The vice president recently previewed a new policy initiative by the Trump administration to provide financial support to stay-at-home mothers. A longtime gripe from traditionally minded families is the fact that federal policy (including, and especially, the federal Dependent Child Tax Credit) gives a helping hand to dual-income families that doesn’t exist for families where one of the spouses stays home. Perhaps because of the rampant fraud in federally supported daycare institutions or perhaps because of his time spent around Catholic intellectual types (who tend to rankle this disparity), the vice president concluded that something needs to be done to remedy this unfairness in federal policy.
The solution the administration has come up with is allowing stay-at-home mothers to get access to a funded and authorized federal welfare program run by the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s an interesting decision and presumably one that was driven by the fact that helping stay-at-home mothers is the kind of policy that can only be enacted through executive action.
This is because, as a practical matter, legislation on the topic would be dead on arrival. Democrats have zero interest in supporting regressive, patriarchal family structures (and the kinds of voters who adhere to them), while Republicans are sufficiently green-eyeshaded and growth-minded at the margins to wonder why both parents can’t just be productive workers. If the latter weren’t the case, it could conceivably be a budget-reconciliation provision at some point in the future, but changing the tax code to correct for unfairness in family economics would be a steep hill to climb under the Byrd Rule. So executive power it is, and the identified vehicle is expanding eligibility for a funded welfare program.
This has resulted in perhaps predictable howls from the green-eyeshade and growth-minded members of the commentariat. The proposal has been decried as welfarism, socialism, and Orbanism depending on who’s launching the attack. (Some, like my EPPC colleague, Patrick Brown, have commendably stuck to worthwhile technical critiques of the means rather than the end.) The better solution — again depending on the source — is to abolish the welfare state or, perhaps, the income tax. Regardless, families shouldn’t have to pay for the choices of other families.
Of course therein lies the problem. Single-income families do pay for the choices of other families. They’re taxed just like everyone else, and they don’t get the benefits of either federally subsidized childcare or the tax credit (whose primary constituency is the middle and upper-middle classes). That’s the unfairness whose correction is being proposed. At the same time, the program in question isn’t some new entitlement; it’s an existing welfare program. The money is going to be spent one way or the other. What the vice president is doing is changing how the money is spent to further conservative social policies.
There’s a term for this, and it isn’t socialist. It’s neoconservative.
While now associated with foreign policy and the Iraq War, neoconservatism, as initially exposited in places like the Public Interest, was primarily interested in domestic policy. An abiding concern of the neoconservatives was the social disorder left in the wake of the 1960s and its interaction with the welfare state that many of them had supported in their (often Trotskyite) youth.
Their turn to the right did not make them slash-and-burn libertarians. The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, laid out his vision of welfare succinctly in the pages of Newsweek in 1976. He explained, “Neo-conservatism is not at all hostile to the idea of a welfare state, but it is critical of the Great Society version of this welfare state. In general, it approves of those social reforms that, while providing needed security and comfort to the individual in our dynamic, urbanized society, do so with a minimum of bureaucratic intrusion in the individual’s affairs.” What does that look like? He went on, “Such reforms would include, of course, social security, unemployment insurance, some form of national health insurance, some kind of family assistance plan, etc.” (emphasis added). His concern was that social programs don’t seek to “provide security and comfort” but rather empower “vast and energetic bureaucracies to ‘solve social problems.’”
As explained by Matt Continetti in a retrospective on Irving’s thought, he believed that “public policy could help produce bourgeois antibodies by lowering the cost of family formation.” Continetti calls this Kristol’s “bourgeois agenda,” which included empowering families against the prevalent culture. “The bourgeois agenda,” per Continetti, “also includes helping families protect children from the depredations of the culture by enabling families to take advantage of more educational options, such as home schooling, school choice, vocational training, and new online resources. With a public-school system captured by unions and by the ideology of the multicultural left, these alternatives can help families reclaim bourgeois values.”
