Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Politics of Tragedy

Abstract

How does tragedy, primarily a dramatic-literary experience, shape politics? While scholars have mostly looked to classical tragedy and expressions of public mourning to answer this, I employ a policy-oriented case study to do so: the politics of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Widely known for his data-driven social science, I want to suggest the counterintuitive claim that the popular senator from New York was ironically also influenced deeply by literary tragedy. This article demonstrates how Moynihan cultivated a set of tragic sensibilities that informed his realist political calculations and implanted in his policies a tragic awareness that limited the goals of what government could achieve, while helping define what it should and how. Rather than evaluate the validity of his controversial proposals from the 1960s, I offer a critical reexamination that highlights the tragic impulses coloring them. In the process, I conceptualize a politics of tragedy as a “tamed” form of postwar liberalism.