Homeless? Hungry? It’s All Your Fault : The Gingrich era means class-based politics, ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ in a war on the poor.

Nearly three decades ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty, a strong majority of Americans believed that poverty was neither necessary nor inevitable. Nearly everyone had a program to end poverty.

Now we have discarded the War on Poverty for a war against the poor. We assume--with virtually no public discussion--that the poor and the homeless will always be with us. As the 19th- Century social Darwinist William Graham Sumner put it, survival of the fittest and poverty for the least fit are simply laws of nature. “Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.”

Newt Gingrich and many conservatives in Congress illustrate perfectly this social Darwinism. They announce that able-bodied adults who do not find a job in two years will be cut off from welfare, food stamps and health care. (President Clinton would stop welfare payments only if the recipient refused an available job.) No matter if this would massively increase homelessness (even Dickens’ England had dreadful workhouses for the poor). Poverty is nature’s penalty for laziness, and poverty is always the fault of the individual. Said an exasperated Sumner, the foolish poor “insist on remaining in the slums.”

Most dramatically, the state will take their children. “Ultimately if they cannot support their children,” said Rep. Bill Archer (R-Tex.), “the children will be taken care of through loving families, through foster care and adoption.” Forget foster care and adoption. With 9.5 million children on welfare, we are heading toward the bleak orphanages--eliminated decades ago because they were too expensive--of an earlier time when, as columnist Ellen Goodman points out, “more than half the children in orphanages were not in fact orphans,” but indeed had mothers who could not support them.

Social Darwinism has three key characteristics. First, by twisting Darwin’s writings, social Darwinism poses as “science.” Sumner boasted that his new sociology could discover laws of society just as Newton uncovered the law of gravity. Nowadays experts speak of the “law” of economics and declare a “natural” unemployment rate of 6%; “science” again tells us that poverty is unavoidable.

All this science soothes the conscience. The turn-of-the-century robber baron Andrew Carnegie, who came from a family of union organizers, slept better after social Darwinism told him that both great wealth and great misery were part of God’s design. “Light came in as a flood and all was clear . . . I had found the truth of evolution.”

The second characteristic of social Darwinism is this upper-class bias. Is it any wonder that just about the first thing Gingrich announced after the November elections was his determination to reduce the capital-gains tax?

From 1929 to 1969, economic inequality in this country narrowed, but then widened. “The poorest 10% of American families suffered an 11% drop in real income between 1973 and 1992; the richest 10% enjoyed an 18% increase in real income,” the Economist magazine reported. Welfare payments have been cut 47% in real terms since 1970. In the last 25 years, notes columnist Murray Kempton, “the share of the national income assigned to the middle class has fallen 48.2%, a 9-point drop.” Social Darwinism is merely an ideology masking a cruel class rule.

And finally, behind both the old and new social Darwinism is the element of race. Sumner used his science of society to suggest that racial antagonism was unchangeably rooted in human nature. Gingrich’s “Contract With America” is really a contract of Us against Them. From California’s Proposition 187 to Gingrich’s welfare reform, the message is simple: The real enemies of your individual prosperity are not powerful and wealthy elites, but rather African Americans too lazy to work hard and stubborn Latinos who refuse to learn English.

The same political and intellectual climate that produced the new Republican congressional majority has made a bestseller of the book “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Posing once more as “science” but founded on bogus studies, “The Bell Curve” comforts Americans and erases guilt by telling us that poverty is inevitable. Most important, the book claims that African Americans and Latinos are poor largely because God and nature doomed them to a lower IQ. Like Andrew Carnegie, we can all sleep more restfully, relieved of responsibility.