This spring marks the 20th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's death. Perhaps at no time since his passing has our nation needed his legacy of evidence-based, fact-focused analysis and bipartisan balance in evaluation of problem-solving more than at the polarized present.
Few U.S. senators deserve the moniker of "social research scion" more than Moynihan, whose background in education and incisive writing skill enabled him to artfully articulate the need for rigorous reasoning in government.
Even fewer prophets are recognized as such in their own land, however. Despite his pedigree as a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal Democrat, his own party could be (and often was) quick to criticize, attack and dismissively disregard Moynihan whenever he blasphemed the party line with factual logic.
Nearly 60 years ago, long before he became a senator from New York, Moynihan worked in the LBJ administration's Department of Labor. In March 1965, he published a paper that--while controversial at the time, and effectively condemned and canceled by liberal Democrats and Black special-interest groups--would prove amazingly prophetic over the ensuing decades.
"The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" was a 76-page report filled with extensive data analysis and startling conclusions. The purpose of his paper, he wrote later, was to establish some statistical basis for what "everyone knew": namely, "that economic conditions determine social conditions."
It turned out, his research indicated, "that what everyone knew was evidently not so."
The mic-drop message from what became known as the Moynihan Report was that the main impediment threatening Black social progress wasn't lack of jobs, but the steady and increasing deterioration and disintegration of the Black family.
(Note: To aid in clarity and undistracted understanding, I have replaced the word "Negro" with "Black" in quoting Moynihan's report).
"The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations," his report begins, sounding remarkably timely. Moynihan was writing just after passage of the historic Civil Rights Act, and his warning was that equal opportunities under the law would not translate into equal experiences and results would not happen for generations "unless a new and special effort is made."
He called the normal indices of income, education and standard of living deceptive when considering the gap between Blacks and other groups in society.
"The fundamental problem," his evidence indicated, was that "the [Black] family in urban ghettos is crumbling. ... [F]or vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself."
Moynihan didn't discount latent white racist attitudes of the time, or the collective weight on the psyche of Black people brought by centuries of servitude and mistreatment; he named them prominently as reasons why "measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here."
The special effort Moynihan proposed was to create a new national goal: "the establishment of a stable [Black] family structure."
Moynihan's evidence centered around single-parent households and out-of-wedlock children, where huge gaps existed between Blacks and whites. Nearly a quarter of ever-married Black women were divorced or deserted in 1965, and Black births to unmarried women approached the same figure--a percentage that was eight times that of whites.
Using charts, graphs and tables, Moynihan traced the breakdown of family structure to poverty, failure and isolation among Black youth, which in turn had "the predictable outcome in a disastrous delinquency and crime rate."
There was, of course, no declared national effort to re-establish traditional two-parent families among Blacks. On the contrary, Black political leaders excoriated Moynihan. They and liberal Democrats accused him of "blaming the victim" by warning that Blacks would not be able to escape the "tangle of pathology" plaguing their communities "unless the viability of the [Black] family is restored."
Six decades later, despite trillions of dollars spent on social-engineering measures targeted toward minorities that Moynihan warned wouldn't work, the tangle of pathology has tightened, just as he predicted. The state of Black families has worsened by magnitude: The out-of-wedlock Black birth rate is now 70 percent, and two out of three Black children today live in a fatherless home.
And Moynihan couldn't even imagine Black crime as deadly and debilitating as it has now become. His point regarding the overwhelming intraracial nature of crime rings truer than ever: "the cost of crime to the [Black] community is a combination of that to the criminal and to the victim."
Moynihan also slammed categorizing Blacks as a whole, because the true extent of urban family destruction and crime was minimized by rural data, which has better scores.
But rather than revisiting Moynihan's report, 21st century Black leaders and their Democrat panderers are more adamant than ever in denying its precepts. The Black Lives Movement's guiding principles declare a commitment to "disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement."
Spitting on Moynihan's even-more-evidence-now-based contention that social equality won't happen without restoration of the Black family is one approach.
Following it would be a better one.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.