In other words, as Kristol put it, making the case for “A Conservative Welfare State” in the Wall Street Journal, “the welfare state is with us, for better or worse, and that conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse.” Or, as Continetti summarized, such a welfare state’s goal would be “to ensure it incarnates conservative values rather than liberal ones, and to direct its benefits to individuals and families and associations that behave in conservative rather than in liberal ways.” Importantly, this “would build on human motivations, rather than try to change them.”
It’s not hard to see how this plays out with Vance’s proposal. Here we have an existing welfare program where the money is going to be spent one way or the other. The proposal on offer is to use that existing program to assist working families where mothers take care of their children rather than sending them to daycare. It’s providing “security and comfort” to those families as they “protect children from the depredations of the culture.” It supports families “behaving in conservative ways” by struggling to maintain socially conservative bourgeois values in the choices they have already made rather than coming up with some new, futile (Orbanist?) scheme in the legislature to “try to change them.”
Of course there was more to neoconservatism than just Irving Kristol. Take former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who spent decades ruminating on the social dynamics of welfare. He addressed many of them in a 1968 article in the Public Interest called “The Crises in Welfare.” He concluded that, as a practical matter, when it comes to welfare, “What we can do is improve it somewhat.” He bemoaned that “it is an American fault to insist on extravagant goals — as if to set out to achieve anything less than everything suggests a lack of sincerity, manliness, or both — and to be exceedingly busy with other matters when it subsequently develops that little or nothing happened.” It’s a ready-made rebuke for Vance to deploy against his critics who insist the solution is fundamental changes to the tax code or the welfare state.
Moynihan didn’t address the issue directly at hand here. How could he? He wrote in 1968, and the question of single versus dual-income families is a comparatively recent one. But his policy prescriptions had an eye toward government support of working families in ways that echo what Vance is proposing now. For example, he suggested that “The length of unemployment compensation should be permanently extended and should provide, far better than is now the case, for workers with large families.” He recommended, “A system of income supplements for workers with families, such as now exist in most parts of the world.” He went on to note that “The United States is the only industrial democracy in the world that does not have a family allowance.” He saw it as a virtue that this would be, essentially, middle-class welfare because the lower middle class, in his view, “is the group that by and large has been left out of the recent spate of government programs: if not forgotten, it is at least ignored.” As a result, a majority of Americans “cannot but wonder what it is getting out of the activity, and, in particular, has to be asking whether government is playing favorites, or greasing squeaky wheels, or whatever.”
There are obvious drawbacks to these particular policies, but he was addressing the current policy dynamic pretty squarely. As noted above, the middle class already enjoys a significant tax expenditure to assist in childcare — if both parents work. Washington is awash in bipartisan proposals to make life better for working mothers via paid family leave. There’s no shortage of political interest in helping the “Gen Z boss and a mini” set “have it all.” But what if she wants to stay home with her kids?
In the end, the families Moynihan wanted to support were, like Kristol, striving for the bourgeois ideal. He bemoaned how, “many persons active in the civil rights movements, as in most social reform efforts in recent American history, bring to the understanding a considerable disenchantment with the traditional ‘middle class’ values of the society.” He went on, “Although they are likely to be — or because they are — the products of quite successful families, ideas of family stability and morality tend to be seen by such persons as part of the bourgeois apparat. And they say to hell with it.”
Other neoconservatives (rightly, I suspect) chafed at some of Moynihan’s ideas. In 1987 another great neoconservative, Michael Novak, chaired a presidential “Working Seminar on the Family and American Welfare Policy.” Its report began by noting, “We are all ‘pro-family’ now,” and compared that to the then-recent past when “experts taught that parenthood was too important for amateurs, that children should be raised in State-approved clinics, that a license should be required for procreation, that tax penalties should be levied against those with large families.”
Of course, it being the Reagan administration, there was an abiding and continued hostility to welfarism that you didn’t necessarily see in Kristol or Moynihan. “Somehow,” the Novak Seminar notes, “the bottom line was always the same: government would take resources from the families of America in order to ‘help’ them.”
