Retroactivist.

The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, by Michael B. Katz (Metropolitan, 469 pp., $35)

In this age of multiculturalism, identity politics, the Third Way, and postmodernism, it's easy to forget what liberalism meant even 25 years ago. It was not about assembling a "cabinet that looked like America" or allowing gays to serve in the military or putting more cops on the streets. Nor was it about deconstructing the classics and eliminating "dead white males" from college curricula. Rather, it was mainly about expanding the welfare state begun by the likes of FDR and LBJ. Liberals of this persuasion dreamed of a classless society, and thought about how to bring capitalism to heel. They believed in raising taxes, redistributing income, creating new government programs, and nationalizing certain industries. The New Deal and the Great Society were the most tangible accomplishments of this liberal impulse; Walter Mondale, who in 1984 actually promised the American people a tax hike, typified it.

In the 1990s, this older kind of liberalism had perhaps its last hurrah. The unreconstructed liberals of the Clinton administration set their sights on nationalizing health care, only to be resoundingly defeated. Soon after, Bill Clinton declared the death of Big Government and signed historic legislation (forced on him by a Republican Congress) to repeal the federal entitlement to welfare. It was, to paraphrase Clinton, the end of liberalism as we had known it.

So it's nice to be reminded by Michael Katz-if only for nostalgia's sake-what liberalism once meant. A noted social historian at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about poverty and U.S. welfare policy, Katz is something of a dinosaur, an old-school welfare-state liberal who loathes capitalism and wants to bring back the days of Big and Bigger Government. His intellectual hero is Michael Harrington, to whom he dedicated an earlier book. Thus it's not surprising that Katz seems blissfully unaware of the large body of scholarly literature on why socialism can't work, and unconvinced by the failure of socialism everywhere its been tried. He also naively thinks that the redistributionist state can be sold to the American people, who have never shown much interest in it. In his latest book (partly written, as we learn from the acknowledgments, in the picturesque village of Oquossoc, Me.), he unapologetically defends the welfare state and calls for reversing the damage done to it by Newt Gingrich in league with the New Democrats.

Katz's architectonic idea is that over the last two decades, the ideal of social justice has been subordinated to market imperatives: "By tightening the links between benefits and employment, the late- twentieth-century welfare state has stratified Americans into first- and second-class citizens and undermined the effective practice of democracy," he argues. "Everywhere market price has superseded social justice."

A little explanation is in order. When Katz uses the term "welfare state," he does not have in mind simply public assistance such as food stamps. Rather, he means the entire structure of public and private assistance, from AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), Social Security, and Medicare, to soup kitchens for the homeless or employee benefits for those who work. In his view, this whole structure has been overturned by a few well-funded right-wing ideologues. Public aid has been revoked or made contingent on work, while nonprofits like the Red Cross have gone commercial, competing, for example, over the blood supply. The result, he argues, is not simply the end of Big Government but the end of both the national ideal and the idea of a common citizenship.

Katz's approach is best measured in his chapter on "The End of Welfare." In the most far-reaching social policy innovation of recent decades, Congress replaced AFDC, the nation's most important cash- assistance program, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. Drawing on the work of three conservative thinkers in particular-Charles Murray, Lawrence Mead, and Marvin Olasky-TANF transformed public assistance. Not only did it repeal the federal entitlement to aid, it also sought by various means to encourage work and discourage out-of-wedlock childbearing; for example, individuals were now limited to five years of assistance, and only two years without working. Coupled with charitable choice and, more recently, George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives, the conservative approach to welfare seeks to turn lives around, not subsidize their destruction. In contrast to the Left, which sees poverty as exclusively an economic problem, it emphasizes the broad behavioral and moral dimensions of poverty.

Although it is too early to say that TANF is an unqualified success, results so far are encouraging. By 1999, welfare rolls had fallen by 49 percent from their high of 5 million in 1994. This is unprecedented. As Douglas Besharov has pointed out, whether the economy has been healthy and growing, as in the period 1963-73, or weak and stagnant, as in 1989-94, welfare rolls have always grown at a fantastic clip. Of course, many questions remain, such as what will happen to the poorest in the event of an economic downturn. But all in all, TANF has been a remarkable improvement.

For Katz, however, it is an unmitigated disaster instigated by a few nefarious conservatives. Supposedly, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation and Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute "manufactured" a welfare crisis based on "shoddy statistics and fallacious arguments." They then tricked a gullible public into accepting their vilification of the poor, who now, as a result, face hunger and malnutrition and second-class citizenship.

It is a sign of political maturity not to impugn the motives of your opponent. President Bush recently exhibited this trait by praising the "noble intentions" behind the War on Poverty begun by LBJ. In contrast, Katz employs the kind of overheated rhetoric found mainly in the pages of The Nation. Conservatism, he claims, took advantage of "the anger and confusion of ordinary Americans experiencing economic insecurity and a new racial order" so as to implement an anti-welfare-state agenda. The innovations of such pragmatic Republican mayors as Rudolph Giuliani and Stephen Goldsmith, and of such governors as Tommy Thompson and John Engler (a "disciple" of Russell Kirk), are described for the most part as failures. Conservative welfare policy is dismissed as "social Darwinism" with roots in the new science of sociobiology. Though Katz does not spell out what he means by this fanciful charge, the idea would seem to be of some great right-wing intellectual conspiracy encompassing E. O. Wilson, Charles Murray, and the Bradley Foundation. As for conservative proposals to save Social Security by partial privatization, Katz labels these efforts a "new class war."

Indeed, Katz takes a highly jaundiced view of American life in general. He describes a "new American city" in which "the office tower embodies the same economic processes as the sweatshop." Sinister corporations have lowered wages and cut benefits to compete in the new global economy. Crime is explained as "the translation of poverty, hopelessness, and frustration into rage." According to Katz, "America has responded to the chronic joblessness among inner-city minorities not with public work or support but with a new and hideously expensive form of public assistance: mass incarceration." He condemns the American people for caring more about "legislation protecting the flag" than entitlements for the poor, more about "the symbols of nationality than . . . the shared experiences that unite a people." Meanwhile, conservative ideologues have "racialized the undeserving poor, who now carry the triple stigma of sexual licentiousness, willful poverty, and race."

In the best tradition of the left-wing scholar-activist from Saul Alinsky to Frances Fox Piven, Katz ends his book with a call for "immediate action." He wishes to revive the old liberal agenda of not requiring work in exchange for benefits; restoring the federal entitlement to public assistance; and making health care a constitutional right. Yet if Katz is out of step with the American people, his views are typical for a certain kind of social-democratic college professor, not to mention the New York Times. Only in this small, cloistered world could the end of an entitlement that has done untold damage to the poor be construed as a public disaster.