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By Margaret Talbot, New Yorker, March 13, 2023

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The sociologist Matthew Desmond identifies specific practices and policies that consign tens of millions to destitution.

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An Australian millionairess wants to pay more tax, and other superwealthy people agree (5 min)

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An Australian millionairess wants to pay more tax, and other superwealthy people agree (5 min)

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It's not often you hear people asking to pay more tax. But that's exactly what hundreds of superwealthy people have been calling for lately. In Austria, one multimillionaire has decided to give away almost all of her inheritance in protest at the Austrian government's failure to tax her. And earlier this month, more than 250 of the self-proclaimed super-rich signed an open letter calling on world leaders to tax them more. The World's Europe correspondent Orla Barry reports

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An Australian millionairess wants to pay more tax, and other superwealthy people agree

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It's not often you hear people asking to pay more tax. But that's exactly what hundreds of superwealthy people have been calling for lately. In Austria, one multimillionaire has decided to give away almost all of her inheritance in protest at the Austrian government's failure to tax her.

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President Joe Biden, Senator Charles Schumer, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others reflect on his career, including the “Moynihan Report” and his efforts to combat national poverty.

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♪♪ ♪♪ -What is a senator?

One percent of one half of one of the three branches of government.

Unless, of course, you're Mr. Moynihan.

♪♪ His life was one of the broadest and deepest public careers in American history.

-Politician, social philosopher, and statesman... Daniel Patrick Moynihan's wide-ranging influence can still be felt today.

-I don't think you get many people in public life who have this kind of unique insight, from highway safety to welfare... -Social and family policy... -The role of the United Nations... -Infrastructure... -Public architecture... -Or Social Security.

-Secrecy in government... -In the last half of the 20th century, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was at the center of America's most urgent political debates.

-Equality and liberty are two different things.

-He served four consecutive presidents and was elected to four terms in the Senate.

It all began with his fight for America's poor.

-Things are not getting better for everybody!

There is a group of Americans for whom things get worse.

-I certainly have memories of when the Moynihan Report exploded into controversy.

-He rose to national celebrity as America's most famous representative to the United Nations.

-One word that's attached to you wherever you go until you're probably sick to death of it is "flamboyant."

"The flamboyant Patrick Moynihan."

-Am I embarrassed to speak for a less-than-perfect democracy?

Not one bit.

Find me a better one.

♪♪ -He was a man shaped by the Depression.

He saw government do an enormous amount of good.

-He was always a liberal who knew that Liberalism thrived only when it could question itself.

-Moynihan hated the notion that government is the problem.

His own rejoinder to that was, "If you have contempt for government, you will get contemptible government."

♪♪ -There's no doubt in my mind that if Pat Moynihan had been airdropped into New England in the 1770s, he would've been one of the most prominent members of our founding fathers.

♪♪ -The great challenges of our time have been challenges of ideas.

♪♪ Politics is an argument about the future.

♪♪ [ Crowd cheering ] [ Fanfare plays ] ♪♪ -When the Kennedy administration swept into office, the New Frontier, and there's this great excitement, the greatest since the New Deal.

Brilliant people are leaving the Ivy League.

They're going to Washington.

-1960 election brought Jack Kennedy to town.

Was supposed to empower the American professoriate.

It was academia's moment.

-And the idea was technocratic problem-solving.

And that was Moynihan's specialty.

♪♪ -Moynihan at the time was teaching social policy at Syracuse University.

He had worked for New York Governor Averell Harriman and was yearning to get back into politics.

When Kennedy came along, it was, I would imagine, love at first sight.

Kennedy was an intellectual.

He went to Harvard.

He was a war hero.

He was Irish.

-I went into the Labor Department as an assistant to that great man Arthur Goldberg.

-It's not entirely plain what his role was except, I think, that Arthur Goldberg enjoyed having a clever young man tossing out ideas.

He had this extraordinary ability, amounting almost to genius, for seeing the broader implications in what other people would regard as banal facts.

For example, he got a rather casual interest in the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Avenue, and he extrapolated that into a brilliant piece of writing about what should be the principles of federal architecture, which is still used by the government of the United States to this day.

-Solemnity gives way to celebration as the traditional Inaugural Parade... -These were seen as wonderful times economically in the United States.

-...birth of a new generation of Americans.

-Poverty had not really been an issue since the 1930s.

-People forget that the great inaugural speech that Kennedy made, there was no mention of any domestic issues.

♪♪ -And then in '63, things began to change.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -You had a Civil Rights Movement that would not rest, that was looking for equality for African-Americans now.

And intertwined with the Civil Rights Movement was seeing that there was a poverty problem.

♪♪ -Michael Harrington.

Author and expert on poverty.

-One of the most terrible things about poor people is that they are people who are literally without hope.

And when you stick them off in a corner of the society, where most of the people don't even know they exist anymore, they feel, rightly, that they're left out, that nobody cares, that there's no place for them.

-Kennedy certainly read "The Other America" by Michael Harrington.

And the administration was moving towards seeing poverty as an important political issue in a very cautious way.

[ Applause ] When Lyndon Johnson came in, he's, "We're going to do this nationally and we're going to do it big."

-And this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

[ Applause ] -Moynihan was one of the people -- Moynihan, being an Assistant Secretary of Labor in early '64, was one of the people who helped Johnson design what became known as the War on Poverty.

-It was ultimately headed by Sargent Shriver.

-[Chuckling] I remember...

There was one week when they were really trying to draw up what it would be.

And every -- They all were working in other places and, at 5:00, would show up at our house.

[ Laughs ] And it was Adam Yarmolinsky -- came from Defense Department.

Frank Mankiewicz.

Pat's friend Mike Harrington, who'd written the book on poverty.

And Pat.

And the War on Poverty was planned over spaghetti dinners at the Moynihans'.

[ Laughs ] -For the first time in our history, an America without hunger is a practical prospect.

-We're only at the beginning of the road to the Great Society.

♪♪ -I've been unemployed now since 1962.

I need a job.

-I've been out of work over four years.

I'll go down and try to get work and can't get no work.

-Moynihan, as early as early 1964, is writing memoranda about the need to do something special for poor Black people, as opposed to all poor people.

-I felt that the great crises having to do with the protection of the liberties of Negro Americans in the South were probably coming to an end.

It seemed to me that we would now turn to the problems of the Northern ghettos, the Northern slums, where just passing a law wasn't going to change things, where problems were much more difficult.

-Moynihan's interest in urban Black poverty was triggered, in part, by a study he had led a year earlier.

Eager to boost its ranks during the Cold War, the military was concerned that too many men were failing their exams.

What Moynihan found was that many of them came from single-parent homes, and a disproportionate number were impoverished Black men.

-Moynihan sat down to write his report on the Black family, which was titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," on January 1st, or thereabouts, 1965... and, with the help of Paul Barton, a chief aide, finished it in the remarkably quick time of little more than three months.

-That report began, "The United States is facing a new crisis in race relations."

♪♪ -Teenage unemployment in the Negro world today is almost 25%.

That is a social crime!

That's an outrage!

-He was one of the first scholars to integrate structural analysis, for example, the problems of urbanization, joblessness, Jim Crow segregation, and so on, and their effects on the Black population... and cultural analysis.

That is, the way Blacks respond to chronic, racial, and economic subordination.

And sometimes the response is problematic.

-The very start of the second chapter says, "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family."

-Moynihan immersed himself in a raft of statistics that convinced him impoverished Black families were under enormous stress, their children deeply affected.

By 1960, nearly 24% of these families were headed by single parents.

This was some 8 times greater than the rate for white families.

-How'd you learn how to behave?

From your father and your mother and the people around you.

Well, supposing there is no father, where children are just brought up without that support which a family gives it.

Then what do you end up with?

You end up with the cycle reproducing itself.

-That report was intended for one person -- president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

-Moynihan writes a memo to President Johnson, appealing to him to understand.

"You were born poor, yet you came of age full of ambition, energy, and ability because your mother and father gave it to you.

The richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life."

And he's trying to get Johnson to understand this culture of poverty and racism that was assaulting the poor Negro family.

♪♪ -The insight that he had was that we have to go beyond civil-rights legislation to address the cumulative effects of chronic, racial, and economic subordination.

And what he was saying was that we need to move beyond issues of liberty and address issues of equality.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Applause ] And Johnson incorporates that thought into one of the most important addresses any president has ever given.

[ Applause ] -But freedom is not enough.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

-This is the core of the liberal anthem that LBJ stood for.

[ Applause ] -I remember listening very carefully to President Johnson's speech at Howard University in 1965.

And I said, you know, "This...

This resonates with me."

[ Applause ] And it was based on the Moynihan Report.

So it's unfortunate that it turned out to be so controversial down the road.

♪♪ -Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been a public figure for so long as a writer and an advisor to Presidents and ambassador to the U.N.

Senator Moynihan, if I could get just a touch of personal color, I always thought, as far back as I first saw your picture, that you were what they call I believe "to the manner born."

I would have thought of you silver spoon in the mouth, so on, finest schools, yachting as a boy, and so on.

And I was startled when I learned that you had quite a different background.

You grew up in Hell's Kitchen, in Harlem.

You went to City College.

You've been a stevedore.

You've ridden the rails, I believe, and you had.. -Well, it was a single-parent family.

Three kids.

He was the oldest.

-His father abandoned the family.

He was growing up in the 1930s when most families were intact, when divorce or desertion was uncommon.

-As he once said to me, it's not as though he walked out the door one day to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

He left over time.

So it took a year or two until it was clear he was never going to come back.

♪♪ -Pat was poor, but it was because his family was divorced and his father lost his job.

It wasn't because -- And drank.

His parents drank.

It wasn't because they'd never made it out of that immigrant status.

-If you do start in a middle-class family and lose that, in this case because of marital breakdown, it's probably more scary than, for example, if your parents are hard-rock miners and don't know anything but that.

-His mother was a nurse, and she was having a hard time financially, and she married a new man, and it produced a new baby.

And so they moved from the city, somewhere in the city, to Kitchawan.

Pat was definitely a city boy, interested in things citified.

He read the newspapers, and kids in eighth grade there didn't read the newspapers.

He spoke about things that I didn't know about and didn't give a damn about -- John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther and the coal miners and the auto workers.

When you saw him in class, he'd sit in one of these little wooden chairs, and his arms would flail out, his legs would spread out, and he looked like Ichabod Crane.

He was...different.

♪♪ -I don't know why these two brothers were so different in their response to the father leaving.

Michael all his life talked about missing a father, not having had a father.

But Pat didn't.

And, in fact, Michael would occasionally say to Pat, "You know, you're -- you're not the father I need."

♪♪ -After two years, Moynihan's mother was a single parent once again and moved the family back to New York City.

♪♪ -It was a little grungy apartment in Astoria.

I do know that it seemed to be a wretched family situation.

-He was always afraid of poverty for himself.

Certainly his friends thought, in later years, that he worried too much about losing jobs.

Underneath his tremendous charm, energy, ebullience, there was also a little grain of fear, I think.

Not physical fear.

He was not a coward.

I don't mean that.

He was just afraid of the abyss.

-This is Dad and President Johnson, who nev-- Ken Galbraith told me that Johnson didn't like or trust Moynihan 'cause he was a Northeast liberal, a Kennedy man.

-Time was getting at hand to get out of Washington, so I decided to take a two-dollar bet and run for president of the city council.

-♪ He's our man, hallelujah ♪ -Kennedy appointees had a difficult time leaving the Johnson administration.

-♪ Moynihan, hallelujah ♪ -But if you left to run for office, it was okay.

When the primary was over and we had lost, I explained to my children that we were celebrating because the only thing worse than losing would have been winning.

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ -On July 19, 1965, The New York Times announced what would be Moynihan's unsuccessful candidacy for City Council.

That same day, a second article reported an anonymous internal government study on the state of the Negro family.

-The report leaked in the summer of 1965.

The timing is very important here because what happens also in the summer of 1965 is the awful Watts riot.

[ Indistinct shouting ] [ Sirens wailing ] -Absolutely incredible scene, with gun battle in the middle of Broadway... [ Gunshots ] 34 persons were killed, all but 5 of them Negros, in the middle of the nation's third-largest city.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -And people were trying to come up with an explanation of, "Why did they riot?"

-As the smoke lifted above Watts and the shooting died down, the soul searching and blame shifting began.

♪♪ -Various columns appeared, including one by Evans and Novak, who were famous columnists in those days.

That was titled "The Moynihan Report."

And that's probably the first time that it really became known that way.

♪♪ -And then people started associating the Watts riot with the Black family.

"This is a cause of the Watts riot.

The deterioration of the family has helped to trigger these riots."

-If you're, say, in the activist community and you're an African-American, well, the first lens that you have on the Moynihan Report is from Mary McGrory or, you know, it's from Evans and Novak.

That's the lens through which you read this report.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It came from a white intellectual, at what could not have been conceived as anything but poor timing because it overrode what certainly the African-American leadership and community believed needed to be exercised.

"Alright, government, for 150 years, you've done nothing!

No legislation against job discrimination.

No legislation giving people the right to vote.

