The last time the United States grappled with the cruelty of “poverty in the midst of plenty”—a term coined by President John F. Kennedy in a letter to Vice President Lyndon Johnson—was more than fifty years ago. The similarities between that era and today are notable.
Then, as now, the government has seemingly limitless funds for wars abroad while implementing austerity for domestic needs. Working people face the threat of widespread job losses due to automation and the economic impact of the coronavirus. They are on the front lines of fighting the COVID-19 outbreak, doing essential jobs in a dangerous time.
Turning the sense of individual misfortune and shame into collective fury and mobilization helped make possible the groundbreaking (if insufficient) social and economic protections of the New Deal.
The pandemic has added urgency to calls for solving poverty with a guaranteed or universal basic income. And these issues are being brought to the national consciousness largely by grassroots collectives of poor people demanding respect and economic security.
The Poor People’s Campaign, which frames its political project as “A National Call for Moral Revival,” is a unique and much-welcomed presence on the U.S. political scene, in part because for the past fifty years poverty was rarely seen as an issue of any political import.
Those who haven’t managed to climb the illusive ladder of success—the 59 percent of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, the 14.3 million households who were food insecure at some point in 2018, or the 40 percent of Americans who would not be able to cover an unforeseen financial crisis of $400 or more—often come to believe these situations are their own doing. If only they had made better decisions, worked harder, held off on having kids a little longer, and so on, they wouldn’t be in this position.
Overcoming shame and isolation, and replacing self-blame with feelings of outrage and belief in an alternative future, have been crucial to successful mobilizations of poor people throughout history. Turning the sense of individual misfortune and shame into collective fury and mobilization helped make possible the groundbreaking (if insufficient) social and economic protections of the New Deal.
A similar shift in blame—from the individual to structural causes—helped embolden the mobilizations of poor people in the late 1960s, the last time politicians spoke seriously about eradicating poverty in the United States.
The Poor People’s Campaign—which shares its name with the major campaign launched by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—emerged on the national scene in 2018. One of the modern campaign’s key goals is to challenge the belief that poverty results from individual missteps, insisting instead on a collective responsibility.
Led by the Reverends Dr. William J. Barber II and Dr. Liz Theoharis, the Poor People’s Campaign draws explicitly on numerous political projects of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement and the welfare rights movement. One of the current campaign’s prominent slogans, “Everybody Has the Right to Live,” was popularized by the welfare rights movement in the 1960s as it attempted, along with sympathetic lawyers at Columbia University’s Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, to establish a Constitutional “right to live.”
To these militant anti-poverty activists, this was not just an abstract idea, but a concrete demand. They believed that if people did not have enough money to live decent lives, they would be unable to exercise their Constitutional rights. They sought to establish this right by securing a guaranteed annual income, similar to today’s calls for a universal basic income.
One significant feature of the Poor People’s Campaign, which sets it apart from past attempts at addressing poverty, is the central role given to environmental concerns. Besides fighting against “systemic racism, poverty, the war economy” as King and welfare activists did, the campaign has added addressing “ecological devastation” to its list of priorities.
Indeed, the current COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis lend urgency to all major social and economic issues. If we are to be hopeful for a moment, this urgency may buttress the argument made by the welfare rights movement fifty years ago: Increased economic growth and trickle down economics will not solve poverty. But the militant mobilization of pissed-off poor people might.