The rise and fall of guaranteed income
Social citizenship
Several scholars pointed out that, in the last 50 years, Americans’ understanding of what it means to be a citizen has changed dramatically, as well, and that these changes also spurred the decline of GAI as a mainstream policy possibility.
According to Alice O’Connor of UCSB, many proponents of GAI in the 1960s and 1970s were drawing on an idea of citizenship that sprang, in part, from how citizenship had been defined in the New Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the idea that full citizenship entails not only political and civic rights but also economic security.
FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY
In his 1964 acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination, Lyndon Johnson made a forceful case for eliminating poverty on the grounds that it would empower people to participate in the broader society.
“The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want — that man is not fully free,” Johnson said.
“For more than 30 years, from Social Security to the war against poverty, we have diligently worked to enlarge the freedom of man. And as a result, Americans tonight are freer to live as they want to live, to pursue their ambitions, to meet their desires, to raise their families than at any time in all of our glorious history.”
Though he framed his argument for economic security in terms of individual freedom, it is clear that Johnson’s vision of freedom came with social obligations.
Those individuals who had achieved the means to participate fully in society and “received the bounty of this land…must not now turn from the needs of their neighbors,” he said.
O’Connor explained that the massive economic hardship that was experienced during the Great Depression gave rise to a widespread sense that, when individuals are struggling to make ends meet, it will be much more difficult for them to exercise their political and civil rights and to fulfill their social obligations. Additionally, she said, an understanding developed that being unable to participate actively in one’s community and to feel included in that community — whether by attending social events or by purchasing new clothing for children at the beginning of a school year — because of economic deprivation constituted a form of “disenfranchisement” in itself.
That sense of social and economic disenfranchisement — the understanding that economic security was a prerequisite for full civic and social participation — gave rise to a conception of citizenship in which economic rights were inseparable from civil and political rights.
“The idea of full economic citizenship was an underlying rationale for a very broad range of advocacy and a justification for social policy,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor pointed to the “Economic Bill of Rights,” proposed by President Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address in 1944 as an illustration of the idea that full citizenship depended not only on having civil and political rights and obligations, but also on having the means to exercise those rights and fulfill those obligations. In that speech, Roosevelt argued that the political rights guaranteed by the Constitution had “proved inadequate to assure us all equality in the pursuit of happiness.”
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” Roosevelt said.
The idea that full citizenship entailed economic rights as well as civic and political rights was more fully articulated by the British sociologist T.H. Marshall in his 1949 essay, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in which he argued that “a modicum of economic security and welfare” is necessary to have the time and the means to enable full participation in society and the civic community.
While proponents of GAI in the 1960s did not draw explicitly on Marshall’s argument, O’Connor said that, in many ways, their arguments followed the same logic that the rights of citizenship entailed some measure of economic security.
Martha McCluskey, a professor of law at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), pointed out that the arguments for a guarantee of basic economic security being made in the 1960s by the civil rights and welfare rights movements — both of which supported the idea of a GAI — relied on the assumption that achieving full citizenship required not only gaining civil and political rights, but also gaining the economic security that is necessary to participate fully in both one’s local community and the broader civil sphere.
“There was the implicit argument that you couldn’t separate civil and political rights from economic rights,” McCluskey said.
When South Dakota Senator (and later presidential candidate) George McGovern introduced a version of GAI on the floor of the Senate in 1970, he invoked both the idea that Americans have mutual obligations to each other and the idea of active social citizenship. Adopting a GAI policy, he said, would be a move toward “insuring each of our citizens against the risk of poverty and doing so simply because we believe that this kind of minimal financial security should be a right of citizenship in our country.”
According to Daniel Rodgers of Princeton, the idea of active citizenship was a key element behind pro-GAI arguments.
In 1971, for example, Representative William J. Green III (D-Pa.), made an explicit appeal to this idea.
“Perhaps programs to guarantee an income will, after a period of years, translate into new forms of social awareness and an increased participation in the political life of the nation,” Green said. “Almost all of us accept this as a reasonable assumption, and it is the assumption that is the foundation of this plan.”
Rodgers said that, since the 1970s, the prevailing American concept of citizenship has come to de-emphasize participation and obligation.
Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, cited the widespread impulse to describe the paying of taxes as an imposition on individual freedom as an example of citizenship viewed through the lens of individual rights, instead of collective obligations.
“That civic obligations like paying taxes and serving on juries are seen as burdens and infringements on individual liberty, rather than as privileges of citizenship and part of what it means to participate in democracy I think shows how underdeveloped our sense of citizenship has become,” Gordon said.
When the value placed on participation and mutual obligation declined, said Erik Olin Wright, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “you saw a transformation of the citizen into a client or a consumer of state services,” which represented “a fundamental erosion of the richness of citizenship and of what it means to live in a society.”