecting revenues but bad at distributing services. Direct cash payments to the poor are more effective than what he calls "the monopoly strategy of services," because the government...
...cheapest strategy, Moynihan's dispersal strategy, would virtually sabotage Nixon and Mitchell's grand political design. The Administration has committed itself to the white silent majority, with a few feints toward the Wallace constituency. The surest way to lose a silent majority, as any politician knows, is a risky social experiment. Regardless of ideology Moynihan is emotionally and ultimately a Democrat. Only the Democrats have commitments to the minority groups, which stand to gain most from a "national urban policy...
...SECOND point of this policy- the reorganization of local government- might even do more to aggravate stolidly Republican suburbia. Moynihan correctly calls urban government "fragmented and obsolescent." The flight of both industry and middle class to the suburbs has eaten away at the urban tax base. This smaller tax base must simultaneously finance more and more government services for the outcast population left behind...