Currents
September 2018
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have strong attitudes about government that are shaped
by this view. They believe that welfare is unfair, or that
undeserving people are receiving it, and that deserving
people like themselves are not getting anything. They’re
blind to their own relationship to government, and so they
assume welfare is something “other” people get.
Suzanne Mettler: Race is significant, and many other
scholars have discovered this as well. Across the board,
whites had more unfavorable views of welfare than people
of color, in large part because they considered welfare
something that people of color prima-
rily benefit from. I found that income
matters a lot. Every group throughout
the middle class had very unfavor-
able views toward welfare. Even
African Americans, if they were mid-
dle-class, were more resentful of wel-
fare than African Americans who
were low-income or high-income.
There’s the racial bias, and then
there are the views of middle-income
people. The past several decades
have been particularly rough for the
middle class. Productivity is very
high, people are working more hours
than ever, and incomes are stagnant.
Many of these people feel like they’re
trapped between the poor, who
receive lots of benefits, and the rich,
who don’t need any help.
Sean Illing: Can you give me a
sense of how public attitudes toward
the government have evolved over
the last three or four decades? And
how does this break down on the left
and the right?
Suzanne Mettler: There are all
kinds of survey questions that have
been asked in the same way over
time, like from the 1940s or so
onward. It used to be that majorities
of Americans, like over 60 or 70 per-
cent in the 1950s and 1960s, had
very positive responses to questions
about trust in government.
But then it begins to deteriorate
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