The poll tax still out there.

if you were a white man in Mississippi, you could go to work in a laboring job and become middle-class.

If you were a Black man that had the same non-skills, you couldn't get a job at all.

What are you going to do about that?

You talking about my family?!"

If anything, the Black family, along with the Black Church, is all that kept the Black community whole.

-This is Len Brooks inviting you to...Meet the Press.

Our guest today is the author of the controversial study "The Negro Family," Mr. Daniel P. Moynihan.

-Pat was blindsided by the reaction of the left to what he was saying.

-What's your explanation for the fact that it's being criticized for fostering a new racism?

-I think there may have been a misunderstanding.

I was trying to show that unemployment statistics, which are so dull, and you've read so many of them, and you don't know what they mean, they're hard to believe -- That unemployment nonetheless ended up with orphaned children, with abandoned mothers, with men living furtive lives without even an address.

That unemployment had flesh and blood and it could bleed.

-One of the reasons why the Moynihan Report ended up blowing up in Moynihan's face is the document was never meant for public perusal.

It is written in a very bombastic way.

It was written to get the attention of politicians.

-Unless you took the time -- and who does -- to look into what Moynihan himself said were the causes, you would have taken up this view that these people just have to get their families together, and everything will be fine.

♪♪ And that was what many in the Black community believed they had to rebut.

-They intend to build within Black people the realization that that problem is not theirs, that it's created by White society.

It's purposely created by White society, and then they throw it back on us and blame us.

-And a book came out by William Ryan called "Blaming the Victim."

-...by William Ryan, a Harvard psychologist, who criticizes your report.

"The implicit point is that Negroes tolerate promiscuity, illegitimacy, and everything else that is supposed to follow."

Now, how do you answer those charges?

-I'm not responsible for the fact that he can't read.

The point about the family is that it's a good place to see the results of unemployment, the results of discrimination, the results of bad housing and poor education.

And you can't do anything about a family life if men don't have jobs, if school children don't have good schools, if people live in ghettos.

-There's a very ironical development in all of this, you know, because, um, up until the Moynihan Report, almost all writings on the problems that Black Americans face emphasize not just racism, but the fact that the years of oppression, of slavery, of Jim Crow had distorted aspects of Black life.

-Remember just one thing if I may say -- that my report basically simply develops the work of the great American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, whose book on the Negro family, published in 1939, in an uncanny way, predicted that this would happen.

-The racial confrontation in America... -Kenneth Clark, Bayard Rustin, a lot of Black leaders endorsed the report and felt that Moynihan was unjustly criticized.

-Martin Luther King called him.

And Pat never used to take -- He never answered the phone.

I answered the phone.

So I actually would often listen.

And Martin Luther King was calling him about the report and said that Pat had analyzed it very well and there's much in it that he agreed with.

And he said, "I hope you understand why I can't publicly support you."

Because he himself was under attack from the young Black radicals.

♪♪ -Johnson became very angry with Moynihan once the report became known.

Here's a president who'd done more for civil rights than any other president.

Various Black leaders said it then, with two civil-rights acts, and they're dumping on his administration through Moynihan.

♪♪ And Moynihan really started feeling very sorry for himself.

-I do think that he was hurt personally by the way in which the Moynihan Report was received.

♪♪ -My wife and I bought an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, and we were very proud of it, and we invited the Moynihans for dinner.

And as they were coming in the door Senator Moynihan said to Liz, "I broke into this building once."

And Liz was -- Liz was as surprised as could be because he never talked about that part of his life.

He said, "During the Depression, these buildings along West End Avenue were boarded up.

And so after school, I would get enough money to eat and then break into one or another of these buildings to sleep and then get up the next day and go to school."

♪♪ -He didn't talk very much about his youth.

In fact, he didn't talk at all about his youth.

He had to say some things because soon he was a politician and he was asked things.

And he had a few set lines about, um -- about shining shoes on 42nd Street... -You shined shoes just down the street a ways, huh?

-Used to shine shoes at 42nd.

I was raised on -- Not "raised" because in those days -- No one can remember this in Manhattan, with rent control, anymore.

In those days, everybody moved on the first of October, because you got one month's rent free.

-Although he had this erudite, almost patrician persona, he loved his working-class identity.

-I graduated then went straight to work on the piers, on the North River piers.

-I mean, that was authentic about him, but there was a little bit of the "I grew up in a log cabin" kind of thing that a lot of politicians do.

-A friend of mine just showed up over at Pier 48 at the end of the day, and he said, "You know, they're giving exams for City College.

Why don't we go up and take them?

I'm going to go up.

Do you want to come with me?"

-City College in New York was free and explicitly designed for poor, bright students like Pat Moynihan.

He studied in the evenings and continued to work on the docks during the day to support himself.

-He was a big fan of Thomas Wolfe.

"Look Homeward, Angel."

And he said that the foreman on the docks told him, "Okay, guys, take five.

We got to switch the cars."

So he took his copy of Wolfe, crawled up on top of the railcar, started reading, and promptly fell asleep.

And he said he was rudely awakened by the stevedore from a "benign slumber."

One of his favorite words was "benign."

And he was fired.

[ Laughs ] -As World War II was drawing to a close, the 17-year-old Moynihan volunteered for the navy.

Testing into an officer's training program, he was sent to Middlebury College in Vermont and then, with the war's end, to Tufts University, where he eventually earned a doctorate.

For Moynihan, it was an entrée into a new world.

♪♪ -I think one of the things that -- that he liked about me was that I was -- had the sort of life that he wished he'd had.

You know, I had a secure, loving family.

I was a totally separate relationship to this home life that he -- I don't know whether he was embarrassed or ashamed.

He -- He...

But he...

It's not something he talked about.

But at that part of our life, we were ready for anything.

If a door opened, we walked through it.

The Navy was a way to get a free education.

Those were doors that opened.

And I think the open doors for Pat were intellectual, ideas.

-At one point, when Pat was in his second year at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, at his mother's bar, somehow -- somebody got stabbed, and the bar was deserted.

So Pat left Fletcher for two months, went down to the bar, ran the bar, and then returned to Fletcher and graduated valedictorian.

Extraordinary ability.

-His mother lived above the bar, and I remember one time that we spent the night on the floor.

And she said to me something like, "I'm so sorry that a boy like you is a friend of Pat's"... ...the point being that he was bad news.

She was sorry for me, that I had gotten involved with Pat.

-If you read his diaries in the early 1950s, he was going through psychotherapy at the time, so the diary reveals his deeply emotional, mixed feelings about his father, whom he actually loved and had wonderful memories and tender memories of.

And yet, because the father abandoned the family, he seemed to have felt obligated to hate his father.

-The boys were brought up that their father was a very bad man who had fallen apart.

Actually, when Pat's brother Mike went out to find him in California, they found a guy who was the editor of the Sunday edition of a major newspaper who had married again, with several children.

-But Pat, you know, never...

Didn't attempt to be in touch with him.

-You know, Liz Moynihan was also abandoned by her father.

If you read Russell Baker's memoir, there were men who just, as he put it, "disappeared into the Depression."

♪♪ -But a government cared about the high school I went to, cared about a free college, the first in history, the City College of New York.

Went to universities, colleges, great places.

Four advanced degrees.

I never saw a tuition bill in my life.

And something I realize -- how different that experience is from those of most young people today.

I'm a generation which I don't think will be reproduced now for a while, which is deeply respectful of American government and owes -- owes so much to it.

-One reason Moynihan is so interesting is because he inhabited two worlds at once.

He inhabited the world of practical politics.

He also inhabited the world of the liberal intellectual.

And in his day, the people who wrote for small magazines, for little journals, which had an influence we almost can't imagine today -- a publication like Commentary or The Public Interest, which Moynihan really helped create -- had tremendous intellectual cachet.

That's where the ideas would begin and then reverberate through the society.

♪♪ -Moynihan's public writing, like his government work, often used data to reframe issues in novel ways.

His article for The Reporter magazine in 1959, "Epidemic on the Highways," was a classic example.

It drew on epidemiological studies to show that traffic fatalities were not the result of human error but poor car design.

-A lot of people read it and were very impressed, and it was almost, like, the beginning of the effort to raise levels of safety in automobiles in the United States.

♪♪ -I first met Pat in 1961 when I called him up and told him I'd like him to write for Commentary, and he said he'd be delighted.

-At that time, I'd become involved in a project on ethnic groups of New York City.

I wanted to find someone who both had some intellectual sophistication, but also had direct experience and involvement.

Irving Kristol, who was editing The Reporter magazine, said, "You should talk to Pat Moynihan," and so we met.

-Irresistible.

And he always was.

The charm.

The wit.

Always a lot of fun.

-We'd have these long walks in New York, and we'd -- [ Laughs ] observe the buildings and sometimes step into a bar and so on.

And he always drank much more than I did, but it didn't seem to affect him in any way.

And eventually Pat wrote a wonderful essay on the Irish in New York and America.

-When it was published in 1963, Glazer and Moynihan's book, "Beyond the Melting Pot," transformed how ethnicity was viewed.

It challenged the notion of an homogenized America and instead presented a country of jostling ethnic groups.

-There had been this idea that we'd all come over here, we were all different.

We'd go into a melting pot, which is... -Israel Zangwill.

-Israel Zangwill.

-The play.

"The Melting Pot."

-Right!

But that was our creed and our hope.

What we looked at was a city in which that hadn't happened at all.

And if wasn't going to be there in New York, it wasn't going to be there anywhere.

-Pat Moynihan was very proud and really claimed, I think with some justification, that he was present at the creation of this whole idea of studying ethnicity as a serious academic subject.

♪♪ -I remember I was raised on 42nd Street and taught to think that all the people that lived on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue were somehow...animals and against us enlightened people who lived on 42nd Street and 11th Avenue.

We're a pretty mixed up population, always have been, and are always going to have some of the tensions that come with this.

That's one of the things that makes life interesting in the city.

♪♪ [ Siren wailing ] ♪♪ -1967 was the third summer of the burning and looting of the Black ghettos.

This was Newark in July.

-Mounting violence, lawlessness, and disorder that is taking place in our cities across the country has created the most serious domestic crisis since the end of the Civil War.

♪♪ -Two years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, now director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard and MIT, wrote a report that foreshadowed some of the events that have so shocked us these last summers.

The report began, "The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations."

-Somehow the Negro world itself has been pulling apart.

On the one hand, a working class, middle class... -Moynihan, now out of government, used his new position at Harvard to analyze social policy and to focus public attention on the causes and problems of Black poverty.

♪♪ -I was a freshman at Harvard in '67, and Pat Moynihan's course was well-known because he was a brilliant man, but he had practical experience.

-I wonder if you'd give us what your ideas or thoughts are as to why we're facing these kinds of problems.

-Gunnar Myrdal described it a couple years ago.

He said, "The United States is building up an underclass."

-He was a bridge between academic thought and government.

And there were very few bridges that were as strong, as durable, and had as much a foot in each camp as he did.

The course was vintage Pat Moynihan.

It led with policy.

-Policy like the War on Poverty.

By the time it was finally enacted, President Johnson had chosen to focus on education and empowerment rather than on jobs or money.

-This is a community beginning to act.

-The irony of Pat Moynihan is that he's pushing for equality of results and for poverty programs, but at the same time as these programs are being developed, he becomes very skeptical of them.

-New York's poor are demanding a voice in decisions that affect their lives.

-To him, the War on Poverty was creating a costly bureaucracy to engage in social engineering instead of giving the money directly to the poor who needed it.

-...majority in the House Appropriations Committee, sir.

-What Moynihan really wanted was a large-scale jobs program along the lines of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration, the WPA.

He was a big fan of Franklin Roosevelt.

Johnson didn't want to do that.

He didn't want to spend a lot of money on jobs.

Government jobs programs are expensive.

-I think the United States government can become the employer of last resort, so that, in effect, anyone seeking work, not finding it after a point, a job is found for him, period!

-Moynihan's idea was to prepare people to work and put them to work so that they would have jobs with which they would be able to sustain their position in the family.

-One of Pat's great lines was, "We can do more for the Black family by doubling the delivery of mail than any other way."

[ Laughs ] What he meant was, we could create 50,000 jobs for men if we just had two deliveries a day.

-...feel this country reaching a general consensus... -The advocacy for unequal, preferential treatment.

The advocacy for a minimum level of income for the family.

The advocacy for a big jobs program.

The kind of solutions Moynihan advocated for are -- I would say even in the time were radical and are very, very radical now.

-By the mid-'60s and certainly by the late '60s, there was crushing disappointment.

The riots in the cities.

And there was the disappointments of the War on Poverty.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Johnson saw his hopes for a great society overwhelmed by the pain and anger in the country over the escalating war in Vietnam.

[ Indistinct chanting ] -By 1965, we had 184,000 troops in Vietnam.

And by the end of 1966, we had around 400,000.

-And the cost of maintaining and perpetuating that war was overriding almost all other expenditures.

It was very hard for Moynihan to accept that.

-We have been saying we're going to get rid of these problems.

We have been saying we're going to have full employment, we're going to have good housing, we're going to have equal opportunity.

And it never happens.

[ Radio chatter ] -Hey, hey, LBJ!

