Squatting at Bethlehem: A Response to Stoesz’s Human Service Cartels

One of the most important voices in American social welfare, David Stoesz hits the mark with his studious commentary on professional social work—a cartel that flourishes to license programs and manpower in behalf of an inadequate and predatory social welfare system. Rather than promote the qualified and protect effective services, it promotes mediocrity. Stoesz has previously detailed the debased intellectual enterprise of social work by measuring the scholarly productivity of deans and directors of academic social work programs, journal editors, and journal referees (Stoesz et al., 2010). His review concluded that key positions in the scholarship of the field—its basis of expertise—are routinely occupied by the marginally qualified and unproductive.

Moreover, social work research consistently fails to achieve an objective rigor sufficient to establish the effectiveness of social work interventions. The prowess of the social clinic—the favored practice of social work and similar fields—is a soothing fiction. The field seems oblivious of its actual role as a cultural system obedient to reigning values that are very much in conflict with social work’s presiding New Left ideology (Epstein, 2019). The conclusion begs for attention that seniority and perhaps demography rather than productivity, knowledge, and achievement have become credentials as important as scholarly productivity for advancement in social work.

After more than one century of pursuing professional standing, social work still lacks evidence of effective interventions that demonstrate a reliable production function in reducing personal and social problems. Instead, it perennially accepts marginal therapies of little known rational provenance or clinical coherence (Holden & Barker, 2018). The current insistence on research-based services and best practice each a debasement of rigorous testing are quiet admissions that social work is incapable of achieving a credible clinical practice. Forever ineffective, social work and the social clinic in general persist in priestly roles to bless embedded national values. Indeed, social work’s receipt of cartel control over licensing can be interpreted as a Faustian bargain—middle class occupations as the payment for social obedience.

Stoesz’s essay is largely an institutional critique of social work—attentive to the field’s choices as though they were autonomous of the society. The analysis might profitably be broadened to acknowledge the systemic underpinnings of social work’s institutional presence. After all, the field has never funded itself, run its own agencies, written its own job descriptions, or even voiced its own preferences except in the extraordinarily weak and poorly attended membership organizations whose enrapture with psychotherapeutic practice blots out professional involvement with issues of inequality. Rather than an institution of its members’ professional will, the monopoly on licensing is granted precisely because the field obliges the national will.

Social work offers little of any palpable, material value to protect an independent social welfare role in the market place or political sphere. Through its practice, notably psychotherapy, it reinforces the nation’s romantic values of extreme individualism, subjective truth, and a sense of being the elect of God and Darwin. Stoesz’s “mediocracy” of social work channels the mediocrity of the American people. The debasement of achievement realizes Tocqueville’s fear that a democracy, dependent on popular consent, would institutionalize common deficiencies, namely antagonism to merit, genius, and genuine contribution. Lamentably, mediocrity offers a step up and a healthy replacement for the popularity of authoritarianism, civic disregard, superstition, and even cruelty in the United States.

The field’s embrace of psychotherapy did not occur consequent to studies of need and value but rather as an inevitable diktat of the nation’s enchantment with extreme individualism. The notions of self-invention and thus personal responsibility reduced the burden on social provision for personal failure, enhancing the power of the private sector, notably business, at the expense of public provision. It was and is fanciful to expect the nation to turn over its resources to social workers for allocation to the needy or even to take charge of surrogates for absent social institutions, usually the family, when the nation is both complacent and complicit in sustaining the enormous divides of social and economic inequality. In fact, the United States has never in its remarkably wealthy history shared more than a pittance of its bounty with the most needy and most deserving of its citizens, not even children. Instead, the very inadequate relief efforts of American social welfare sustain the belief that by and large the poor and needy have created their own problems through avoidable personal failures of sloth, crime, addiction, and other moral inadequacies; thus a stern necessity, negotiated out with a weak opposition as inadequate welfare, has become the popular and embedded response to inequality and deprivation. Quite to the point, there are few if any social work agencies that practice the rhetoric of social work’s professed liberality. In reflection of common values, there is little private or public sector funding for egalitarian endeavors.

The American hit parade of social problems ignores social work and its complaints. At the top of the charts, COVID competes with the economy followed by health care (but not mental health care) and then descends to global warming with a remaining herd of problems that only attract single-digit attention. Poverty, material need, crime, social and economic inequality, Black Lives Matter, defund the police, the issues of poorer and marginal women, and justice are all marginal concerns in the United States. Poverty itself, including food and housing deprivations, is rarely addressed as a central social problem. The political power of these issues is further weakened by the prevailing conservative consensus that, in addition to personal responsibility, cherishes a relatively unfettered marketplace, local independence, and minimal public intervention.

The decisive national ethos was put on display as Americans voted for the president in 2020 and by their behavior in response to the COVID epidemic. Liberal democracy, meaning majoritarian rule but constrained to respect civic rights and a broad voting franchise, cannot flourish when 48% of its members—Trump’s vote—are transported into electoral ecstasy by charismatic certainty, fundamentalism of belief, autocracy of governance, and the “big lie” that scapegoats the vulnerable as the source of national failures. Of course, every Trump voter is not like this and some Biden supporters do not exhibit a more gracious social consciousness. Yet this constellation of proto-fascist preferences has always gained support in the United States at least as a mute presence but often as the underpinnings of nation policy particularly regarding public issues of equality. It is instructive that fascism gained its most horrific presence in Germany, the most technologically advanced society of its time and one with a rich cultural tradition in arts and letters.

The COVID epidemic ravaged the United States with relatively more sickness, hospitalizations, and deaths than any other technologically advanced nation. The failure was largely one of public noncompliance with public health measures. A destructive proportion of Americans refused to abide by prudent public health measures to contain the spread of the disease and even denied its presence as a hoax perpetrated by Democrats and the deep state of career government officials setting out to subvert President Trump. Mask wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, and the like were frequently rejected as intrusions on individual liberty. Many acted as though the right to seriously imperil neighbors was protected by Americanism itself.

The goodness of the masses (following Stoesz’s reference to Veblen) and “coercion over the population” are both fictions. They have rarely inspired national social policy. COVID and the election are definitive statements of the American people and their patience with antidemocratic, authoritarian, racist constituencies—in particular the public tolerance and seeming support for White supremacy and Christian nationalism. These widespread affections should dispel any fantasy about embedded goodness and wisdom in the American population along with the fanciful notion that national problems are caused by coercive, self-serving elites of one sort or another. By and large, American elites enjoy popular support.

Many Americans are better than this. However, many are not and Trump’s ascendancy suggests that they prevail and will continue to do so insofar as they can impede any steps toward a more gracious and generous ethos. The fact that the nation was saved from fascism by a sliver of votes augurs little comfort for the future and the emergence of a more skillful, informed, patient, empathetic autocrat than Trump. Apparently, Trump failed to secure a second term and the dissolution of American democracy, even in its shrunken state, only due to his dishonest and gross mishandling of the epidemic. The nation is no longer slouching toward Bethlehem; it has arrived at the gates.

Seating an argument in the embedded deficiencies of the American people themselves must surely rank among the most unpopular themes possible. It will not sell books, attract editors, appear on television, command market share for sales, or become the structure of sermons, school curricula, or lectures on grandpa’s knees. Still and all, it may be the sorry truth of the nation: democracy without decency. The problem is not social work. The problem is the American people.