Perception has become a problem for safety net programs.

"It’s harder for somebody that really needs it to get it than it is a dopehead," one woman who benefits from the Social Security Disability Program said recently.

The problem has been exacerbated by the change in liberal messaging around the safety net that has deemphasized the importance of personal responsibility.



Dylan Matthews wrote a useful dive on the Social Security Disability Program for Vox last month, arguing the program works better than its critics give it credit for. The vast majority of its benefits go to people who really can't work, and it does less to push people out of the workforce than many people believe. It's not welfare by another name.

Still, the part of Matthews' report that sticks most with me is this:

"Stereotypes about recipients wasting or not needing the money are common even among people on the program. 'It’s harder for somebody that really needs it to get it than it is a dopehead,' Jeanetta Smith of Robbins, Tennessee, who has been on the program for 13 years, told me. 'You’ve got these folks that don’t do nothing with it but dope it up.'"

This perception is a problem. It's a problem that's exacerbated by the change in liberal messaging around the safety net that has deemphasized the importance of personal responsibility, and it's further exacerbated by increasing social divisions.

Support for social programs is built on a foundation of mutual obligation: We have a social obligation to take care of the less fortunate, and individuals have an obligation to support themselves to the degree they can, instead of relying on public support.

If voters suspect the latter obligation isn't being met, their support for meeting the former obligation will decrease.

Distrust and verify

Yet liberals have become less inclined, in recent years, to talk about personal responsibility as a component of safety-net policy. This is considered victim-blaming, it ignores structural problems, etc.

If voters are concerned that safety-net programs are being abused, the response is increasingly that this signals a problem not with the programs but with the voters: They are driven by perceptions of the racial demographics of program beneficiaries, or they're just not compassionate enough.

This line of thinking is very closely related to the one Hillary Clinton laid out in the "deplorables" speech: That a lot of the electorate simply has bad values, which makes it improper to conform public policy to their desires.

This line of thinking about much of the public might even be true. But how does it work as a foundation for politics? It involves going to the public and saying "you're selfish and I think you might be racist, but give me your money and I promise to spend it in a way that reflects your interests better than you realize."

If the public is bigoted, that actually makes it more important to demonstrate that social programs are consistent with an ethic of mutual obligation. If people are skeptical of their fellow citizens' intention to hold up the social bargain, for whatever reason, it needs to be extra clear that social programs are designed to prevent abuse, if you hope to gain popular support for maintaining and expanding those programs.

More broadly, if social trust is low, verification becomes all the more important.

And the general disposition that it is improper to focus on the personal responsibility of benefit recipients makes it hard to get people to listen to empirical arguments like Matthews', which contend a specific program is actually aligned with an ethic of personal responsibility.

I share concerns about some of Republican proposals that have been made to increase the emphasis on personal responsibility in safety net programs, particularly Medicaid. Some of these proposals may indeed result in reducing participation by people who need and deserve government benefits, even if just by throwing a lot of paperwork at people.

Liberals can more effectively argue against these policies if they start from a place of taking the importance of personal responsibility seriously, and talking about how to emphasize it in a way that is consistent with getting help to those who need it, instead of using it as a pretext to cut programs.