How many kids did you kill today?!

-We speak of the violence of poor Blacks.

Now there is the violence of affluent Whites.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -So all of these things send liberalism crashing to the ground.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -My friends, let me make one thing clear.

This is a nation of laws.

And as Abraham Lincoln has said, "No one is above the law, no one is below the law, and we're going to enforce the law."

And Americans should remember that if we're going to have law and order.

[ Cheers and applause ] -I think there is a mood of people saying, "We've given you all we can.

We're not going to give you any more.

We're sick of it."

And talking about "law and order."

Alright.

Law and order.

We know that.

But you can have law and order in a penal camp.

You haven't achieved much.

-I remember picking up and sending the Moynihan Report in to a candidate for president named Nixon, who was in the middle of his comeback.

And he came back, interestingly enough, with, "This guy Moynihan."

[ Laughter ] "You suppose we can get him to talk to us?"

And I said, "He's a Democrat, He's a professor.

Worked in the Kennedy administration."

And Nixon said, "Well, that's three strikes, but maybe..." [ Laughter ] And the word went out.

♪♪ -Someone came up from the president-elect's transition office and said that the president would like to meet him.

Would he come down?

Nixon told him that he himself was an expert on foreign policy and that he knew what he wanted to do.

He said, "One word.

China."

But he did not know about domestic policy.

-Ladies and gentlemen, I have another major announcement with regard to the White House staff.

-When he came back and he told me that Nixon had asked him to be his Domestic Advisor and that he accepted, I was enraged, I have to tell you.

I was just devastated, but furious.

[ Laughs ] -When he went into the Nixon administration, against the advice of his wife and friends -- Nixon was the devil.

Going to work for Nixon was a disgrace.

-Presidents don't need advisors who agree with them about everything.

They agree with you, then you've got one man on the payroll you don't need.

-He had no stake in Nixon.

He had a stake, as he felt it, in the presidency.

-You can come home every weekend.

You can commute.

We're not going to move.

-His Urban Affairs advisor, Daniel Moynihan, told how the new administration hopes to attack urban problems.

-As Moynihan said to me in my interview for the job with him, he said, "John, I want you to work with me on everything I'm doing."

And he said, "That is domestic policy.

That is urban policy.

And that is, therefore, policy about the Black community."

-Now, having an urban policy is no more a guarantor of success with cities than having a foreign policy is a guarantor of success in, say, world peace.

But it's a condition of success.

I mean, you have to start... -Moynihan's portfolio was the newly created Council on Urban Affairs.

But its chairman was the president himself, making the council the powerful center for all domestic policy in the Nixon administration.

♪♪ -Pat was like a Roman candle going up.

The sparks were in the sky all over the place.

You'd go into a meeting with him, and you really wouldn't know what was on his mind.

He could be all over the line.

-Pat was a ginger man in some ways.

He was a yeasty, idea-creating person.

For example, he brought in Bruno Bettelheim, who had written of children in the kibbutz in Israel and about the importance of early child development, and, forthwith, Nixon created the first office of Early Child Development in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

And whom did Pat put in charge of it?

James Farmer, the head of CORE.

♪♪ -Pat Moynihan wrote probably the first memo about global warming in the American government, written in 1969.

And that is part of how the Nixon presidency became so active on the environment.

-He would be in agriculture under food problems, hunger problems.

He could be in the Department of Commerce under giving jobs to minorities.

He loved the diversity of the job that he was given.

-President Nixon has proposed a comprehensive anti-hunger package designed to make sure all Americans get enough to eat.

His statement was read by Patrick Moynihan.

-The moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself.

It is a moment to act with vigor.

It is a moment to be recalled with pride.

-We were in the basement of the West Wing.

Right above us, on the first floor, was the president, the Oval Office.

Then you went down one flight, and there was not only Pat Moynihan and his staff.

There was also the Situation Room, Henry Kissinger and his staff.

So you go down one flight, and you're in the territory of these former Harvard professors.

-They were in a kind of implicit competition.

Kissinger thought he had the more important position as National Security Advisor.

At the beginning, certainly, the role that Pat was playing as Chief Domestic Advisor had the spotlight.

And I don't think Henry was very happy about that.

-It's an interesting thing with Richard Nixon.

He had these sort of love affairs with a person, where suddenly there's some person who is special -- "Some person who has something useful and helpful to me."

And it happened with Pat Moynihan at exactly the right time -- like, Easter 1969.

When everything was coming together, the one that Richard Nixon wanted to have around him, quietly, alone, was Pat Moynihan.

-It's a very interesting question about the relationship with the president on substance.

Because it is a combination of Pat being a very adept courtier, on the one hand, frankly, which he did with color and verve and anecdotes and historical records, but, on the other hand, really trying to get the president to think large and to see himself in a very big historical context.

The Blake biography of Benjamin Disraeli, which Pat drew to the president's attention, was a case in point.

I mean, Pat was trying to show how Disraeli, as a conservative, had taken the Tory party and moved it into deep concern for the poor and the lower middle classes and to show, by implication at least, that Nixon could do just the same thing for the Republican party.

-His eyes still on the impoverished Black family, Moynihan seized on the issue of welfare.

[ Telephone rings ] Its rolls had doubled in the '60s and become the object of Republican scorn.

Major reform of the program, he believed, was an idea that might capture Richard Nixon's imagination.

♪♪ -Whatever else you think about Nixon, he came from a hardscrabble background, as did Pat Moynihan.

And they found common cause.

There was an instinctual level.

It was like Moynihan would hit a tuning fork with Richard Nixon talking about some of these issues of poverty and difficulty of making your way.

♪♪ -Nixon wrote about what it had been like as a boy -- poor boy, but not as poor -- his father had a little store in Whittier, California -- as the other kids who came into the store whose parents were on welfare, who he felt were scarred for life.

He wasn't scarred for life because he had parents who were an intact family.

-The problem of welfare is the problem of dependency.

It is different from poverty.

Poverty is a condition which, historically and into our time, is never enviable but is often associated with very fine personal qualities.

Dependent persons which are -- who are brave, who are resourceful, who are courageous -- are nonetheless never envied.

The buried image of the word "dependent."

People who are poor stand on their own feet.

People who are dependent hang.

-Welfare, known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, had been designed to help widows with children during the Depression.

Over time, it had evolved into a national poverty program but remained targeted at single mothers.

-You know, if there's a male in the house, the women and the kids don't get a penny, you know, if the male's not working.

That was the way AFDC worked.

So Pat and Nixon wanted to fix it.

-Moynihan proposed to Nixon a program that would completely remake American social policy towards the poor.

The Family Assistance Plan, in Moynihan's eyes, would remove the stigma of welfare by giving support to all struggling families in America, whether the parents were working or not.

[ Fanfare plays ] -The reason that Senator Moynihan liked it was because Social Security had worked so well.

-The new government plan for old-age security.

-And the way Social Security works is the government sends people a check.

It doesn't send people an administrator to tell them how to run their home.

It doesn't interfere in their lives in any way.

People weren't telling you what to do or how to spend the money, but they were -- He thought that the difference between the rich and poor was that the rich had money and the poor didn't.

-You know, Bill, what we're trying to do here is more important I think perhaps than just the substance of the program.

We're trying to bring government back a little closer to what it is it can be said it knows how to do.

-Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

-One of the great, heartbreaking experiences of the 1960s was to see government try to do so many things, and good things, only somehow to fail because, in fact, no one knows how to do those things.

That old 19th-century saying that it's not ignorance that hurts so much as knowing all those things that ain't so."

-Getting the president to support what was basically a negative income tax, which he campaigned against.

What a turnover, to go before the American people and say, "Welfare has failed.

And, by the way, I'm proposing something that's going to cost more money!"

-That is why tonight I therefore propose that we abolish the present welfare system and that we adopt in its place a new Family Assistance system.

What I am proposing is that the federal government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that can not care for itself.

-Our guest today on "Meet the Press" is the assistant to the president for urban affairs, Daniel P. Moynihan.

-Why is it necessary to get so many more people onto the public assistance rolls in order to move people off?

-Mr. Oberdorfer, it is necessary to provide them Family Assistance payments because they are poor, because they do not now have the income that is needed to maintain a decent standard of life.

The president's proposal will triple the number of children receiving assistance.

But this is not welfare.

Most of those children will be in families with fathers who get up in the morning and go off and work a long, hard day and a long, hard week and it just doesn't bring back enough money.

-The response to the Family Assistance Program is quite remarkable.

Michael Harrington, a leading socialist writer on urban affairs in the United States, calls it the most radical program since the New Deal.

-John Gardner, the head of the Urban Coalition, said it was "an historic step."

It'll abolish two-thirds of the poverty in this country in one step.

-The White House staff realized it would be a hard slog in the Senate.

-There were certainly liberals, liberal Democrats mostly, who were unhappy because it seemed to be so little money.

-Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

-You've got to realize the sickness that's happening in this country while the man is talking about giving a welfare family $1,600 -- This is about as bad as it is in Mississippi.

-Some of them used the acronym F.A.P.

as meaning "...America's Poor."

-California's governor, Ronald Reagan, told the Senate Finance Committee he still opposes the administration's proposal for a guaranteed yearly income.

-The president and I share completely the belief in the need for welfare reform and in the belief that something must be done to induce more people to work.

I didn't believe that the Family Assistance portion of that plan did this.

-Chairman Russell Long and committee conservatives hope to kill the bill.

-The chairman of the finance committee, Russell Long, Democrat from Louisiana, certainly didn't like a program that somehow was more advantageous to Blacks than to whites.

In fact, more money went to whites just because there were more whites, but as a percentage, he was right.

-So you had pressure from below for more, and you had pressure from above for less.

-President Nixon reluctantly now is willing to compromise on his welfare reform plan.

He is in fact now pleading for a compromise.

My dear lady, it is five minutes to midnight.

We have taken this great piece of legislation through the House.

Now the president knows that if this bill is reported to the floor of the Senate, it will be overwhelmingly enacted.

And to fail now would be to fail the nation and to fail the poor of the nation.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -Nixon himself was still saying, "You know, don't worry about the little stuff.

You're gonna get kicked in the shins all the time about this and that and the other thing."

He said, "The really important things are the big things, like Family Assistance, which we will get."

And he said, "Pat Moynihan will be able to hold his head up for the rest of his life."

-Good evening.

The Senate today shelved welfare reform for perhaps five to eight years.

Instead, as anticipated, it voted to continue the present system.

-It failed in the Senate by one vote.

Nixon could have gotten the vote from a Republican.

Lyndon Johnson, if it were a comparable situation and he was going to the Senate, boy, he would've squeezed a senator till he got the vote.

-There was agreement today that this is the end of the road for welfare reform and vigorous disagreement on who's at fault.

-The Family Assistance Plan ultimately died in Congress.

But Moynihan's conservative rivals in the White House had been maneuvering to kill it almost from the beginning.

-As you may have noticed, there has been a small brouhaha lately over a secret memorandum to the president that suddenly appeared in all the public print.

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the president's White House staff sent Mr. Nixon a private memorandum on race relations, but somehow it became public.

-The publication of that memo has caused a furor at the White House, as ABC's... -The memo was one of these beginning-of-the-year situations -- "This is where we are.

"This is where we should be this year."

The state of the African-Americans is really improving, but it has a long way to go.

And it would be best if the rhetoric of race was quieted so that the flow was in the right direction.

But he used the word -- Pat always had a flair that could get him in trouble.

And this time it really got him in trouble.

He used the word... -The time may have come when the issue of race could use a period of benign neglect.

-...which came out of some parliamentary document having to do with Canada.

Where Pat got it, I don't know.

But it was there, and Pat got it.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -A group of civil rights leaders charge that Daniel Patrick Moynihan's suggested policy of "benign neglect" toward Negroes was symptomatic of Nixon administration efforts to wipe out two decades of civil rights gains.

-Had I made any suggestion of that kind, I would imagine I'd react about the way this group reacted.

But I didn't make any suggestion of the kind whatever.

-Concerned by increasing racial tensions in the country, Moynihan had written his memo in part to criticize the incendiary language of Black radicals that he believed was deepening the problem.

-...and you run into one of the cops, be he white honky or be he Black honky.

Brother, they are out to kill you.

America is practicing genocide against Black people.

-But he was equally frustrated with the Nixon administration's stoking of racial animosity, its use of the so-called "Southern strategy" to appeal to whites who had fled the Democratic Party in the wake of Johnson's civil rights legislation.

[ Music continues ] -It was Pat really pushing against the malign attention that Blacks were getting from Nixon and Spiro Agnew and all the other Republicans who were developing and fomenting the Southern strategy, which was, at bottom, a racist strategy.

-Now, I threw down the gauntlet to you.

I repudiate white racists.

Do you repudiate Black racists?

Are you willing to repudiate the Carmichaels and the Browns -- -We have already done so.

-Answer me.

Answer me.

Do you repudiate Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael?

-We -- -Do you?!

-We don't repudiate them as human beings.

-We repudiate -- -That's what I was afraid of.

-Wait just a minute.

I don't repudiate you.

