Who let this happen? Who can fix it?

Anderson's account is as prescriptive as it is historical. Throughout Chapter 8, she discusses the advent of social democracy in the 20th century, which she credits to the ascension of political parties that “began as the political arm of various national trade union movements, and aimed to represent the working classes more broadly.” (223). She details how, as the zeitgeist of political economy came to be dominated by the progressive work ethic, both governments and private corporations shifted their approach to being more egalitarian. For the latter, she provides the postbellum policies of the Labour Party, which adopted “comprehensive social insurance facilitation of labor unions and collective bargaining, determination, dramatic expansion of public higher education offered at low or no cost, and guaranteed paid vacations and family leave” as part of its mainstream agenda. (243) In a similar vein, she also recounts how Volvo, in an attempt to increase co-determination and managerial diffusion, “placed workers on the corporate board and in plant level work councils that regulate local work processes and conditions”, which engendered more upward mobility and a rightful sense of enthusiasm amongst workers. 

Certainly, things seemed to be going very well. Yet, as she writes in Chapter 9, these sentiments of well-faring welfare were not to last. The era of neoliberalism, ushered in by staunch decentralists such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, brought many a bane for the working class. As the public began to prefer workfare over welfare, structures began to emerge that would trap individuals in cyclical poverty, narrowing welfare limits such that one could either be completely dependent on welfare, or exceed its asset-limits, and be relegated to a life of paycheck-to-paycheck survival. Family welfare programs were overhauled by systems that led to “the imposition of arbitrary limits on benefits that bear no relation to need” (263). The AFDC, a family welfare program, was abolished in favor of TANF, which set a 5 year limit on receipt of welfare. The government moved away from civic services and shifted onwards outsourcing, which has led to pernicious companies (like those which manage private prisons, healthcare, etc) making boatloads of money without providing the robust services they guarantee. 

Things have evidently taken a turn for the worse. So who let this happen? To understand this, I turn to the very end of Chapter 8, before Anderson has even broached the rise of neoliberal depravity. She writes that, in Social Democracy, to balance the “inherent inequality” due to capitalism with a system that maintains equal “access to more advantaged positions”, one must "retain the loyalty of the broad middle class to solidaristic institutions that leave no one behind”. Lack of solidarity amongst the middle and working classes is the greatest enabler, in my eyes, of the sparse welfare apparatuses that neoliberalism has resulted in. Politicans were only able to pass anti-working class laws because the middle class had seen themslvbes as ideologically and matterially separate from their lower-class counterparts. It is only with public support from the middle class that politicians were able to run on platforms of skewed policy which allowed welfare systems to disintegrate. In fact, polls from the latter half of the century show that over half of Americans believed the government was “spending too much on welfare”(Source), and in the 1992 election, both Clinton and HW Bush ran with a similar "end welfare as we know it" policy.

However, in today's America, there is a growing number of individuals who consider themselves to be working-class rather than middle class. This  Gallup Poll found a 9% increase in working/lower class self-identification from 2012-2022. Given this, as more people themselves begin to feel economically vulnerable, could there again be a shift in welfare sentiment? As more and more middle-class individuals begin to feel financial pressure, could they regain appreciation for the “solidaristic institutions that leave no one behind”? I believe that it is certainly possible, and as Americans become more and more exposed to turbulent economies and lesser government reprieve, perhaps they will be forced to confront the numerous detriments of neoliberalism and pull a page from the post-war progressive book.