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(ThyBlackMan.com) In 2000, Republican George W. Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative.” Bush defended his approach: “Government cannot solve every problem, but it can encourage people and communities to help themselves and to help one another. Often, the truest kind of compassion is to help citizens build lives of their own.”
Bush’s idea of compassionate conservativism was a way to return responsibility and accountability to individuals and, in doing so, free them from a life of poverty. The political slogan may have sounded good at the time, but Bush’s branding annoyed many of his fellow Republicans who found the catchphrase insulting. The phrase was “an attack and criticism on conservatives,” former Vice President Dan Quayle told the New York Times. “Conservatives are compassionate and that is my criticism.”
But when it came time for Bush to put action and policy behind the campaign rhetoric, he exposed himself as a “tax cut for the wealthy” Republican. When preparing the first budget under the Bush administration, Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley provided $6 billion per year in tax credits to encourage charitable giving to organizations fighting poverty since it was one of the president’s campaign promises. During the budget negotiations, Grassley was told by the president’s legislative team to “get rid of” the charity tax credits because the money was needed for another political priority: the $100 billion cut in estate taxes. With the rise of the Tea Party movement, Bush’s façade of compassionate conservativism was erased for good as a domestic agenda within the Republican Party.
Bush was on the right track by identifying compassion as a major key in addressing society’s problems. Unfortunately, he and many others in his party were not true advocates for the disenfranchised. A person is not compassionate in rejecting a rise in the minimum wage when it is needed for a person to survive. A person is not compassionate when embracing the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” while ignoring the structural barriers, cultural insensitivity, and victim blaming often encountered.
Every major city in America has some degree of homelessness impacting its local communities. According to HUD’s 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR), more than 650,000 people in America lack permanent shelters. Before Reaganomics took effect, our nation never experienced homelessness as a national crisis. During President Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, critics such as Don Mitchell noted homelessness as a visible problem in the U.S. As a professor of human geography, Mitchell extensively wrote about homelessness and examined its structural causes. According to Mitchell, the increased cuts to spending on housing and social services under the Reagan administration were a contributing factor to the homeless population nearly doubling in just three years, from 1984 to 1987. This is an unknown part of the Reagan legacy. In the closing weeks of his presidency, Reagan told news commentator David Brinkley that the homeless “make it their own choice for staying out there,” noting his belief that there “are shelters in virtually every city, and shelters here, and those people still prefer out there on the grates or the lawn to going into one of those shelters.”
This false narrative that homelessness is about personal choices was developed during the Reagan era, and it continues today. The narrative became a deliberate attempt to misdirect public attention away from the human consequences of cuts to HUD’s affordable housing budget, which were used to cover tax cuts for the wealthy. Individual responsibility and accountability go both ways. The main source of the problem behind today’s affordable housing crisis is the individuals responsible for creating enough investment in low-to-moderate income housing who fail to do so.
During the 1980s, there was a shift in housing policies that saw a decrease in new public housing construction and increased dependence on housing solutions such as Section 8 vouchers. Thirty-plus years after this housing policy shift, a record-high 653,104 people were homeless on a single night in January 2023. The Supreme Court didn’t help the housing crisis with its Johnson v. Grant Pass decision. The court announced that people experiencing homelessness can now be arrested and fined for sleeping outside.
Johnson v. Grants Pass is a court case filed in 2018 that determined it cruel and unusual punishment to arrest or ticket people for sleeping outside. The case started in Grants Pass, Oregon, when the city began issuing tickets to people sleeping in public, even when there were not enough safe, accessible shelter beds. How does criminalizing homelessness address the permanent solution needed for this national crisis? And where is the conservative compassion?
Homelessness is too complex an issue with balancing interests such as the need to provide access to mental health treatment, substance abuse recovery programs, and job training. In a city like Grants Pass, Oregon, with no public shelter, where do the unhoused go if it is now a crime to sleep in public? At a time when we are faced with a nationwide affordable housing crisis and a growing insensitivity to the unhoused, we have an incoming administration that subscribes to the Reagan school of thought by not seeing housing as a basic human right of every American.
President-elect Donald Trump nominated Scott Turner to serve as the secretary of HUD. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against the funding for a public-private partnership to support people experiencing homelessness. Turner, an associate Baptist pastor and former NFL player, was the first Black person nominated as a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet. Despite being a pastor, Turner’s voting record does not prove that the nominated HUD secretary will be a compassionate voice and advocate for the unhoused.
Written by David W. Marshall
Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/