-Pat's enemies, if such there were, used that memo to discredit him and his liberal initiatives, most importantly, the Family Assistance Plan.

Its passage was going to depend on the Northern liberal votes in the Senate and the House, and the leaking of the memo undermined Pat among liberal elements of the Democratic delegation.

It hurt a lot.

-Howard K. Smith knows what I was saying.

Dave Brinkley knows what I was saying.

You know what I was saying.

Right?

-As you've been described as a leading -- -Look me in the eye, Ed Morgan.

You know what I was saying.

-Yes.

My answer is yes.

-I am told by reliable sources that the net result will be politically damaging.

Moynihan, known as the administration's champion of equal opportunities, now expects to become the target of bitter protest by Negro groups.

Bill Gill, ABC News, the White House.

[ Music continues ] -I don't find that memo to be problematic.

I think what he wanted was a cooling down of the rhetoric.

I think it became interpreted as "Do nothing for Black people."

I don't think, you know, that was what he was necessarily advocating for from a policy perspective.

I think much worse is some of the other memos... where he asserts that the Black middle class is in fact using the Black poor to extort things from White America.

That is incredibly dan-- He's playing with fire right there.

You are running right down the middle of mainstream racism.

That's hard to reconcile except to look at his anger, except to look at his rage.

-The Nixon presidency -- It's hard for people who didn't live through it.

It was such an emotionally charged, divisive period of history.

[ Crowd shouting ] -Civil unrest and angry protests over the continuing war in Vietnam plagued Nixon's presidency.

And Moynihan, while a critic of the war, was deeply disturbed by the growing chaos and violence.

-Pat was spending most of the time in Washington, and Liz and the children were on Francis Street in Cambridge.

-On the Harvard campus, one day after students took over and occupied an administration building, the police were called in, swinging clubs, hauling students out of the building... -A group of radicals at Harvard were calling for Pat's house to be trashed on the grounds that he was a racist as witnessed the Moynihan Report.

-After the police raid, SDS members and sympathizers... -The Secret Service had to get involved to protect their house.

So it was a scary time, and he was furious about this.

[ Crowd cheering ] -It seemed to Moynihan that these were the children of the elite and the privileged and there was disrespect for the institution but also for -- the phrase then used -- Middle America.

Hatred of the police, hatred of the military, of people who actually went and fought the wars.

Moynihan was very distressed by that.

-I remember once walking with him through Harvard Yard, and he said, "We are in this place, but not of it."

-He had a rather literal, almost kind of adolescent, way.

There was a sense of honor.

I can remember the Navy monument -- It's just next to their apartment in Washington.

And he used, literally, to stand on a balcony going at attention, saluting when they played the Navy hymn, for example.

-I am a fella whose first political memory was the 1936 election in New York City, the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, and the war against Germany.

It was a time of intense and legitimate pride in your country and love of your country and so forth, and you can't change me.

-To the radical left, people like Moynihan were about preserving and extending the status quo, keeping the lid on things rather than really making this a better country to live in.

-And at one point, the old traditional socialists suddenly started attacking us.

In a celebrated article, it was decreed that people like Glazer and Moynihan and so forth were not liberals.

We were neoconservatives.

-Pat despised the term "neoconservative."

He thought it was a slur.

Don't ever use that term to describe him when you're talking to Liz Moynihan.

He was considered a neocon.

He wasn't.

He was a New Deal Democrat all the way through his life.

-Moynihan left his role as White House counselor in 1970.

[ Down-tempo march playing ] Two years later, a still-admiring Richard Nixon gave him a surprise appointment as ambassador to India.

The ambassadorship would help set a new course in Moynihan's life -- as diplomat and statesman.

[ "The Star-Spangled Banner" playing ] -Moynihan helped repair relations with New Delhi by negotiating a major debt-relief package for India.

And I think Moynihan got a kick out of the fact that the U.S. gave India the largest check ever written at the time.

And India was a crucible for a lot of ideas that evolved for Pat Moynihan.

He was sick and tired of the sort of ill-thought-out, Marxist-Leninist, anti-West, anti-U.S. intellectual elite in places like India and in other parts of what was then called the Third World.

And he wrote this terrifically powerful essay that the U.S. had to stand up for itself in opposition.

-What Pat said in that article was that official representatives of the United States had been apologizing for the country and had sat silently as the country was defamed and libeled by Third World tyrannies and despotisms.

And he said this was crazy.

[ Applause ] -...do solemnly swear... -...do solemnly swear... -Forty-two floors above Manhattan's Park Avenue, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The visitor is greeted by the only family servant, Hines, created in paper-maché by the 19-year-old-son of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] Moynihan is a large leprechaun of a man with the mental equipment of a Harvard professor and with teeth behind his smile.

And he says what he wants how he wants.

In the United Nations today, there are in the range of two dozen democracies left in 142 members.

Totalitarian communist regimes and assorted ancient and modern despotisms make up all the rest.

It is sensed in the world that democracy is in trouble.

There is blood in the water, and the sharks grow frenzied.

[ Music continues ] -It was a time when not only had America lost its confidence in its actions abroad, but there was garbage piled in the New York City streets.

-...garbage collectors refused to work again today... -More than 30,000 tons of garbage line... -It was a time of real and profound loss of confidence.

-"Ford to city: Drop dead."

-If we are to be under attack continuously at the United Nations, as we are, if we are going to be attacked, we are going to defend ourselves and defend ourselves with some enthusiasm.

-Idi Amin, the controversial president of Uganda, has been in the United States for the U.N. General Assembly.

-He took aim at what he called "the bogus state of Israel."

He went on from there.

-Idi Amin was a kind of symbol of the obscenity of a tyrant speaking about international morality.

[ Camera shutters clicking ] And, as they say, that tore it.

-Last week, our ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used the term "racist murderer" to describe President Idi Amin of Uganda.

Moynihan said it is no accident that Amin is the head of the Organization of African Unity, and that made a lot of Africans angry.

Estimates of the number of Ugandans who've been killed... -It seems to me that the function of public diplomacy and even of private diplomacy is to avoid misunderstanding, to make meaning clear.

-Some of your critics say that perhaps you're too public and that they suspect you of going more for impact than persuasion, more for drama than diplomacy.

-Well, they may be right.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -I'm here to compliment him and to pay my highest respects for the wonderful job in which he has represented our people in the U.N. By that I mean frustrated Americans that are a lot prouder today because of his presence.

[ Music continues ] -I would walk down the street with Pat.

Taxi drivers would screech to a halt and yell, "You're great!"

You go into a restaurant with him, it happened.

The whole place would stand up and applaud.

We went to a concert once at Carnegie Hall, and the whole audience got up.

I mean, things like that were happening all the time.

It was kind of amazing.

I mean, I've never seen anything quite like it.

-Moynihan had been sharply criticized at the U.N., particularly by British delegate Ivor Richard... -The British ambassador spoke of a "Wyatt Earp approach," with Moynihan's aim occasionally bad.

-...from the pressures of civilized international... -The British ambassador, Ivor Richard, launched an attack on Pat, and Pat was convinced that Kissinger had put him up to it.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Henry was a European, a great believer that politics between nations is a balance of power, period.

-Come a little closer, Kurt.

Gonna ruin you.

-Now, Kissinger knows that he had to accommodate a strain in America that Pat represented... ...which was that the United States has a messianic gene in its DNA.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created --" Not all Am-- every one.

And the universalism of the Declaration of Independence is part of our national DNA, and a foreign policy that completely excludes that will not hold the American people.

The most hideous thing I've ever had to deal with over at the U.N. was that resolution which called Zionism a form of racism.

-It was Somalia?

-Somalia introduced it.

Um, and -- but Somalia as a Soviet client.

The Russians began that campaign in 1971 -- very open.

When the Russians begin a propaganda campaign, there's a three-part article in Pravda.

And it said Orwellian or horrible was that the Jews, far from being the victims of the Nazis, were the successors to them.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -Pat understood the importance of words.

Every regime, like liberal democracy, depends not just on force but on principles that people accept as legitimating a regime.

And by labeling Zionism as racism, you were saying that the homeland of the Jewish state was incompatible with liberal democracy.

Whether a statement like that has an effect tomorrow, probably not.

But does it have an effect over the long run, undermining people's allegiances and their willingness to take action, their willingness to prevent bad actions?

Yes.

That's exactly how it happens.

-What we have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy of the state of Israel, although a challenge to the legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arose the vigilance of all members of the United Nations.

For a yet more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of that whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights.

It is sufficient for the moment only to note one foreboding fact -- A great evil has been loosed upon the world.

The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.

-People didn't talk like that.

Kissinger didn't talk like that.

He said this is "wicked," "infamous," "evil."

About, you know, a few years later, the president of the United States was calling the Soviet Union "the evil empire."

-...not forsaken them now... -So in that sense, Pat Moynihan was -- it might have embarrassed him to acknowledge -- a precursor of Ronald Reagan.

-The United States of America declares that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

Thank you, Mr. President.

[ Applause ] -We need the Pat Moynihans of this world to remind us that our nation's future need not be one of retreat and pessimism.

I'm sorry -- [ Applause ] I'm sorry the administration was unable to keep him.

His voice will be hard to replace.

-Here is Ronald Reagan praising Daniel Moynihan, who may very well run for the Senate this fall from New York.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -I mean, Pat had politics in his blood.

He's been hanging around Democratic clubs since he was about 10.

-Patrick Moynihan's political career began in Hell's Kitchen, where he cast his first vote, at age 21.

-I put on a suit, tie.

I came in, and I walked down there.

Fella I'd never seen in my life said, "Hi, Pat!"

-[ Laughs ] -And I said, uh, "Well, sir, um, I'm not sure I'm eligible to vote."

"Everybody votes!"

he said.

-[ Laughs ] And as I went in the booth, he gave me a little piece of paper showing me who everybody was gonna vote for.

-[ Laughs ] -For all his reputation as a policy wonk, Moynihan loved the business of politics and winning elections.

He had a lifelong respect for the old urban Democratic machines, like Tammany Hall.

Tammany was the epitome of corruption to critics, but to Pat, Tammany was successful because it actually delivered the goods to the poor.

-These were the only political organizations that welcomed new waves of immigrants and gave them the opportunity to get a job and start a family and build respectability.

-One of the things I love is that when Pat was at Harvard, a letter was sent to Carmine De Sapio, who was then in federal prison for bribery and who had been the leader of Tammany Hall.

And Pat said, "Well, I hope you're doing well in prison, and when you get out, why don't you stop by Harvard someday?

I'm sure we would have a lot to learn from you."

So, uh, what a character.

[ Laughs ] That's great.

-♪ Oh, goodbye, my Coney Island baby ♪ The distinguished gentleman singing "Coney Island Baby" is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of five Democrats running for the Senate.

He's here at a beach club in Brooklyn because these Jewish voters can amount to 35% to 40% of the electorate in a Democratic primary.

Sharing the frontrunning position with him is Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Mrs. Abzug has maintained her political base among feminists, liberals, and the New Left.

[ Up-tempo music plays ] -It was an extremely close campaign because there were so many candidates, because the margins were so thin.

[ Music continues ] -The campaign, like all campaigns, was short of money.

So what they would do is they would drag Senator Moynihan to Ravitch's office and call people.

-Pat and I used to meet occasionally in the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle but more frequently a few blocks to the north in a place called the Madison Pub.

It was a dreadful bar.

Senator Moynihan, who liked the hamburgers at the Madison Pub, would go there and essentially hide because he knew that Ravitch himself found the place to be repulsive.

There was a constant stale smell there, and I'm not sure why Pat liked it.

[ Music continues ] We walked out of the pub one day, and there was a guy on a bike.

And he yelled out at Moynihan, "You right-wing bastard!"

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan is no stranger to slings and arrows.

He caught them as a member of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and now, as a candidate for the Senate from New York, he still is a target.

Yesterday, campaigning on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he caught a banana cream pie in the face as the pie thrower, a proclaimed member of the Yippies, the Youth International group of protesters, shouted that Moynihan was a fascist pig.

-Well, I don't think there was any Black politician that supported Moynihan in the primary.

There was Bayard Rustin who was for Moynihan.

-I've said Mr. Moynihan has to prove to the voters that he has renounced Nixon and Ford and their policies.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Because Pat was still suspect as a liberal, the conventional wisdom -- and it was probably right in this case -- was that the New York Times editorial would make a difference in the primary.

-People knew that John Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, didn't like Moynihan, and we were terribly afraid that we wouldn't get his endorsement.

-While the editor, John Oakes, was on vacation, the publisher had become convinced that the paper should endorse Pat.

And John Oakes was reduced to writing a letter to the editor from Martha's Vineyard opposing the Times editorial.

It was a great moment in American journalism.

-The United States' recent colorful and controversial ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has won the right to run as a Democrat for the United States Senate.

-Senator Moynihan only won by 10,000 votes, or what he described at the time as a whopping... -...a whopping 1%!

[ Laughter ] -When I first met Pat, he was running against a friend of mine, Jim Buckley.

I was for Buckley and enchanted by Pat.

-I welcome Professor Moynihan into the race.

-He called you a professor today.

-He did what?!

[ Laughter ] Well, it's begun, has it?