Nevertheless, the Novak Seminar was clear that the government should have defined objectives as it relates to the family. “Families,” it explained, “who choose to have children are making a desirable decision. Mothers and fathers who then decide to spend a good deal of time raising those children themselves rather than leaving it to others are demonstrably doing a good thing for those children. Countless Americans do these things every day.” Indeed: “Public policy and the culture in general must support and reaffirm these decisions — not undermine and be hostile to them or send a message that we are neutral.” So much for “zombie Reaganism.” Isn’t this exactly what Vance is proposing?
The Novak Seminar went on to take direct aim at Moynihan’s family allowances as a Western European failure, but it also took on the question of childcare. It did so somewhat gingerly as it was in the throes of what it took to be the first sustained and pervasive expansion of working motherhood (although it wondered if Reagan’s policies on taxes and inflation might correct that trend).
But it was also forceful in a way you’d never imagine today, observing that, “unlike Sweden, for example, the mothers of America have managed to avoid becoming just so many more cogs in the wheels of commerce.” Coming from Vance, such a statement would be right at home, and his critics might wonder if it had been influenced by the likes of Patrick Deneen. Nope, that’s free-base neoconservatism coming from one of their cardinals, Michael Novak.
In fact, the Novak Seminar commented on the perceived unfairness of the Dependent Care Tax Credit, noting that its critics allege it “only help[s] families who seek third party child care.” It floats the idea of expanding it to include families with stay-at-home parents as a policy that would be “more neutral than the current one although obviously more costly.”
In the end, it offers a recommendation: “Policy options need to recognize that parents have the primary responsibility for rearing and caring for their children.” This recognition must “be sensitive to the perception of favoring one type of family arrangement over another (e.g., two-parent families with dual earners vs. a single earner).” It basically stops short there, though, saying the government should “encourag[e] and endors[e] employer efforts to adopt family-oriented policies which provide for flexibility in the workplace,” without, of course, “creating new entitlement programs.”
Novak’s ideas were clearly influenced by his friend and fellow Christian neoconservative, Father Richard John Neuhaus. During his Lutheran days, Father Neuhaus coauthored a monograph at AEI called To Empower People, which dealt with many of these same issues, including family formation and structure. In it, he argued that there must be “public recognition of the family as an institution.” This is so “because every society has an indexable interest in how children are raised, how values are transmitted to the next generation.” This, in turn, leads to a “preference for the parents over the experts.”
The problem, though, is that “most modern societies have in large part disenfranchised the family in the key area of education.” He went on to note that this makes the family “at best, an auxiliary agency to the state, which at the age of five or six coercively (compulsory school laws) and monopolistically (for the most part) takes over the child’s education.”
Again, this was in 1977 and before the dawn of functionally universal daycare, but Neuhaus saw the problem coming. He noted that “daycare has become a public issue, as more and more mothers of small children have entered the labor force and as many people, spurred by the feminist movement, have begun to claim that working mothers have a right to public services designed to meet their special needs.” He doesn’t endorse this view but notes resignedly that “Both factors are likely to continue, making daycare a public issue for the foreseeable future.”
Neuhaus adopted a solution that essentially wound up winning out from a policy perspective, namely that there be a national program but one that isn’t tied to public schools. At least, in his view, it’s being undertaken by mediating institutions and could conceivably be voucherized.
What seemed like a good idea in 1977 couldn’t have conceived of Minnesota’s Quality Learing Center, but that’s not really the point. Look at his approach to the issue. A valid policy position he rejects offhand is “quite simply, stay out of this area.” Neoconservative that he was, there was a social issue to address, and government means available with which to address it. The question was primarily, “how?” And the answer was the way in which, to Neuhaus, the government intervention would best appreciate the mediating influences of civil society.
Was Father Neuhaus a socialist? Hardly. Like the other neoconservatives, he took a pragmatic view on the role (and persistence) of government. He — similarly to Kristol, Moynihan, and Novak — sought to deploy the tools of the government more efficiently and toward non-neutral social ends, like the preservation of the traditional family.
In this, the vice president’s proposal places him squarely in the neoconservative camp.