Conservatives have emphasized this bipartisan past and the non-racial character of their argument as well, insulted by liberals who take "culture" to be just a euphemism for race. They point, among other things, to the 1996 Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform, which both parties claimed would end "dependency" and various other ills, like the rise of "illegitimate" births. That did not happen, and poverty increased after the short dotcom boom, but the culture argument still has a strong constituency that believes we have just not gone far enough: Abolish the rest of the welfare state, and the poor will no longer be with us.

Few figures loom larger in the American poverty debate than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who conservatives repeatedly say told liberals long ago that "the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure," as Ryan states in the opening to his recent 200-page critique of the War on Poverty. Moynihan, a liberal Democrat with a long, distinguished career as a policy intellectual and government official, grew up in a poor "broken family" and became one of the main planners and critics of the Kennedy-Johnson initiative. His 1965 report "The Negro Family" implicitly rebuked that effort, and grew into a scandal that has divided the left ever since. The controversy was so intense that reactions to the report filled a book one year later.

For decades, the right has loved to tell this story, arguing that the hostile reaction to Moynihan's prescient warning made research on the subject taboo for a generation, even as poverty's real cause, family breakdown, grew worse and worse. As George Will explained it, the attacks on Ryan's argument about the family, or "culture," is simply déjà vu. “For those who still make a living from race baiting and diverting the attention of the country from the facts about what produces multi-generational poverty," writes Jonathan Tobin, "the truth of Moynihan’s conclusions are still blasphemy.” The belief that someone as liberal and intelligent as Moynihan was silenced for arguing what conservatives like Ryan do now seems even to have convinced the right that welfare is a literal racket on both ends. Marc Thiessen and Robert Woodson speak of a "poverty-industrial complex" that Democrats maintain for profit, hiding all evidence that proves the "failure of the left's approach."

Contrary to myth, however, Moynihan's career was not destroyed; his report, which continues to generate liberal admiration, may have even sped his rise to influence and fame. Nor did it kill research on the family and poverty. Historian Steve Estes estimates that as many as 50 books and 500 journal articles were published on the subject just in the first 15 years after Moynihan's report.

Still, because Moynihan was vague on recommendations in "The Negro Family," the left has often depicted it as a neoconservative tract. Both sides would probably be surprised to read the author in the 1960s and to learn about his objectives for the report. Like many other Democrats later on, Moynihan shared America's reasonable but contradictory anxiety over the growth of single-parent homes, and some of the misconceptions about it. But he saw family break-up as the result of "structural," or economic, factors—not cultural ones. The pro-family conservatives who take his diagnosis as a prescription for laissez-faire capitalism turn the story upside down. If they knew what policies Moynihan hoped to spur with his report, they might view him as a Marxist radical to be forgotten, not a visionary martyr to remember. Moynihan stated these goals more than a few times, but new documents from his rich archive give a much fuller, clearer, and bolder illustration of his thinking and hopes.