This week we read Martha Davis's Brutal Need about the development of welfare rights under U.S. law. Inside, incremental, individual, legal strategies can be cooptive. Also trying to make something like welfare more appealing to the mass public by making it more limited can make it less useful for the people who need it. Popular social programs are often like WIC or Food Stamps or housing vouchers or Head Start that are for limited purposes to address dire need for the most vulnerible populations like babies, pre-schoolers, hungry children, homeless families. These programs are seen as less of threat to the concept of less eligibility and the idea that people should try as much as possible to be personally responsible and generate their income through paid employment, even if they are single mothers with young children.
Cash assistance is seen as more threatening to our society's basic work and family values.
Yet the other programs are more limited as to their purposes, who can receive and under what conditions. Therefore there are a variety a pitfalls in trying to either work inside the system vs. trying to push for more dramatic changes. Things change , even get better but usually in some respects but not others, they can be said also to swing back but when they do it is never the same as before. Race relations have improved since slavery in many respects but not all and at times they have gotten worse, only to see a swing back towards improvement later on. These spatial relations of social change highlight how it has been a real struggle in our liberal, individualistic, capitalistic society to get entitlements right for low income families.