My God, it's going to be a long, difficult time, I can see.

-One of the liveliest of the Senate races is here in New York between incumbent Jim Buckley, running on the Republican and Conservative tickets, and Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

-It is a classic confrontation between a conservative defender of local government control and a liberal advocate of national health insurance and federalization of welfare.

-He is shuttling back and forth from the faculty rooms at the Ivy League colleges and taking any job that any president has to offer him.

Well, I believe we ought to send him back to Harvard, send him back to the classrooms, where the kinds of programs he advocates and where his academic attitudes can't do harm.

-Jim Buckley?

-Yep.

-He's an engaging and... and...honest man who hasn't the foggiest notion what the 20th century is all about.

When New York has been Democratic, America has been great, and New York is Democratic again.

-Of course, Moynihan doesn't expect smooth sailing as he carries the case for New York into the Senate.

And when reminded of his somewhat abrasive style in the U.N., Moynihan commented, "Well, at least it got their attention."

Bettina Gregory, ABC News, New York.

[ Indistinct conversations ] [ Glass clinking ] -Now, some of you may have been in the innermost inner sanctum in the Russell Senate Office Building, which was the senator's private toilet in his office.

[ Laughter ] Not many people were allowed through there, and I just, one day, because he was gone and I was goofing around, I went in there.

Now, on the wall, framed, there were two side-by-side magazine covers.

One was The New Republic.

"Moynihan, hope of the neoliberals."

And the other was "Moynihan: savior for the neoconservatives."

[ Laughter ] -When he came into the Senate, there was a lot of skepticism about whether Pat Moynihan was a Democrat.

I mean, he was obviously a Democrat, but was he a Democrat?

Put another way, I think there is at least a half a dozen famous liberal Democrats who wouldn't have been surprised had he run for the Senate as a Republican.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -He was different from any other senator because he arrived every morning and immediately went into his office and began typing.

He was constantly writing an essay about something.

And it could be about anything.

It could be about architecture.

It could be about Social Security.

It could be his famous essay "Defining Deviancy Down."

-I once said rather mischievously that he while he was in the Senate, he wrote more books than many of his colleagues read.

He leavened the place with a sense of complexity.

-He knew the history of the United States Senate, and he thought that's where, in American politics, you started to change ideas.

-He wanted to spend plenty of time using his bully pulpit to raise big questions.

-He wasn't everyone's cup of tea.

There was a feeling among some of Pat's colleagues that he was a gadfly.

One of Ted Kennedy's top aides told me when I was working on the book, "You know, Pat Moynihan, I always thought he was more trouble than he was worth."

-In his first term, Moynihan, the fierce opponent of the Soviet Union at the U.N., called for a re-examination of the Cold War and the newly escalating nuclear arms race.

-Where I think it was decreed that I was no longer a neoconservative took place about the time I came to the Senate.

And it was on a pretty crucial issue, which was the issue of the Soviet Union.

-Moynihan based his changing opinion on a set of recently emerging data.

-The death rate is one statistic that was hard for the communists to lie about.

Moynihan, as a connoisseur of statistics, knew this.

He followed the work of Murray Feshbach, the analyst who was documenting the increased death rate and the lower life expectancy in the Soviet Union, and he said, "Something pretty terrible is happening."

-Pat believed that conservatives stressing arms weren't wrong but they were missing the point.

The point was -- and this is an essay Pat wrote -- the problem was how to deal with an ailing bear.

-I can tell you I got a call one day from Scoop Jackson himself.

And he said, "Listen.

Can't you do something about your friend?

He's acting like a flake!"

-Our problem between here and the year 2000, is how to deal with the breakup of the Soviet empire.

It's going to break up, Ben.

It's -- It's collapsing.

They can't feed themselves.

That system is going to come apart.

-This is NBC Nightly News.

-Tonight, the end of an era.

Mikhail Gorbachev's farewell as the hammer and sickle is lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

-With the Soviet Union's demise, Moynihan drew on his earlier work to predict the new and vastly different world fracturing along ethnic lines.

-What he saw with the book "Pandaemonium" was the Cold War is over, and the power balance between the West and the Soviet Union had disappeared.

[ Crowd cheering ] What you were gonna get as a consequence is people tend to organize themselves not as a part of the West or the East, but more oriented toward either a tribe or an ethnic group or a nation-state.

-The great source of violence in our age is conflict over religion, nationalism, language.

Wars that seem more to be associated with the Middle Ages than with the industrial period are upon us again.

[ Mid-tempo music plays ] -Senator Moynihan was viewed in the Senate with enormous respect, sometimes incomprehension, and sometimes a little fear.

And the fear, of course, came from not wanting to go up against him in debate because he'd find something that you hadn't thought of and you'd be in trouble.

-He was philosophically, obviously, very progressive.

You know, he was from up there in New York, and sometime his intellect was further, you know, expanded by a little sip of scotch, perhaps.

But I really admired Pat Moynihan, with his brilliant intellect and his somewhat sharp tongue.

He was interested in the art of the possible.

-He was not an ideologue.

He was an ideas person but not an ideologue.

So he had great friends on the Republican side.

-I remember one of the things he came to talk to me about more than once on the floor of the Senate was the idea of having more transparency with the government and that more of the records of the government should be declassified.

And I never quite figured out why I agreed with him as much as I did.

-Secrecy is a form of power which can be used inside government.

-Moynihan viewed secrecy as almost a cancer in the U.S. government because it had become so absurd how we classify so much.

-Senator Moynihan believed there are things worthy of secrecy.

But he would argue that the more secrecy you have around anything, ultimately the less you will end up knowing about it.

-It's a romantic delusion that there's a secret.

There are none.

Save when things are kept secret, they tend to be wrong.

Keep that up and you will miss huge events and occupy yourself with marginal and unimportant events.

-You know, in many ways, the 9/11 Commission report is an outgrowth of what Moynihan was saying about this -- the CIA, with these massive silos of secrets that they couldn't distinguish the value of.

The FBI had massive silos, and they couldn't distinguish what has value, what doesn't.

-One of my colleagues on the Republican side said, "You know, you couldn't have a Senate of 100 Moynihans, but you sure need a Senate with one or two."

[ Indistinct conversations ] -I'll just share one little vignette that I think is very characteristic of Senator Moynihan.

There was a bankruptcy bill on the floor.

I can't remember what year it was.

It was written by the credit-card industry to make it harder for people to discharge debts.

So Senator Moynihan offered an amendment that said for people with below median income, the status quo would prevail.

Senator Grassley from Iowa went down to the floor and attacked Senator Moynihan's amendment.

-This amendment says that people can purchase over $1,000 in luxury goods, like Gucci loafers and get over $1,000 in cash advances just minutes before declaring bankruptcy.

-He kept referring to "those people."

And he said, "Those people go out and buy Gucci loafers knowing that they're not gonna pay for them."

And Senator Moynihan jumped up, and he said, "Parliamentary inquiry."

-...delay the amendment on the -- -Senator will state his parliamentary inquiry.

-Mr. President, would it be in order for me to offer a second-degree amendment which excluded from the provisions of this amendment any purchase of Gucci loafers?

[ Laughter ] -And you can hear on the tape the Senate parliamentarian whispering to Senator Hutchinson.

-It would be in order.

-I so move, sir.

-Would the senator send the amendment to the desk?

-And at that point, Senator Moynihan just sort of waved him off in disgust... -Mr. President, I've made my point.

I withdraw my request.

-...and then launched into one of the most eloquent, extemporaneous, and poignant speeches about not picking on poor people.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -Some 30 years after what he saw as a crisis in the impoverished Black family, the number of single parents in America had only expanded.

-An earthquake rumbled through the American family in the last 30 years.

It began in some portions of our society, but it ended affecting all of them.

-Despite years of failed or stalled efforts, Moynihan remained firmly convinced that it was still the government's role to lift these poor families from poverty.

But government, Republicans claimed, had in fact been the prime cause of poverty and the exploding number of single-parent families.

[ Crowd cheering ] In 1994, Republicans swept into both houses of Congress, promising to overturn decades of liberal social policy.

-Let's talk about what the welfare state has created.

Let's talk about the moral decay.

What's gone wrong is a welfare system which subsidized people for doing nothing.

-Through 11 presidents and 31 Congresses, we have sought to aid children in poverty.

We have not always succeeded.

But never, until now, have we undertaken to do harm.

I think a lot of what he did in the earlier years, with the Family Assistance Plan, for example, was really playing offense.

But what happened now was he was really playing defense.

-The history of AFDC showed that there were plenty of people willing to accept welfare and not work very much if at all.

And so that's what we wanted to change, and the only way to change it -- You needed something forceful.

-The bill ends the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor and largely turns welfare over to the states while cutting the growth of federal welfare spending $55 billion over six years.

-Moynihan thought if the economy failed to cooperate, we were going to essentially pull the safety net out from under the feet of poor women and children and make them destitute, and there was nowhere for them to go.

-Good evening.

Welfare as we know it is now history.

President Clinton today signed the legislation that ends a government commitment made 61 years ago of federal aid to the nation's poorest.

"An historic opportunity for improvement..." -If in ten years' time, you find children sleeping on grates, picked up in the morning frozen, will anybody remember that there was a time when the federal government said it had a responsibility... for these matters?

-I was heavily influenced by my friend Pat Moynihan, who said that this would have worse consequences than, in fact, it had.

He was wrong, and I was derivatively wrong.

-The White House announced today that federal efforts to reform welfare have worked even better than expected.

-Fourteen million Americans were on welfare in 1993.

That number has been reduced by more than half... -It did send many into the workforce.

It did reduce welfare caseloads.

It turned out that when the lifetime entitlement to welfare was repealed, people adapted.

They were more adaptable than Pat thought.

-...NBC's Gwen Ifill reports, not all of the predictions of disaster have come true.

-If you look at the decline in the rolls, the decline should start in 1997, right, when welfare reform is implemented across the states.

But it doesn't.

It starts in 1994.

-That was when a 20-year-old poverty program called the earned-income tax credit was dramatically expanded by President Clinton.

The program, targeted to poor working families, had been modeled on Moynihan's more expansive Family Assistance Plan.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -The greatest legacy of Pat Moynihan -- or one of the greatest -- is that the program that he pioneered in the '70s, in the early '70s, is pretty much now there.

-The basic idea was in the Family Assistance Plan, even if your wages are too low to support your children, we have made work manageable by providing an EITC.

-You can actually afford to go to work.

We changed the rules, and people behaved like rational actors.

And the EITC became this major engine that lifts people out of poverty.

[ Music continues ] -The fundamental thing is you will never solve the problem of poverty through the wage and employment system alone.

A great many people work full time, try to maintain their families, maintain an independent situation in life, and just don't do it 'cause they don't make enough money.

And therefore, you must supplement their wages.

For those who have managed to find full-time, full-year work, things have probably never been better, at least in modern history.

-But what do you do with people who can't work?

We are seeing the deep poor, for whom there is no longer a safety net.

-I have to admit that the problem that he was the most concerned about, namely that at the bottom there still is a large and apparently growing group of moms who are in deep poverty and, really -- as ridiculous as it is to say this -- nobody is doing much about it.

Boy, if Moynihan were alive, he'd have 50 hearings next Tuesday morning on what are we gonna do to help these moms.

-When people talk to me about you, I always refer them to The Almanac of American Politics, which says, "He's the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the best politician among thinkers since Jefferson."

How's that sound?

-That sounds overstated.

-[ Laughs ] -But it's a fine note on which to say it's time to go.

-Moynihan retired in 2001 and was succeeded by Hillary Clinton, who announced his death today.

-A small funeral procession carried the senator to his final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery, overlooking the city he loved.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -You know, the Moynihan Report was the last point where you had a federal official making an argument -- an implicit argument -- for a massive investment in African-American communities, massive benevolent investment and tying that case for investment to history.

That is something that just really wouldn't happen today.

[ Music continues ] -Pat always had a gray document case on the floor.

As he'd read papers, reports, things, he'd drop notes to himself into that box.

And when he died and I went through the last box that he'd been collecting -- because that's what he's going to be working on -- it was all about poverty, family poverty.

[ Music continues ] -It is the finest work an American can have.

And it's not easy.

As President Kennedy would say, "Democracy is a difficult kind of government.

It demands all sorts of qualities of steadfastness, purpose, and integrity."

And then he said, "And it also requires knowledge."

I wish that was a little more clear -- that there has to be an elemental knowledge of how our system works, what is involved, and you never are -- You're always behind that curve.

But if you just don't let it get lost altogether, you can do well enough, and that, I think, is about what, at the end of a fairly honorable day, most of us would be content to have judged about us.

-I'm not sure you can show anybody how to tie a bow tie.

But you can tell them.

You start at the beginning.

Guess what you want to do first is you want to -- Got to button that top button.

Then you got to sort of locate your bow tie, and you put it on like that.

Then you put down your collar.

Right?

Don't think when you tie a bow tie.

Just do it the way your mother taught you to tie your shoelaces when you were 14 months old.

Mind, if you've never seen shoelaces, you probably will never tie a bow tie.

