ome time in the last 30 years, liberals and conservatives switched places in the poverty debate. It is conservatives — market Republicans and new Democrats — who are now most optimistic about incorporating the poor into main-stream America. Meanwhile, traditional liberals — like Herbert Gans, Michael Katz, Benjamin DeMott, and Peter Davis in recent books — have taken up the fatalistic view of poverty as retribution for sin.

Granted, that sin is “white racism” and its associated iniquity, “middle class values.” Gans acknowledges “culturally divergent behavior” but insists there’s no such thing as an underclass; the very term, he argues, reflects a conservative conspiracy to defame and degrade the poor. Katz can’t decide whether the underclass is an old problem or a new one, but he’s certain that the very poor bear no responsibility whatsoever for their plight. DeMott is beside himself that an African-American mother of seven could be held accountable for leaving her children alone in a house that caught fire, killing six of them. All three authors, like conservative fatalists of decades past, are filled with pity for the poor. They are less interested in instructing readers than in warming them with the fellowship of shared moral indignation. After announcing that “the poor have replaced the Communists as our principal enemies,” Davis strikes the note common to all these books when he asserts that the reason we “persecute” the underclass is that it represents the “tendencies we fear in ourselves.” What remains unchanged across the years is that the party that sees the poor through the lens of pity has the least to contribute to the debate.