The vice president recently previewed a new policy initiative by the Trump administration to provide financial support to stay-at-home mothers. A longtime gripe from traditionally minded families is the fact that federal policy (including, and especially, the federal Dependent Child Tax Credit) gives a helping hand to dual-income families that doesn’t exist for families where one of the spouses stays home. Perhaps because of the rampant fraud in federally supported daycare institutions or perhaps because of his time spent around Catholic intellectual types (who tend to rankle this disparity), the vice president concluded that something needs to be done to remedy this unfairness in federal policy.

The solution the administration has come up with is allowing stay-at-home mothers to get access to a funded and authorized federal welfare program run by the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s an interesting decision and presumably one that was driven by the fact that helping stay-at-home mothers is the kind of policy that can only be enacted through executive action.

This is because, as a practical matter, legislation on the topic would be dead on arrival. Democrats have zero interest in supporting regressive, patriarchal family structures (and the kinds of voters who adhere to them), while Republicans are sufficiently green-eyeshaded and growth-minded at the margins to wonder why both parents can’t just be productive workers. If the latter weren’t the case, it could conceivably be a budget-reconciliation provision at some point in the future, but changing the tax code to correct for unfairness in family economics would be a steep hill to climb under the Byrd Rule. So executive power it is, and the identified vehicle is expanding eligibility for a funded welfare program.

This has resulted in perhaps predictable howls from the green-eyeshade and growth-minded members of the commentariat. The proposal has been decried as welfarism, socialism, and Orbanism depending on who’s launching the attack. (Some, like my EPPC colleague, Patrick Brown, have commendably stuck to worthwhile technical critiques of the means rather than the end.) The better solution — again depending on the source — is to abolish the welfare state or, perhaps, the income tax. Regardless, families shouldn’t have to pay for the choices of other families.

Of course therein lies the problem. Single-income families do pay for the choices of other families. They’re taxed just like everyone else, and they don’t get the benefits of either federally subsidized childcare or the tax credit (whose primary constituency is the middle and upper-middle classes). That’s the unfairness whose correction is being proposed. At the same time, the program in question isn’t some new entitlement; it’s an existing welfare program. The money is going to be spent one way or the other. What the vice president is doing is changing how the money is spent to further conservative social policies.

There’s a term for this, and it isn’t socialist. It’s neoconservative.

While now associated with foreign policy and the Iraq War, neoconservatism, as initially exposited in places like the Public Interest, was primarily interested in domestic policy. An abiding concern of the neoconservatives was the social disorder left in the wake of the 1960s and its interaction with the welfare state that many of them had supported in their (often Trotskyite) youth.

Their turn to the right did not make them slash-and-burn libertarians. The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, laid out his vision of welfare succinctly in the pages of Newsweek in 1976. He explained, “Neo-conservatism is not at all hostile to the idea of a welfare state, but it is critical of the Great Society version of this welfare state. In general, it approves of those social reforms that, while providing needed security and comfort to the individual in our dynamic, urbanized society, do so with a minimum of bureaucratic........

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