A month or two ago, Bhaskar Sunkara came to me with the idea that we could, on a short deadline, turn our long-running discussions about the future of progressive politics in the United States into a “Piven-Cloward plan for the 21st century” for the cover of In These Times magazine. This was, of course, an insane proposal, combining the intellectual hubris of a mid-twentieth-century French philosopher and the slapdash work ethic of an undergraduate pulling an all-nighter. But I’ve learned by now not to doubt Bhaskar’s crazy schemes, so naturally I signed on.

You can read the resulting product here, and Francis Fox Piven herself also weighs in with an editorial in the issue. I don’t know whether we accomplished our grandiose aims, but I’m happy we at least made a case for something that’s long been discussed on the left, and which doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the need to shift responsibility for social policy from states and localities to the federal government.

In the essay, we make our case primarily on fiscal grounds, pointing out that the limited ability of sub-national governments to run deficits almost inevitably leads to a politics of austerity. But there’s another aspect to this that we didn’t really talk about, which is the regional structure of American politics. Reactionary approaches to the welfare state are particularly characteristic of the South, both its culture and its political economy. Federalizing social policy is therefore both an act of solidarity with the working class of that region, and a move toward completing the class project of the Civil War.