The “war on a noun” framing
In the excerpts, Bob Zadek returns repeatedly to the phrase “war on a noun” as a description of a category of government programs. In the 2013 episode on war and extra-constitutional power, he lists “War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Immigration, War on Terrorism, War on a noun” as examples of declarations that politicians never declare won, because doing so would mean surrendering accumulated powers War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013). In the 2017 episode on the drug war, he repeats the formulation, saying that “anytime we declare war on a concept, war on a noun, that war is doomed to fail,” and names “War on poverty, war on drugs” as examples Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017). In the 2019 foreign policy episode, he tells guest Christopher Preble that declaring war on a concept is the perfect move for someone who wants to aggrandize government power, because “there will never be peace” and the powers accumulated will remain with whoever holds office On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019).
The War on Poverty appears in these excerpts chiefly as one member of that list rather than as a subject examined on its own terms. The 2013 episode places it first in Zadek’s enumeration of wars on nouns. The 2017 episode pairs it with the War on Drugs in a single sentence. The 2019 episode again pairs “war on poverty, war on drugs, uh, war, um, on terrorism” as examples of wars on concepts. Only the 2019-12-29 episode with Amity Shlaes treats the War on Poverty as a topic in its own right.
Amity Shlaes on the definition of poverty
In the December 2019 episode, Zadek introduces the word “poverty” as “a very slippery, almost sinister word,” asking what it even means and suggesting that if it merely means some people have less than others, that is simply life Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). Shlaes responds by distinguishing absolute poverty—whether a family has enough to eat, has heat, and may send its children to school—from a relative definition in which not being as wealthy as another person counts as poverty. She calls the second definition “not acceptable” but says it is “much more fun for policymakers because then there is always policy because poverty is always defined as relative to wealth.”
Shlaes notes that the White House had recently been fighting a rearguard action on that question in the economic report of the president, which she places at Chapter 9, and that Kevin Hassett, described as the chief advisor to the president, noted that in terms of starving hungry, most of poverty had been eliminated, whether through economic success or through payments and in-kind benefits. She observes that in the early 1960s poverty was not much discussed, and that the economic reports of the president of the 1950s more often used words like “want,” “need,” “assistance,” “mothers,” and “orphans.” It was only in the 60s, she says, that the existence of poverty was declared.
Shlaes cites The Other America by Michael Harrington, which she says looked at Appalachia and described a poor America that was not known about. She also describes a new federal metric created in Washington by Molly Orshansky, called the poverty metric, and says that once poverty began to be quantified it became official. She quotes Martin Luther King saying to someone—she thinks the union leader Walter Reuther—“We didn’t know we were poor until you told us,” and asks the listener to consider the destructiveness of that label.
Zadek’s political reading
Zadek responds to Shlaes with a political observation: declaring war on poverty is “political genius,” like declaring war on drugs and war on terror, because there never can be victory Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). No one can say the last terrorist has been killed and close the effort down; the war on terror is intellectually incapable of ending, which means the abuses of civil liberties and freedom will never go away and are not temporary but permanent. The war on drugs can never be won, he says, and the war on poverty can never be won. He calls it brilliant to declare war on poverty because it assures re-election and unlimited funds to spend in a war that can never be won. He summarizes Shlaes’s account as saying the war on poverty was a war on a circumstance that never really existed any more in the 60s than at any time before or after.
Zadek also raises Martin Luther King’s campaign, describing its goal as political equality, political participation, and correcting abusive laws, and says King did not spend much time complaining about poverty as such. He connects this to Shlaes’s remark that many people did not realize they were poor until the government pointed it out.
The drug war analogy
The 2017 episode with Jeffrey Miron supplies the most developed parallel case in the excerpts. Zadek opens by saying that never in the history of the country has more money been spent on a more flawed policy than the War on Drugs, and that the giveaway is that any war on a concept is doomed to fail Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017). He describes Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a self-described drug warrior who, in a recent op-ed piece, complained that being soft on drug sentencing means more violent crime, and who took an oath to vigorously enforce the drug laws. Miron, introduced as a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at Cato, argues that Sessions has it “almost precisely backwards”: it is not that drugs beget violence, but that drug prohibition induces violence. When a good is banned, he says, the market is not eliminated but driven underground, where disputes cannot be resolved with courts and lawyers, so the obvious substitute is violence. He gives the example of an employer in the drug trade who wants his street-corner sellers to believe that stealing the product will bring the boss to break their kneecaps, and he mentions fights over drug territories and over enforcing contracts.
Zadek draws out the implication that because drug commerce is forced underground, participants do not get the benefits of a civilized system for resolving disputes and are left only with guns. He also characterizes Sessions’s position as enforcing the laws simply because they are laws, without asking whether more vigorous enforcement or the laws themselves make sense.
Across episodes: the same argument in three episodes
The same question—whether declaring war on a concept creates permanent, unbounded government power—is argued in the 2013, 2017, and 2019 foreign policy episodes, with the War on Poverty named each time as one example among several. The treatment does not develop across the excerpts: Zadek advances the framing in each episode, and the guests who take it up are Chris Preble in 2013 and 2019 and Jeffrey Miron in 2017. The 2019-12-29 episode with Amity Shlaes is the only one in which the War on Poverty itself, rather than the general pattern, is discussed, and there the emphasis falls on the definition and measurement of poverty rather than on the war’s institutional history.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the legislative origin of the War on Poverty, name any statute or program associated with it, or give dates for its enactment. They do not state what the War on Poverty spent, what it achieved, or how it ended or failed to end. The Shlaes excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in Zadek’s question about Martin Luther King, and the 2013 excerpt ends at Bob Zadek’s name with no further text, so neither passage can be carried further than it goes.