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan - About the documentary | American Masters | PBS

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Discover the life and legacy of former U.S. Senator and diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his fight to end national poverty.

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In an age of historic disparity, Abigail Disney and the Patriotic Millionaires take on income inequality.

Abigail Disney remembers the moment, two decades ago, when she no longer wanted to fly on her family's private plane. Disney is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded the Disney company with his younger brother, Walt, in 1923, and her father was a longtime senior executive there. Abigail's parents owned a Boeing 737, one of the largest private-aircraft models on the market, and they let her use it for family trips. For many years, when Abigail was raising her four children, she would take the plane to Ireland, to visit her mother's castle. The plane "was like a flying playpen," Abigail told me recently. "I've known the pilot since I was a teen-ager." One day, when her children were older, she took an overnight flight from California to New York, where she lives. She was travelling alone, but there was a full staff on duty to cater to her needs. As she got into the queen-size bed and secured the safety belt that stretched across the mattress, preparing to sleep for the next few hours, an unpleasant feeling came over her. "I couldn't help thinking about the carbon footprint of it, and all the fuel," she said. "It just felt so wrong."

It wasn't the first time that Abigail, who inherited part of her grandfather's fortune, had experienced discomfort about her wealth and how little she had done to deserve it. As a child, she would go with her grandfather to Disneyland, where she was treated as a special guest. "He loved taking us to the front of the line," she said. She would hang her head as they marched past other families who had been waiting for rides in the hot sun. "I'd say, 'Grandpa, they hate us,' " she recalled. "And he'd say, 'I worked so hard all those years so you could go to the front of the line.' " As a young adult, Disney forged her own life in New York City, first as a mother and later as a documentary-film producer. She eventually stopped flying on the private plane, although it took a year or two. ("These things are hard to give up," she told me.) And she started advocating for peace and women's equality.

In 2011, she joined an organization called the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who are concerned about rising income inequality and who speak out in favor of policies traditionally considered to be antithetical to their economic interests. She began to make public appearances and videos in which she promoted higher taxes on the wealthy. She told me that she realized that the luxuries she and her family enjoyed were really a way of walling themselves off from the world, which made it easier to ignore certain economic realities. "Coming face to face with it feels fucking awful," she said. "That's why the wealthy have the private planes and the bottle service in the back and the limousines with the tinted windows."

In March, 2018, she received a Facebook message from a custodian at Disneyland who was asking for help. He said that many workers there were barely able to survive on what they were paid, and that their union was fighting for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, without success. The local press had recently published several sensational reports about Disneyland, including a story about a sixty-one-year-old night janitor at the Disneyland Resort who had died, alone, in her car, where she had been living. That year, the Walt Disney Company had reported almost thirteen billion dollars in profit; the night janitor was estimated to have been earning thirteen or fourteen dollars an hour.

"I spent almost a month sitting on it, thinking, What can I do?" Abigail told me. She is a shareholder in the company but has never had a formal role there, and was wary of interfering in the family business. "It was hard for me to decide that I could take this on," she said. To learn more about what was happening, she flew to Los Angeles and met with fifteen or so Disneyland employees at the Anaheim office of Workers United Local 50, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that represents about seventy-five hundred food-service workers at Disney theme parks. "I have a healthy skepticism about the way that unions characterize things, so I was not inclined to simply accept whatever was told to me," she said.

Abigail had told the union representatives that she didn't want her visit to attract publicity, so some of the workers were summoned to the office without being told whom they were meeting. They sat in a circle and talked about their economic struggles. A full-time hair stylist named Rebekah Pedersen told Abigail that she, too, had often slept in her car. Abigail recalled that a thirty-year veteran of the park said that she had also recently been homeless for a time, and that some of the workers said that they were on food stamps. (A spokesperson for the company issued a statement saying, "We strongly disagree with this characterization of our employees and their experience at Disney." The company also said, "Disney has made signiﬁcant investments to expand the earning potential and upward mobility of our employees.")

The president of Workers United Local 50, Chris Duarte, who attended the meeting, told me that he could see that Abigail was struggling to process what she was learning. "She didn't want to trash her family name," he said. "The company does a lot of good things. But to have this ugly thing in the closet-I know it bothered her." Abigail spent the next few weeks working on an e-mail to Bob Iger, the company's C.E.O. The Walt Disney Company is one of the largest and most profitable media businesses in the world, and in 2018 Iger, who that year announced a new streaming service and who had directed the company's acquisitions of Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox's film and TV assets, received almost sixty-six million dollars in total compensation. That was more than fourteen hundred times the median pay of a company employee. Although some in the business world say that Iger deserves his staggering salary because of the company's financial success, Abigail found the pay ratio disturbing. "It is something that the whole country is engaged in-shaving every benefit off workers' lives, making sure they are living as close to the bone as is humanly possible," she said. (Iger has pointed out that his salary was unusually high in 2018 because of a one-time stock award that he was granted after the acquisition of 21st Century Fox and as part of an agreement that he would remain at Disney for three years. His annual compensation was $39.3 million. Disney has defended Iger's compensation package, saying that he has "delivered exceptional value for the company, its shareholders and employees.")

In the U.S., executive compensation has increased, on average, by nine hundred and forty per cent since 1978, according to one estimate; during the same period, worker pay has risen twelve per cent. Income inequality hasn't been this extreme since the nineteen-twenties. A recent study by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that, as a result of cuts to estate and corporate taxes, as well as the 2017 G.O.P. tax bill, the four hundred richest Americans pay a lower over-all tax rate than any other group in the country. In a Times Op-Ed, Saez and Zucman wrote, "This is the tax system of a plutocracy."

In Abigail's message to Iger, she argued that the company would be damaged by reports that some employees were being paid so little. The press had been reporting rumors that Iger was thinking about running for President, and he had said in an interview that America was "gravely in need of optimism." (Oprah Winfrey publicly told Iger that she would canvass for him in Iowa.) This was an opportunity, Abigail said, for him to set an example by offering more generous wages. She wrote, "You could become the leader of the most ethical multi-billion-dollar multi-national business the world has ever known." Iger responded a few days later, thanking her for her e-mail. He said that he was proud that there hadn't been any work stoppages during his tenure, and he suggested that she follow up with the human-resources department.

In June, 2018, a ballot initiative that proposed raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour was introduced in the city of Anaheim. It would apply to all employers in the city, the largest of which, by far, was Disneyland. In July, four months before the midterm elections, when the ballot measure was up for a vote, the company agreed to increase hourly wages to fifteen dollars for about ten thousand of Disneyland's thirty thousand unionized workers, and to raise the wages of its nonunion workers as well. (The measure passed.) Still, Abigail felt dissatisfied. Earlier this year, after some public comments that she had made about Iger's salary-she called it "insane"-were widely circulated, she decided to go further. On Easter, while taking a train to visit her college-age son, she posted twenty-two messages on Twitter criticizing the disparities at the company. "Let me [be] very clear," the first one read. "I like Bob Iger. I do NOT speak for my family but only for myself. . . . But by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane." She went on, "What on earth would be wrong with shifting some of the profits-the fruits of these employees' labor-to some folks other than those at the top?" Within two hours, she saw that her tweets had been viewed half a million times. "By that night, it was at three million," she said. "And I thought, O.K., something's happening."

She began thinking about how to translate the viral moment into something more lasting. "It's really easy to reduce someone like me to a crazy rich girl," she said. "I needed to find a way to maintain my credibility and not seem like I had an axe to grind about Disney." Since then, she has testified before Congress about worker pay, worked with activist groups fighting for more progressive economic policies, and given dozens of speeches and interviews. Abigail told me that she hopes that the C.E.O.s of other companies are paying attention. "Have you seen the movie 'Caddyshack'?" she asked. "There's a gopher, and he pops up every so often." She added, "I'm the gopher. So I'll continue to pop up periodically and be the bane of their existence, because I don't want them to feel comfortable. They are participating in a social and economic process that is destroying actual human lives. And I'm just not going to go along with it. Especially not with my name attached."

Disney is one of the highest-profile figures in the Patriotic Millionaires, which now has more than two hundred members in thirty-four states: technology entrepreneurs, software engineers, Wall Street investors, industrialists, and inheritors of family fortunes. Although Abigail is best known for her criticisms of the Disney company, the group's mission was initially a simple idea endorsed by a half-dozen rich people: "Please raise our taxes." The members now have the broader goal of pressuring their wealthy peers to confront what they believe are the destructive effects of trickle-down economics-the idea, which has driven U.S. policy decisions for several decades and has largely been debunked, that reducing taxes on businesses and the wealthy will benefit low- and middle-income workers. Members of the Patriotic Millionaires lobby lawmakers and affluent individuals to instead support policies that would, for instance, increase the minimum wage and raise taxes on corporations and the rich. "If you want to change social norms, you've got to be out there going public about your beliefs," Eric Schoenberg, a former investment banker, said, during a breakfast that the group held in New York, in October.

Patriotic Millionaires was founded by Erica Payne, a political strategist who had worked on Bill Clinton's inaugural committee and had served as the deputy national finance director for the Democratic National Committee before getting an M.B.A. from Wharton. She has long, dark hair and a gleaming smile, and she speaks at a high velocity. She was a cheerleading champion in high school, in North Carolina, and proudly displays a trophy from that era in the Patriotic Millionaires' main office, in downtown Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. In 2010, Republican tax cuts were about to expire, and it had become clear that President Barack Obama was going to give in to lobbying pressure and extend the cuts, even for wealthy people. "I thought that was horrifying," Payne told me. "As did two millionaires I was talking to." Those millionaires were Guy Saperstein, a civil-rights lawyer, and David desJardins, an early employee at Google.

Payne wrote a short open letter, urging Obama to let the tax cuts expire, and Saperstein and desJardins signed it, as did forty-five other people who qualified for the tax cut, including the musician Moby and Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry's. Payne called the group the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, posted the letter online, and sent it out as a press release. It was immediately picked up by the media, Payne said, probably because "lots of wealthy people say they want to do good in the world but fewer of them want to specifically advance the things that would actually bring good in the world but that may cost them." The letter got the attention of the White House, and Payne was invited to attend Obama's 2012 Tax Day address.

She began approaching Democratic donors and businesspeople to pitch the idea of an organization focussed on three core beliefs: that if people work full time they should be paid enough to meet their basic needs; that regular people deserve as much political power as the wealthy; and that rich people and corporations should pay higher taxes. Payne speaks bluntly about these goals. People who support tax cuts for high earners and reductions to social programs are "very deliberately attempting to create a permanent underclass," she said. "You want people to suffer and die earlier, because your greed is more important to you than another human being."

Payne also runs the Agenda Project, a progressive political-advocacy organization that she founded in 2009 and which she describes as aiming to "dismantle the conservative premise and shove it into the dark recesses of the human psyche, where it belongs." She has a knack for illustrating policy battles in ways that are both bizarre and memorable. In one of the Agenda Project's ads, which she made during a Republican push to drastically cut Medicare, an actor who resembles Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker, wheels an elderly woman through an idyllic wooded park before steering the wheelchair to the edge of a cliff and pushing her off; other ads of Payne's have targeted the Tea Party, Mitt Romney, and antiabortion activists. The videos are cheaply made, and a little crude, but they generate attention.

Payne manages the Patriotic Millionaires with a similar savvy. Many members are embarrassed by the group's name, for instance-preferring not to identify themselves as millionaires, because it seems tacky, or objecting to the implication that non-members might not be patriotic-but Payne is adamant that it must be kept. "A hundred per cent of our members hate the name, and every time we have a gathering we have thirty minutes set aside so they can bitch about it," she said. "And then, at the conclusion of the thirty minutes, I tell them we're not going to change the name." She added, "The brand was very intentional. I think the lack of subtlety in the name is part of the way that we actually achieve our end goal." One of the group's members, Jacqueline Boberg, a former technology salesperson, agreed that it had an odd power. "Republicans will open the door, because who wouldn't?" she said. "You're patriotic, and you're a millionaire!" Frank Patitucci, the owner and C.E.O. of NuCompass Mobility, an employee-relocation firm, told me that the group had proved a draw with the press. "I joined this organization because it gave me the most leverage," Patitucci said. "You write a letter to the editor as Joe Blow, it might be ignored. But if you write as a Patriotic Millionaire you have an opportunity to make a bigger impact."

To qualify for the group, members must have an annual income of at least a million dollars, or assets worth more than five million dollars. That could include many families who would describe themselves as upper middle class-who, for instance, own homes in cities with hot real-estate markets. When I asked Payne how hard it was to persuade rich people to join, she said, "I think the last time I checked there were about three hundred and seventy-five thousand taxpayers in the country who make a million dollars a year in income"-there are now almost half a million-"and we have a couple hundred members." She laughed. "If you ever needed a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many of America's élite are concerned about the basic well-being of their fellow-citizens, that should give you a rough estimate." Members include Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune; Roberta Kaplan, the civil-rights lawyer; Jeffrey Gural, the real-estate investor; and George Zimmer, the founder of Men's Wearhouse.

