Word: moynihanized
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Obviously, if community action organizations were to represent the interests of the poor, then the poor themselves would have to participate in their formation--hence the famous formula for maximum feasible participation of community residents in all phases of community action programs. Moynihan points out rather interestingly that this formula entered the War on Poverty draft legislation not out of considerations of big city politics, but rather as a device to ensure that community action funds would reach the black poor in the South rather than their white overlords. whatever its origins, however, maximum feasible participation soon became the kingpin...
...Moynihan's current books sets out to attack what he perceives as an example of the misuse of the social sciences by government--the Community Action Program of President Johnson's War on Poverty. Drawing primarily on a Harvard senior thesis written by Richard Blumenthal for Professor Banfield two years ago, Moynihan traces community action from its intellectual genesis in the late fifties through its adoption by the Kennedy Administration, and finally to its apparent decline at the end of the Johnson years...
...this point in the history of community action, Moynihan argues, that the critical distortion of the program occurred. Organizations which has been originally intended to foster pride and self-confidence among the poor while working in coordination with established political and bureaucratic agencies now became intensely antagonistic towards these agencies, and began acting out spasmodic revolts in the streets. The agents of this transformation were middle-class reformers (variously characterized as from New York, "liberal-radical," and Jewish) who were beginning to use the frustrations of the poor in order to vent their won hostility towards American society. The result...
...Moynihan argues that the community action programs--although generally innocent in conception--quickly turned into federally-created Frankensteins whose only ascertainable result was to raise the level of community conflict in cities all over the country. Since the role of governments should be, he feels, to counteract the fragmentation and anomie inherent in industrial civilization--to lead in the quest for community--the conflict created by the community action programs was in itself undesirable...
...MOYNIHAN does not quite say that the community action programs should never have been implemented. It seems safe to infer that this is his belief, since he tells his readers that he argued against community action at the outset, and goes on to credit the programs with helping to create the atmosphere for riots on one side and the rise of George Wallace on the other. But he emphasizes throughout the book that what he is primarily concerned with is the broader problem of the application of social science to public policy. What disturbs Moynihan about the Community Action Program...