Is the Welfare State Codependent?
by Dr. Doug Cardell
The welfare state is essentially a codependent relationship with the populace. It is a means of controlling the citizenry and maintaining a hold on power. Those who advocate for an expanded welfare state believe that segments of the population are inadequately equipped, by birth or by circumstance, to cope with the demands of day-to-day living. However, those in power, or wish to be, recognize that appealing to these advocates can be used to gain and retain control. They have found that creating codependent government programs accomplishes those ends.
Codependents are also known as "enablers" because they allow the ones who depend on them to keep engaging in unhealthy behaviors. Codependency is a dysfunctional relationship dynamic where one actor assumes the role of "the giver," sacrificing their own needs and those of others for the sake of the dependent, "the taker." As a result, codependents do harm disguised as good to satisfy their own emotional needs.
The symptoms include: having a hard time saying no, showing emotional reactivity, feeling compelled to take care of people, feeling a need to be liked by everyone, having a hunger for control over others, and having trouble communicating honestly.
Socialists are prone to label those who disagree with them as mean and heartless but attempting to end a codependency relationship is by far the kinder position. Codependency does not help people; it is a destructive behavior that only exists to satisfy the emotional needs of the enabler. Enablers exploit others and cripple those they purport to be helping.
The welfare state policy expansions that began in the sixties have done generations of harm to black families while the enablers applauded their own virtue. Unfortunately, they've succeeded in portraying their ego satisfaction as a noble effort to improve minorities' lives. They continued the ruse despite overwhelming evidence that their programs created more harm than good.
They are doing the moral equivalent of providing alcohol to an alcoholic so they, the enablers, can feel like saviors for giving the alcoholic what the alcoholic wants. Anyone who has ever dealt with an alcoholic can tell you that it is difficult and painful for a caring person to watch an alcoholic suffering withdrawal and denying them the alcohol they crave. Sadly, enablers lack the courage to do the hard work of not enabling, so they choose the easy way and undermine the alcoholic's recovery by giving them what they want.
The left's power elite, the architects of these policies, are particularly guilty. Their actions are not accidental and unintended; they are an inherent part of their plan to take and hold power. Just as any codependent exercises power over the dependent with the threat of 'cutting them off", these power elite do the same thing. First, they provide funds, let's say for education, then they use the threat of removing those funds to enforce policies important to their agenda. They have employed the same tactics throughout the federal agencies. They can accomplish this because they can convince Americans who want to help others that these programs are well intended and will successfully solve problems like poverty. However, the evidence says they cannot. According to the census bureau, the family poverty rate was 8.8 percent in 1973; since then, it has been as high as 12.3 percent in 1993, during the Clinton administration, and as low as 7.8 percent in 2019, during the Trump administration. The 50-year average is 10.3 percent. In 2021 the last full year of data at this time, the family poverty rate was 8.8 percent, exactly where it started fifty years ago.
These enablers have misled millions of caring Americans who truly believed these enablers' schemes were helping people. Hopefully, these millions will learn the truth over time and see that, however pure their motives are, they have been manipulated into encouraging harmful policies. Furthermore, we can hope that they will come to believe that all people have worth and can succeed on their terms if the government no longer enables the behaviors that have kept them from achieving their dreams.
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