In The Guardian, Gray Brechin on Poverty Shaming

“The New Deal embodied an approach whose starting point was to make attacking poverty – not the people who live in it – a first principle. This makes it especially salient today… The writer and scholar Gray Brechin, a driving force behind the Living New Deal project, argues that at a time when Republicans in America and Tories in Britain behave as if there were no alternative to shrinking welfare states, and when ‘the dominant meme is that government just wastes money’, it is important that this ideology is exposed for the fiction that it is.” Read Mary O’Hara’s article, examining “lunch-shaming,” the “deeply flawed narrative that we can’t afford” the poor, and The Living New Deal’s attempt to commemorate a different vision of society.

 

Gabriel Milner is Project Manager for The Living New Deal. He is a trained cultural historian who teaches courses in U.S. History at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

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