It might seem disingenuous for people to try to change the rules after they have already amassed fortunes via the old, "rigged" system; some might also see their efforts as a way to generate flattering publicity or to alleviate feelings of guilt. But the group's members say that they are concerned about the future of the nation. Some of them feel that severe inequality fuels corruption and has led to the election of Trump and other right-wing leaders across the world. Many of them believe that inaction on inequality could lead to the kinds of violent street protests recently seen in countries like Chile.

The group has produced TV ads and online videos and has sent members to speak at rallies; before important votes, it often targets members of Congress who are likely to be influenced by rich businesspeople in their districts. In New York State, the group has lobbied to close the carried-interest tax loophole, which shields the income of many hedge-fund and private-equity-fund managers, and it has advocated for a so-called pied-à-terre bracket, which would apply to people with part-time homes. Several members, including Molly Munger, the daughter of Charlie Munger, the longtime vice-chairman of Warren Buffett's firm, Berkshire Hathaway, have spoken in favor of a wealth tax.

In February, Morris Pearl, a former executive at the asset-management firm BlackRock and the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, wrote an article for the group's Web site expressing support for Elizabeth Warren 's proposed wealth tax, which would impose a tariff of two per cent on fortunes greater than fifty million dollars and three per cent on those above a billion. (Warren recently doubled her proposed billion-plus tax rate, to six per cent.) The group helped develop a bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in November, that would impose a surtax on the country's highest earners, and it is working on other legislation, including a bill that would raise the estate tax.

In July, the House passed another bill supported by the Millionaires, called the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal hourly minimum wage to fifteen dollars by 2025 and would eliminate a law that permits tipped workers to be paid as little as two dollars and thirteen cents an hour. Judy Conti, the government-affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, one of the groups with which the Millionaires pushed for the bill, told me that, before the legislation was introduced, two hundred and three House members had indicated that they would support it-fifteen votes short of the number needed for Democratic leadership to introduce it for a vote.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups argued that the bill would kill jobs. Many of the undecided members of Congress were moderate Democrats who supported raising the minimum wage but thought that fifteen dollars might be too high and worried about the consequences for small businesses in their states. The Patriotic Millionaires, working with several other organizations, made a list of around thirty undecided House members and identified those who might be especially receptive to business leaders who supported the bill. The group then contacted those members and their staffs. Conti said, of the Patriotic Millionaires, "They help us make the business case for the minimum wage and give moderate members a measure of the cover they need to vote yes. They will talk to members about how taking the high road is the best business strategy, how this is part of how we invest in our workers, that when we treat them better they work better for us-we have less turnover, higher productivity-and when workers in our community have more money in their pockets they spend it at our businesses." The bill passed with thirteen more votes than it needed. When I asked her how impactful the group had been, she said, "When you're looking for those last votes, it's micro-targeting. If they can help deliver two members-and they helped deliver at least two members-they're effective."

Beginning in the early eighties, the remnants of the post-F.D.R. era of social democracy gave way to the age of Ronald Reagan, which brought deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the promise that free-market capitalism would lead to widespread prosperity. In spite of ample evidence that the new system wasn't working as anticipated, this ideology has dominated economic policymaking ever since. Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, told me, "We live in a world where supply-side economics, which was always a fraud, became a religion."

After the recession of 2008-09, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement focussed public attention on the financial industry and its influence on government. The anthropologist David Graeber, one of the movement's early organizers, helped popularize the term "the ninety-nine per cent" to describe everyone who wasn't among the wealthiest "one per cent," a tiny group that controls forty per cent of the nation's wealth. In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-first Century," based on a decade of research into the distribution of wealth, became a surprise best-seller. Piketty argued that, without aggressive taxation, the very wealthy would continue to pull further ahead of everyone else. Abigail Disney told me that, although she didn't get through all eight hundred and sixteen pages of the book, she "certainly got the gist of it, and the gist of it was really important."

That year, the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, one of the first investors in Amazon, gave a TED talk called "Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, the Pitchforks Are Coming." After describing his multiple homes, his yacht, and his private plane, Hanauer argued that the U.S. was at risk of becoming a neo-feudalist rentier society similar to France before the Revolution. In an essay in Politico, he wrote, "Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there's no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand."

In the past few years, many economists, including Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, as well as Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, of M.I.T., have tried to demonstrate that extreme inequality can be reversed. In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, pundits and politicians on the left and right have been asking how best to fix capitalism. In January, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent fifteen minutes criticizing free-market capitalism as a system that exploits average people. Polls indicate that the number of Americans who support some form of socialism has risen dramatically. In March, during an interview on "Morning Joe," the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, who was running for President as a business-friendly Democrat, refused to call himself a capitalist.

More business leaders have begun to say that inequality has reached dangerous levels. In April, Ray Dalio, the founder of the hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, posted a lengthy essay on LinkedIn in which he wrote that American workers in the bottom sixty per cent of earners have had no income growth, after adjusting for inflation, since 1980, while the incomes of the top ten per cent have doubled and those of the top one per cent have tripled. One graphic ranked wealthy countries in terms of the likelihood that a child born into the lowest economic quartile would move into the top quartile; the U.S. was second to last, ahead of only China. Dalio warned that, if capitalism wasn't drastically changed, the U.S. would have "great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt everyone."

On April 10th, a video of Representative Katie Porter, of California, questioning Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, went viral. Dimon had previously spoken about the many Americans "left behind," noting that forty per cent of people in the U.S. earned less than fifteen dollars an hour, and that the same percentage said that they didn't have four hundred dollars in savings to deal with an emergency. JPMorgan Chase had just reported $9.2 billion in profit for the first quarter and almost thirty billion dollars in revenue; Dimon had been paid thirty-one million dollars the year before. Porter described the monthly budget of a hypothetical new employee at a Chase bank in Irvine, California-a single mother who was earning sixteen dollars and fifty cents an hour. After paying the rent for a one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her daughter, plus the costs of utilities, food, child care, and a basic cell phone, the woman, Porter said, had a five-hundred-and-sixty-dollar deficit each month. "My question for you, Mr. Dimon, is: How should she manage this budget shortfall while she's working full time at your bank?" Porter said. Dimon seemed uncomfortable; he told Porter that he "would have to think about it."

Dimon chairs the Business Roundtable, which represents the C.E.O.s of America's largest companies, and, in August, the group issued a statement proposing to redefine "the Purpose of a Corporation." The group advised companies to take into account the interests of "all stakeholders," including customers, employees, suppliers, and local communities. Although the statement was signed by dozens of C.E.O.s, it lacked details or specific commitments, and some critics saw it as an attempt to preëmpt the most radical proposals from the Democratic Presidential candidates, such as banning stock buybacks and mandating that employees have a voice in selecting a company's board of directors.

Over lunch at a vegan restaurant in Manhattan, Morris Pearl, a sturdy, unflappable man with a crown of white hair, who was wearing a windbreaker-he likes to travel around Manhattan by bicycle-told me that he decided to dedicate himself to the Patriotic Millionaires full time soon after making a business trip to Athens in the summer of 2013, during Greece's economic crisis. He had been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires for some time, and had become so vocal about his view that top earners should be paying higher taxes that his day job, at BlackRock, where he specialized in valuing complex bonds, had become a bit awkward. He had travelled to Athens to meet with a group of international bankers who were trying to assign values to the defaulted loans of a Greek bank that was seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. At a lunch meeting one day with the bankers, he was returning from the dessert table when he noticed a commotion on the street below. "I thought at first it was a parade," he said. "Then I realized it was a demonstration in front of parliament." He went on, "I turned around and looked at these twenty bankers, worrying about their capital and liquidity issues. I wondered if I was really doing anything to help people in Greece."

Pearl also recalled a family vacation on Paradise Island, in the Bahamas, at a resort staffed by low-wage workers. One of his children said that the only people who seemed to enjoy their jobs there were the trainers who worked with the dolphins. "I hadn't thought about it until my kids brought it up," Pearl said. "I don't want our country to end up like South Africa. If you recall, apartheid did not end well for the rich people or the poor people."

For its first nine years, the Patriotic Millionaires operated out of Washington and New York. This year, the group expanded to the West Coast, in part to attract more members from the technology industry. Kelsea-Marie Pym, the group's executive director, pointed out that California has been at the forefront of implementing the kinds of economic policies that the group wants to see enacted nationally. "Our goal is to begin to challenge the wealthy to understand that inequality is at such a destabilizing level right now that, by sitting on the sidelines, you're effectively adding to the problem," Pym said.

In mid-August, members of the Patriotic Millionaires gathered for one of the first meetings of the organization's California chapter, at the Fremont Hills Country Club, between San Francisco and San Jose. Charles Simmons, a former executive at Sun Microsystems and NetApp, had arranged for the use of the space. He told me that his recent experience as a math tutor for high-school students in the poor community of East Palo Alto, along with Trump's election, had spurred him to become more politically active. Simmons and about fifteen other people took seats around a banquet table decorated with white orchids. The first item on the agenda was the multimillionaire-surtax bill, which was expected to be introduced in the House. The tax would include a ten-per-cent surcharge on all income above two million dollars, raising the top tax rate from thirty-seven per cent of income to forty-seven per cent. It would also apply to investment income, including capital gains and dividends, addressing what many tax experts see as a crucial weakness in the current laws. Pym had prepared a fact sheet about the bill, along with a list of talking points that members could use to promote the tax.

"I have a marketing point," Blaine Garst, an early Apple employee, with a bushy white beard and a long ponytail, said. "Instead of saying 'multimillionaires,' why not say 'megamillionaires'? You don't want to include farmers who have two million dollars of land. It's about perception." Garst's comment set off a discussion about who qualified as rich. There was a quick exchange about the threshold for the "0.1 per cent," which someone said was around thirty-two million dollars, and the "0.01 per cent," which another person said was seven hundred million or eight hundred million dollars. Alan Davis, who runs a family foundation, said that, although polling has shown that people consider five hundred thousand dollars in income to be rich, two lawyers living together in an expensive city on that sum might not be truly wealthy. "People are trying to come up with the right kind of language," he said. "Five hundred thousand is 'affluent,' two million is 'rich,' and ten million is 'mega rich.' " Everyone agreed that it was a tricky issue.

Pearl spoke about some of the group's recent victories, including its work helping to influence votes on the Raise the Wage Act. "Ideas that seemed crazy, such as a tax on wealth, are now part of the conversation, and our members can take some credit for pushing the needle in that direction," he said. "I think our group, guided by our staff of seventeen people, is helping our members speak out and make their voices heard, letting them explain that, no, all you guys who read Ayn Rand and couldn't find Chicago on a map actually don't know quite as much about what it's like to be rich as a bunch of actual Patriotic Millionaires who founded businesses, who funded startups, and who met payroll."

After lunch, I spoke with William (Buz) Battle, a technology executive who told me that he had been raised in a Republican household but that the Trump Administration had driven him to the left. "With the way we're headed, we need to do more. I need to do more," he said. I asked him what worried him most. He glanced at his wife, Anne, who was standing next to him. "We could have-I don't want to say it, but, riots," he said. " 'Social unrest' may be a better way of putting it. We're making life bad for a lot of people. And it's getting frigging nasty."

Could inequality in the U.S. really become so severe that it leads to social upheaval? I asked the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, the author of the 2017 book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century," which argues that violence has been the "single most important means" of reducing, or levelling, wealth and income inequality throughout history. In his book, Scheidel goes back to the end of the Ice Age, when nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes settled into permanent dwellings, which for the first time allowed for the accumulation of wealth that could be passed on to heirs. His research suggests that inequality is inextricably linked to civilization.

America's wealthy élites, when discussing class-based rebellion, often invoke the French Revolution. But, Scheidel said, that kind of disruption is fairly rare. He noted that levelling happens much more often because of the collapse of a state, such as the fall of the Roman Empire; because of deadly pandemics, like the black death of the thirteen-hundreds, which killed so many people that there were labor shortages and workers' wages went up; and because of mass-mobilization warfare, such as the two World Wars. The French may have resolved some of their eighteenth-century economic injustices with the guillotine, but in many other countries across Europe the ruling classes retained power until they were dislodged by the turmoil of the First World War.

Scheidel told me that the extreme political polarization in the U.S. is likely to continue but that the Patriotic Millionaires' fears of violence are probably misplaced. "If they're worried about wholesale collapse and people with pitchforks coming after them, history does not give any indication that that is around the corner," he said. "States are too powerful. States are too good at monitoring dissent. The rich are rich enough to not put themselves in danger." Scheidel said that America's élites should be more concerned about their quality of life. He talked about organized crime, citing Brazil and other countries where members of the upper classes employ armed guards and worry that they or their children might be kidnapped. "That reduces your ability to enjoy your wealth in a civilized way," he said. "You'd still have your stuff, but you'd be limited in your ability to make full use of it. If I were rich, I'd probably be worried about getting to that point."

In September, I met Abigail Disney at her office in Manhattan, just a few blocks from where she lives. The walls are covered in framed photographs-of her children; of the Irish castle, which she now owns; and of meetings that she has had with the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Meryl Streep. A sign on her desk reads "Feminist AF." Disney has an alert, serious face and light-brown hair that falls in unruly curls; she was sitting cross-legged on a pink faux-leather couch and showed off a few of her tattoos, including a peace dove on the inside of her wrist. She has a slightly defensive way of talking about the comforts she enjoys. She sent her four children to private schools, but she doesn't have a driver. She wears unremarkable clothes. More than once, she cited the Kardashians as a family who feels no shame about "throwing their money around."

