By Jack Jackson, HAC Board Member
For over 25 years the work of the Homeless Action Center (HAC) has focused on ensuring that our clients receive benefits to which they are entitled by law. One important federal benefit for our clients is Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a vital part of the Social Security law in the United States. Social Security is but one component of a broad array of programs designed to offer financial support and solidarity in times of need – and at some juncture in our lives, we will all be in need of the care and support of others.
With these social programs facing growing criticism in some quarters, often by pitting welfare against an imagined higher value of freedom, it might be worthwhile to return to the development of the modern welfare state to reflect more broadly on the relationship between vulnerability, solidarity, and freedom. Such a vantage point will enable us to better appreciate the important labor that occurs every day at HAC.
A comprehensive and detailed history of welfare in the United States is obviously not possible in a blog post. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern important values from the New Deal period that remain quite relevant for today. Given that we at HAC interact constantly with the Social Security Administration, it makes sense to begin with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935.1
The United States faced the Great Depression in the 1930s and Social Security constituted a central pillar of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program to confront it. The economic catastrophe also heralded a political and humanitarian disaster in the form of the rise of fascism in the 1930s in Europe. Economic desperation and dislocation contributed to this fascist ascendancy. Thus, the creation of Social Security and other similar programs were aimed at not simply alleviating poverty; critically, they were designed to shore up the social and economic foundations of constitutional democracy.
The creation of Social Security was aimed at not simply alleviating poverty; it was designed to shore up the social and economic foundations of democracy.
President Roosevelt’s famous “four freedoms” speech, delivered in 1941, set forth a vision for a post-World War II society. Drawing on the lessons of the previous decade, Roosevelt listed “freedom from want” as one of the four freedoms. Ensuring “freedom from want” helped secure nothing less than “democratic existence.” In concrete terms, Roosevelt summoned the nation to insist on the following: “We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care. We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.”2 Again, the political health of the society required a political economy of solidarity. And across the decades, with amendments to the Social Security Act and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, more and more people received entitlement to disability benefits, pensions, and publicly subsidized health care.
This progressive history began to falter in the 1980s with the emergence of a neoliberal ideology that sought to render every person an isolated economic actor. Such a notion was, of course, a fantasy as even the oligarchs governing the country in the name of this ideology themselves frequently demanded federal bailouts when their wealth and welfare was at stake.3 Nonetheless, this vision of an atomistic society succeeded in making solidarity appear as a value from some other time and place.
Self-interest frequently triumphed over the common good – the society moved from one of Social Security to one of Individual Retirement Accounts. Inequality spiraled to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. And unsurprisingly, more and more people experienced homelessness and/or housing precarity. In 2024, more than 770,000 people were homeless in the United States.4 For some context, the population of the entire state of Vermont is approximately 650,000.
Self-interest frequently triumphed over the common good – society moved from one of Social Security to one of Individual Retirement Accounts. Inequality spiraled.
The philosopher Judith Butler once posed the following set of questions: “When movements against homelessness emerge, the unacceptable character of that vulnerability (in the sense of exposure to harm) is made clear. But a question still remains: does vulnerability still remain an important part of that mode of resistance? Does resistance require overcoming vulnerability? Or do we mobilize our vulnerability?”5 These questions compel us to think anew about the work of HAC and the work of HAC can help us think through these questions.
From my perspective, the work of HAC confirms some of the insights developed by the legal theorist Martha Fineman. Eschewing a narrow view of discrete and insular “vulnerable populations,” Fineman advocates for a recognition of vulnerability as a universal condition of the human experience. For Fineman, “the realization that no individual can avoid vulnerability entirely spurs us to look to societal institutions for assistance. Of course, society cannot eradicate our vulnerability either. However, society can and does mediate, compensate, and lessen our vulnerability through programs, institutions, and structures.”6
Organizations like the Homeless Action Center and programs such as Social Security help address shared vulnerability. Our work at HAC brings the law into reality and the reality we encounter reaffirms the need for the law. As such, HAC must advocate on behalf of each individual client as well as for the programs whose rights we invoke in our legal practice. And as constitutional democracy faces threats to its existence perhaps not seen since the 1930s, we must also realize that our daily labor in strengthening the social safety net is today both an economic and political necessity. In the face of vulnerability, solidarity secures our freedom.
- https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html ↩︎
- https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-four-freedoms/ ↩︎
- https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/heres-how-much-2008-bailouts-really-cost ↩︎
- https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/who-is-homeless-in-the-united-states-a-2025-update ↩︎
- Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016) 13. ↩︎
- Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Vol. 20:1, 10 (2008) ↩︎