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Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy.

Publication: Labour/Le Travail
Publication Date: 22-MAR-09 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy.(Book review)

Article Excerpt
Brian Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008)

SYMBOLIC POLLUTION is the cultural theme to be derived from this book. It is a vitally important cultural concept that explains the failure to implement an economic security and poverty elimination program in the United States, particularly in the Johnson, Nixon, and Carter presidential administrations when conditions were most favourable to such action. The failure of liberals and progressives to fully grasp this concept and their embrace of language that reinforced the notion opened a path for Ronald Reagan's "California-style" workfare reforms in the 1980s, and permitted the ideology upon which it is based to persist and strengthen.

Symbolic pollution, or 'moral contamination' arose within the context of the "welfare mess" that preoccupied government administrations in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite growing economic productivity and affluence it was acknowledged by all sectors, as Steensland demonstrates--business, policy experts, politicians of every persuasion and at every level--that full employment goals were not being attained, that many who had...

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