Disney told me that she had spent much of her early life feeling detached from her family, both culturally and politically. "They were Red-baiters," she said. "Whenever two workers stood together and had a conversation, that was communism." In 1941, when the Disney animators unionized and went on strike, Walt and Roy took it personally, and Abigail told me that the two men were resentful about it until they died. She said that they practiced a paternalistic form of capitalism, wanting to take care of their employees on their own terms.

Her parents were conservative. "My mother was Fox News before there was Fox News," she said. When I asked Disney about her own politics, she said, "I really don't know why I care about this. I really shouldn't, given my upbringing. There is no reason why I should give a shit about poor people." As an undergraduate at Yale, she was swept up in leftist movements on campus. "At first, it was about being among the cool people," she admitted. A woman gave her a T-shirt featuring Che Guevara and the words "Viva Los Sandinistas," the Nicaraguan socialist political party that the U.S. had tried to overthrow by backing the right-wing Contras, leading to a decade of civil war in Nicaragua. She wore it constantly. "By the time I graduated from college, I understood that Ronald Reagan was not a good person," she said. "And my parents worshipped the ground he walked on, so that became a very painful thing."

At twenty-one, she gained access to part of her inheritance-between ten million and twenty million dollars-and made what she called a "conscious decision" to live apart from her family. "All of my college life and all of my twenties were spent in a painful process of separation," she said. "I would describe it as no less than agonizing." One of her brothers remained with the family, in Los Angeles, but Disney moved to New York, where she got a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia. She said that her parents were embarrassed and angered by her politics. Her father died in 2009, and her mother in 2012.

Her thirties were spent raising her children. Disney said that, when she was in her mid-forties, "I thought, I have no résumé. Why would anyone ever take me seriously? I understood myself to be a person who had no value." She tried to start a career as a filmmaker, but no one gave much consideration to a Disney heiress. In 2007, she started a production company, Fork Films, which makes movies with a social-justice focus, and the following year she produced her first documentary, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," about a group of women who helped bring an end to the Liberian civil war. The film won several awards, including Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. One of its lead characters, Leymah Gbowee, won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Last year, Disney put together a bid to buy what was left of the Weinstein Company as it prepared to file for Chapter 11 protection. The deal didn't go through, and instead she co-founded a company called Level Forward, which funds film, theatre, and TV productions led by women and people of color; the company's first projects included investments in critically acclaimed Broadway shows like "What the Constitution Means to Me," the 2019 revival of "Oklahoma!," and "Slave Play." She said that she is working on a documentary "about economic inequality and the relentless march over the last fifty years toward treating workers incredibly badly." When I asked her whether the Disney Company would be a part of it, she declined to answer.

When Erica Payne tracked Disney down one day and urged her to join the Patriotic Millionaires, Disney said to herself, "That's exactly how I want to use the currency that I have." She has become one of the group's most outspoken members. In December, 2017, she appeared in a video attacking the Republican tax bill. In July, 2019, she hosted, with the minister and activist William Barber, a Patriotic Millionaires media conference call to celebrate the passage of the minimum-wage bill in the House.

She sometimes exaggerates. In an interview with Yahoo News this past July, she said that Disney employees had been so underpaid that they were forced to "forage for food in other people's garbage," a claim that she later retracted. At a time when political activists are expected to live according to their values, Disney's role as an ultra-wealthy spokesperson for the underclass makes her a target of vitriol. In late September, someone tweeted at her, "Boy do I despise virtue signaling rich liberal hypocrites living off the money earned by their far better ancestors. Bet you live in a luxury apt in NYC! Why don't you renounce your corporate grandad's money and give it ALL away! You never will . . . HYPOCRITE!"

Disney and I discussed another Patriotic Millionaires member, Chuck Collins, the Oscar Mayer heir, who, in 1985, at the age of twenty-six, gave his inheritance away to various environmental and civil-rights organizations. In Disney's twenties and early thirties, she had considered doing the same. "Honestly, the only reason I didn't do it was that I was chicken," she said. "I wish I was a more courageous person." Over time, she told me, her wealth has grown, and she's been able to give away much more than she would have if she'd donated it all back then. (She said that her net worth is a hundred and forty million dollars, and that she has given away around sixty-five million dollars. The number is hard to verify; she said that much of it was in the form of grants to social-justice-oriented filmmakers and to organizations that work with low-income populations.) She pointed out that her name and wealth are what enable her to talk about poverty in the first place. If she were an unknown person with less money, she said, TV networks wouldn't invite her on the air.

I asked her how she felt about the pledge that billionaires such as Buffett and Bill Gates had signed, promising to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. "I've given away much more than fifty per cent of my net worth, and I don't intend to stop," she said. "And, frankly, if you're a billionaire and only want to give away half of your fortune, something is wrong with you." Disney is wary of the idea that the generosity of individual rich people can solve society's problems. Anand Giridharadas, the author of "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World," has argued that much philanthropy does far more to boost the reputations of the donors than it does to help create a more just society. Such gifts also tend to come with generous tax breaks, meaning that taxpayers are underwriting the donations that get hedge-fund moguls' names put on wings of art museums and hospitals. Instead, Disney wants to convince more people that systemic change is needed. "I get messages like 'You don't know what you're talking about, you've never worked a day in your life!' " she told me. "And I'm, like, You're making my point! I've never worked a day in my life, and look at me! I'm sitting here in total comfort. You can work all your life and you will never find yourself where I am today." She said that she doesn't blame people for being resentful: "I will always be sort of an alien anthropologist looking at poverty from my very rarefied air."

In September, I joined Disney at a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of United for a Fair Economy, a nonprofit, co-founded by Chuck Collins, that works on economic-justice issues. The dinner was held in the community room of the Old South Church, on Boylston Street, in Boston. After a guided meditation and a rap-and-saxophone performance by the trans activist and musician Jay-Marie Hill, Disney was to be presented with U.F.E.'s inaugural Class Traitor Award.

For most of the evening, Disney sat at a table near the front of the room, her brow furrowed, scribbling notes on a stack of papers that contained the text of her speech. She wore a navy-blue dress with white skulls printed on it, her tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her nose. Others in the room were helping themselves to rice and beans, but Disney told me that she was too nervous to eat. Instead, she drank a few glasses of Chardonnay. Finally, shortly after 9 p. m., three hours into the proceedings, she was introduced by Mike Lapham, a tall, wiry man who heads U.F.E.'s Responsible Wealth project. Lapham spoke about Disney's support for preserving the estate tax, and how she had helped push for a millionaire tax in New York. "She's passionate, she's fearless, she's fierce," Lapham said. "She's an inspiration to so many other rich people to become class traitors."

As the audience applauded, Disney climbed onstage, clutching her notes. "I love every single person in here," she said. "I came from a place that shouldn't have led me here, and, every time I find myself being led here one way or another, it feels so good to be alive. I just want to thank all of you for the work that you do, and the way that the work that you do gives me meaning." For a moment, the room was quiet, and there was a sense, as there sometimes is when Disney is talking about her wealth and her ambitions, that she might have misread the room. But Disney, who is mostly aware of the unease she causes, tries to use it to her advantage. She looked into the crowd and said, "Now I'm going to start the official part of my speech, and I want to watch you all squirm when I say it. Are you ready?" She paced in a small circle, then leaned toward the audience. "I'm riiiich," she intoned. She paused before asking, "Did I make you all really uncomfortable?" The shame attached to such an admission, she said, has motivated rich people to isolate themselves from the rest of society: "In their hearts, they know that something is inherently wrong with what they have, as compared with what everybody else has." She said that she was hopeful that the country was finally waking up from a "fifty-year fever dream" of market-driven economic policy. After her speech, Lapham presented her with a plaque bearing a quote attributed to the aboriginal artist Lilla Watson: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

Later that night, Disney boarded a JetBlue flight back to New York. She had been running from meeting to meeting since early that morning, pulling a pink Wonder Woman suitcase behind her. On the flight, she started talking about how we got to the current moment in American politics, naming figures ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman. She recalled a conversation that she'd had, in 2013, with David Keene, who was the president of the National Rifle Association from 2011 to 2013. Disney had asked him what he was proudest of. He told her, "We flipped the script on guns in America." She took heart in the simplicity of his answer: if the script could be flipped one way, then surely it could be flipped back. She said that groups like the Patriotic Millionaires, and people like Erica Payne and Chuck Collins, "are tiny little ants in this fight" in terms of their total resources. But the other side is selling "a load of bullshit," she said. "If what you're selling is bullshit, then you need a shovel, and if what you're selling is truth you really only need a teaspoon."

She spoke admiringly of the activists who populated the social-justice world. "If I feel good, that doesn't undermine the credibility of what I do," she said. "And I do feel good doing it. I am the happiest rich lady you will ever meet." Why, I asked Disney, did she have faith that things would get better, when there was so much evidence to the contrary? "I always keep coming back to the idea that you just keep investing in the future," she said. "Despair would be easier if I were less comfortable. But, if I were to lose my hope, where does that leave the people around me? I feel a responsibility. I don't know how to do it any other way." ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the conference call Abigail Disney hosted to celebrate the passage of the minimum-wage bill in the House.

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The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes

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In an age of historic disparity, Abigail Disney and the Patriotic Millionaires take on income inequality. Abigail Disney remembers the moment, two decades ago, when she no longer wanted to fly on her family's private plane. Disney is the granddaughter of Roy O.

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Exploring America's social safety net and the political fights around it

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Exploring America's social safety net and the political fights around it

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Our new series, "America's Safety Net," is focused on the complex web of programs meant to help Americans in need. Over the coming weeks, we'll take an in-depth look at the different forms of welfare in the U.S. Up first, Geoff Bennett and producer Sam Lane spend some time explaining what the American social safety net actually is, who it serves and how it came to look the way it does today.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett:
Tonight, we begin a new series, America's Safety Net, on the complicated web of programs meant to help Americans in need.

Over the coming weeks, we will take an in-depth look at the different forms of welfare in the U.S.

But, first, with producer Sam Lane, we're going to spend some time explaining what the American social safety net actually is, who it serves, and how it came to look the way that it does today.

The year was 1935. The U.S. was still struggling through the Great Depression. A quarter of the population was just unemployed, a level the country hadn't seen before and hasn't seen since. That August, as part of his New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.

Franklin Roosevelt, Former President of the United States: To safeguard the security of American workers and their families.

Geoff Bennett:
In the nearly 90 years since Roosevelt signed that law, politicians in Washington and in statehouses across the country have argued about the best ways to help Americans who live in and near poverty.

The disagreements have ranged from the dollar amounts of that assistance to how much it should be tied to work requirements and even to how poverty itself is defined and measured.

During his State of the Union in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced an unconditional war on poverty in America.

Lyndon Johnson Former President of the United States: Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.

(Applause)

Geoff Bennett:
Johnson's war included the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, a permanent food stamp program now known as SNAP, and the expansion of Social Security.

At about the same time, the government came up with a uniform way to measure poverty by comparing a family's income against a national threshold. In 1959, the poverty rate sat at around 22 percent. By 1973, it had dropped to 11 percent, roughly where it was in 2022, with almost 40 million Americans in poverty.

But the measure is widely considered imperfect. For example, some say the poverty line, about $31,000 for a family of four, is far too low. So there are other measures that account for things like geography, cost of living, consumption, or how much government assistance a family gets.

No matter how it's measured, poverty is often misunderstood, says Cornell University professor Jamila Michener.

Geoff Bennett:
As a congressional staffer, Weidinger helped draft the landmark welfare reform law in the 1990s. The legislation followed years of anti-welfare sentiment driven by perceptions of rampant abuse.

In his presidential campaigns, Ronald Reagan popularized the welfare queen stereotype of people cheating the system to collect benefits. By 1994, the number of Americans receiving cash assistance did reach its peak at 14 million. So, in 1996, after a pledge to end welfare as we know it, President Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress.

It replaced the cash assistance program of the 1930s with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare and made states responsible for distributing money. The number of families on welfare plummeted.

In the years since those reforms, debates have continued over the size and shape of the social safety net.

Geoff Bennett:
Before the pandemic, some 99 million Americans, 30 percent of the population, used at least one of the country's key safety net programs. Altogether, those programs cost the federal government well over $700 billion.

And that doesn't include all of the money for things like the Affordable Care Act, which helps tens of millions of Americans access health care. When President Obama signed the ACA back in 2010, it represented the largest expansion of the safety net in decades.

Still, despite welfare's reach, almost half of American households struggle to make ends meet. And the number is even higher among Black and brown households.

Over the coming weeks, we will bring you the stories of those families and show you what it's like to navigate America's increasingly complex social safety net. We explore why up to half the people eligible for benefits don't actually receive them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exploring America's social safety net and the political fights around it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our new series, "America's Safety Net," is focused on the complex web of programs meant to help Americans in need. Over the coming weeks, we'll take an in-depth look at the different forms of welfare in the U.S.