What Happened the Last Time Republicans Cared About Poverty

by Josh Zeitz

Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

Over the past several weeks, Republicans—at least those running for president—seem to have discovered the vexing issues of income and wealth inequality. Speaking last month at the Detroit Economic Club, former Gov. Jeb Bush acknowledged that “only a small portion of the population [is] riding the economy’s up escalator.” His fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio expressed his newfound concern that “so much of the recovery over the last couple of years has gone to such a small segment of the population.” Even Rick Perry, a prophet of low taxes and minimal regulation, just a few days ago complained that “large corporations don’t pay taxes but single moms working two jobs do,” though it’s not clear that he would prefer the logical fix to that injustice.

This all came after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (of “47 percent” infamy) raised eyebrows this winter when he complained that “under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty than ever before.”

Republicans, it seems, would like to make America more equal.

To be sure, they’re very late to the party. Democrats have been worrying about the problem for years. To those who grew up during or after the “Reagan Revolution,” it’s more intuitive to identify the Republican Party’s key tropes as any combination of minimalist government, low taxes, states’ rights and federalism, stringent interventionism and cultural conservatism. When it came to conversations about economic inequality, the party of Jesse Helms and Lee Atwater was more about racial dog whistles and welfare reform than sermons on justice and uplift.

But it wasn’t always so. As late as 1967, many moderate voices in the GOP sounded genuine concern for the plight of their less advantaged countrymen. Echoing liberal Democrats, with whom they joined forces to pass a wide slate of Great Society programs, moderate Republicans bought fully into post-war wisdom about the nature of the American economy. Their governing assumption—deeply bipartisan in nature—held that America had mastered cyclical macro-economic problems and that the economy would continue to grow in perpetuity. Inequality, they believed, resulted from lack of opportunity, and not from deeper structural problems like regressive taxation, labor and employment laws, minimum wages, rates of unionization, or trade policy. If everyone were given the tools to succeed, there would be enough slices of a growing pie to ensure universal prosperity. ...

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