"Before I went off to grad school, I was working in New York City in soup kitchens, food pantries, and emergency feeding programs in homeless shelters. And I sort of cut my teeth as an advocate and practitioner during the welfare reform debates of the 1990s, and what’s striking to me is how much of the bipartisan consensus then about the causes of poverty and about the nature of poor people themselves is fundamentally different in the discussions that have been taking place around this bill. There’s been, first of all, no talk of deficits, by and large, which is fascinating in itself; no real conversation about work requirements, at least not from Democrats; no concerns about perverse incentives — no “Oh my God, if we give people money, they won’t show up to work!” We heard a little bit of that from the Republicans, but honestly, even that was surprisingly muted.

That’s a repudiation of those ideas, which were never well substantiated in the first place and generated a horrible policy that caused enormous harm, particularly on low-income communities of color. It’s also important to keep in mind that the welfare reform bill came in a very similar political moment as the crime bill, and that Joe Biden himself was one of the proponents of both of those punitive approaches. That way of thinking about the problem did not seem evident to me in recent debates. Now, is that because we are in the midst of a global pandemic and the nature of the emergency has sort of suspended that trajectory, or are we in fact seeing a break from the post-1970s neoliberalism that has been shaping the federal government’s response to need?

In my hopeful moments, I think that, even if we don’t make all of these provisions permanent, something does feel different — and I realize that’s a ridiculous thing for a social scientist to say — but if you look at the nature of the debate now, I don’t think it comes out of nowhere. This is a product of all the people who have been doing enormously essential organizing work since the 1990s and before. It’s also a consequence of the ways in which the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated power in ways that have shifted debate. Bernie Sanders’s two runs for president have also helped move things, as have young, progressive women and women of color doing important work in the House and at the state level."