Psychic Wars of the Elites

__"Conflicting Worlds of Welfare Reform" by Lawrence M. Mead, in First Things (Aug.–Sept. 1997), 156 Fifth Ave., Ste. 400, New York, N.Y. 10010.__

Liberal and conservative poverty "experts" are failing badly to address the real needs of poor people, argues Mead, a professor of politics at New York University and the author of Beyond Entitlement (1986). Both are hampered by their own experiences, he says. The liberals can’t look upon welfare recipients as anything but victims, while the conservatives can’t see that some of the recipients desperately need ongoing help.

Their blind spots are partly a result of their own backgrounds, Mead believes: "Contrary to what one might expect, liberals as a group are the more privileged. They generally went to better schools and hold better jobs." Now they populate the universities, the foundations, the liberal think tanks, and advocacy groups. They empathize with the poor but don’t identify with them, and thus wind up condescending to them. No matter what is done to help the poor support themselves, liberals continue to view them "as too victimized to take responsibility for their own condition." With equal implausibility, Mead says, conservatives insist that all of the poor can be as self-reliant as other people, if only government requires it.

Conservative specialists—chiefly at conservative think tanks and in GOP staff positions on congressional committees—"typically came up the hard way, with less education and more twists and turns in their careers," he says. With a real sense of how they themselves could have slipped into poverty, the

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