The United States: a 'liberal' regime?

The United States is sometimes described as a ‘liberal' welfare regime, in the sense that it represents individualism, laissez-faire, residualism and a punitive view of poverty. These issues often seem to dominate US debates on welfare: examples are the introduction of 'workfare', the exclusion of long-term benefit dependents, and the criticism of the 'underclass'.

The US does not, however, have a unified welfare system. Federalism has meant that many important functions are held by the States, including public assistance, social care and various health schemes (Hawaii has had mandatory health insurance and a state-funded health system since the 1970s); the current reforms of health care will reinforce that diversity. By comparison with other developed countries, central government has had a limited role in social welfare provision: the main developments of federal provision were during the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s, which laid the foundations for the social security system, and the "War on Poverty" of the 1960s, which provided some important benefits (notably health care for people on low incomes) and engaged the federal government in a wide variety of projects and activities at local level.

In practice, the US is pluralistic, rather than liberal. There are significant departures from the residual model - e.g. state schooling, social insurance, or services for military personnel, veterans and their families, which provide for more than 60 million people. In addition to federal and state activity, there are extensive private, mutualist and corporate interests in welfare provision. The resulting systems are complex (and expensive): the guiding principle is less one of consistent individualism than what Klass has called "decentralised social altruism". [7] Diversity and complexity come at a price, and despite - or perhaps because of - political hostility to welfare provision, the US system is also unusually expensive.

Melting pot, cultural pluralism, Anglo-conformity, multiculturalism

The concept of multiculturalism was preceded by the concept of cultural pluralism, which was first developed in the 1910s and 1920s, and became widely popular during the 1940s. The concept of cultural pluralism first emerged in the 1910s and 1920s among intellectual circles out of the debates in the United States over how to approach issues of immigration and national identity.

The First World War heightened tensions between Anglo-American and German-Americans. The war and the Russian Revolution, which caused a "Red Scare" in the US, also fanned feelings of xenophobia. During and immediately after the First World War, the concept of the melting pot was equated by Nativists with complete cultural assimilation towards an Anglo-American norm ("Anglo-conformity") on the part of immigrants, and immigrants who opposed such assimilation were accused of disloyalty to the United States.

The newly popularized concept of the melting pot was frequently equated with "Americanization", meaning cultural assimilation, by many "old stock" Americans. In Henry Ford's Ford English School (established in 1914), the graduation ceremony for immigrant employees involved symbolically stepping off an immigrant ship and passing through the melting pot, entering at one end in costumes designating their nationality and emerging at the other end in identical suits and waving American flags.^[15][16] However, not all "old stock" Americans believed that immigrants could be assimilated. Supporters of Anglo-Saxonism and 100 percent Americanism, such as Milton Gordon and Henry Pratt Fairchild believed in the cultural superiority of white Anglo-Americans to non-whites and the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and perceived acculturation and intermarriage with Southern and Eastern European immigrants as a threat to Anglo-Americans. Opposition to the absorption of million of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was especially strong among eugenicists such as scientists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who believed in the "racial" superiority of Americans of Northern European descent as member of the "Nordic race", and therefore demanded immigration restrictions to stop a "degeneration" of America's white racial "stock". They believed that complete cultural assimilation of the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was not a solution to the problem of immigration because intermarriage with these immigrants would endanger the racial purity of Anglo-America. According to eugenist criminologist Edward A. Ross, such intermarriage (often termed "amalgamation") would lead to "race suicide". The controversy over immigration faded away after immigration restrictions were put in place with the enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924.

In response to the pressure exerted on immigrants to culturally assimilate and also as a reaction against the denigration of the culture and "race" of non-Anglo white immigrants by Nativists, intellectuals on the left such as Horace Kallen, in Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot (1915), and Randolph Bourne, in Trans-National America (1916), laid the foundations for the concept of cultural pluralism. This term was coined by Kallen.^[17] Randolph Bourne, who objected to Kallen's emphasis on the inherent value of ethnic and cultural difference, envisioned a "trans-national" and cosmopolitan America. The concept of cultural pluralism was popularized in the 1940s by John Dewey.

In the United States, where the term melting pot is still commonly used, despite being largely disregarded by modern sociologists as an outdated and diffuse term, the ideas of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism have largely replaced the idea of assimilation.^[18][19][20] Alternate models where immigrants retain their native cultures such as the 'salad bowl'^[21] or the 'symphony'^[18] are more often used by prominent sociologists to describe how cultures and ethnicities mix in the United States. Nonetheless, the term assimilation is still used to describe the ways in which immigrants and their descendants adapt, such as by increasingly using the national language of the host society as their first language.

Since the 1960s, most of the research in Sociology and History has disregarded the melting pot theory for describing inter-ethnic relations in the United States and other counties.^[18][19][20] The theory of multiculturalism offers alternative analogies for ethnic interaction including salad bowl theory, or, as it is known in Canada, the cultural mosaic. In the 1990s, political correctness in the U.S. emphasized that each ethnic and national group has the right to maintain and preserve its cultural distinction and integrity, and that one does not need to assimilate or abandon one's heritage in order to blend in or merge into the majority Anglo-American society.^{[citation needed]} However, some scholars have expressed the view that the most accurate explanation for modern-day United States culture and inter-ethnic relations can be found somewhere in a fusion of some of the concepts and ideas contained in the melting pot, assimilation, and Anglo-conformity models. Under this theory, it is asserted that the U.S. has one of the most homogeneous cultures of any nation in the world. This line of thought holds that this American national culture derived most of its traits and characteristics from early colonial settlers from Britain, Ireland, and Germany. When more recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe brought their various cultures to America at the beginning of the 20th century, they changed the American cultural landscape just very slightly, and, for the most part, assimilated into America's pre-existing culture which had its origins in Northwestern Europe.

The decision of whether to support a melting-pot or multicultural approach has developed into an issue of much debate within some countries. For example, the French and British governments^[22] and populace are currently debating whether Islamic cultural practices and dress conflict with their attempts to form culturally unified countries.