The Romney flap has revealed a divide among conservatives about those who receive government transfers. Those who insanely, self-destructively urge Romney to keep sticking it to the 47 percent are advocating a type of rhetoric that conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Review deliberately abandoned in the 1960s as they sought to build a broad-based political coalition.
In the mid 1960s, the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial defined welfare very broadly and the victims of the welfare system—the class of “provident” citizens—narrowly. The U.S., they wrote, “is getting into that classic situation where the provident must pour more of their resources to support a rapidly growing army of the improvident; more correctly the people who are willing to take anything anyone is willing to hand them.”
The Journal’s conception of the “improvident” included most recipients of federal transfers. The legitimate recipients were confined to, “the relatively few who truly cannot provide for themselves because of unavoidable misfortune or inadequate endowments.” The language was revealing: When the Journal wrote of “unavoidable misfortune” they tended to rule out recipients of Social Security and the soon-to-be Medicare program. While getting old might be inevitable it was hardly a misfortune in itself—at least not to those who were provident enough to prepare for old age. Welfare, they argued, furthered the “Federalization of American life” and weakened principles like “self-reliance.”
Viewing such a broad class of Americans as improvident was hardly a recipe for a winning electoral coalition. And so the Wall Street Journal, along with National Review, began to confine its critique to a narrower segment of aid recipients. By the late 1960s, they began to see welfare as a class war in which welfare recipients (such as those of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) allied with middle-class radicals and welfare bureaucrats against the taxpayers.
The Wall Street Journal and National Review sought to create a polarization in which a majority made up of taxpayers (from the working class on up) formed a broad coalition against the tax consumers (welfare recipients and welfare bureaucrats) and their radical allies. In this class war critique, conservative journalists took the side of the taxpayers against the welfare recipients and their allies. When the class war critique dominated, the interests of welfare recipients were secondary to those of the taxpayers.
In a comment in “The Week,” National Review noted the attempt by the National Welfare Rights Organization to organize welfare recipients under the banner of “It’s not a privilege to be on welfare, it’s a right.” National Review wrote that some NWRO leaders were anti-American radicals and that they were trying to enlist the poorer members of the black community (which National Review wrote only “sensibly” wanted higher benefits) in order to further NWRO’s broader radical agenda. Commenting on NWRO’s use of rights language, National Review bitterly alluded to the old spiritual, writing, “All God’s chillun got rights, except the taxpayers.”
In the same month National Review published an editorial titled “The Poverty Professional.” The editors remarked, “poverty, it becomes daily clearer, is a legitimate and often permanent occupation. Like steam fitting or accountancy.” About the demand for rising benefit levels, the editors wrote, “Fifty years ago, minimal food and shelter were judged enough; today the poverty professionals expect television sets, automobiles, credit at department stores, Easter wardrobes.” National Review wanted to be on the steam fitter’s side and was trying to appeal to the steam fitter to join the conservative anti-welfare side.
There was another class that fed off of the taxpayers through the welfare system. This was the welfare administrator whose job depended on poverty and the transfer of funds to the poor through the welfare system and whose nightmare was the end of poverty. National Review wrote that for this bureaucrat, “his job depends on poverty: lots and lots of surplus poverty. As a federal careerist, he is rated on his ability to pass out his quota of tax dollars or more.” On the bureaucrats dysfunctional relationship with welfare recipients National Review wrote, “If he does succeed, he may eliminate poverty and with it his job and have to work for a living.”
This view of the taxpayer being attacked by an absurdist welfare system was fleshed out in a furious letter to the editor by National Review contributor Patricia Coyne. She wrote that “Welfare mothers scream with rage when the city regretfully is unable to raise their children’s clothing allotment and all the while their middle-class peers forage at rummage sales.”
National Review wrote that in Massachusetts, a family of four on AFDC and all the associated programs (Medicaid, subsidized rent, etc.) received the equivalent of $7,671.55 a year in benefits, while the average wage earner in Massachusetts received $6,396.00 in wages. A year's worth of earnings on the minimum wage was $3,338.00. National Review dryly observed that “State Commissioner Robert Ott wants to raise the dole by $1,200.”
M. Stanton Evans pointed out the political basis for hoping that this class war strategy would bear fruit for conservatives. He noted that the U.S. was becoming “a nation of suburbs” and that as Americans join “suburbia’s army of home owners and taxpayers, they develop an antagonism toward Big Government, social welfare plans, high taxes and inflation.”
These suburban taxpayers were quite different from the “provident” mentioned by the Wall Street Journal in 1965. National Review regularly used the visuals and symbolism of the working and lower middle classes when talking about the taxpayer. The jobs described (steam fitter) the activities (rummaging for second hand clothes), the places where people are described as living (the new growing suburbs) pointed to a socially and economically broad coalition of taxpayers who had in common that they worked, paid taxes, and were being hurt by the basic injustice of paying for those who refused to work, and by the welfare bureaucrats and middle-class radicals egging them on.
The Wall Street Journal picked up the same themes. In January 10, 1967 the Journal published an editorial titled “Welfare Gone Wild” that cited “the whole snowballing range of handouts for the rich and poor, farmers and businessmen, city and state and practically everybody except the ordinary tax-ridden middle-class man.” The Journal avoided mentioning among these special interests the retirees (on Social Security and Medicare) who presumably came from the middle and working classes. The editorial was positioning the Journal toward a politics that was more middle-class oriented, both by including the middle and (presumably working) class as “tax-ridden” and by avoiding attacks on the transfer programs that were most popular among the middle class.
The Wall Street Journal’s then-editor Vermont Royster wrote an article that set the interests of the welfare receiving poor against the interests of the taxpayer. The occasion for the article was the argument over eligibility investigations for welfare recipients. Royster wrote that eligibility investigations of poor people on welfare was considered a mean-spirited, dehumanizing invasion of privacy, but argued that the IRS was far more intrusive in its investigations of taxpayers’ financial and marital lives.
Today’s “makers vs. takers” rhetoric finds an important precedent in the Wall Street Journal adoption of a formal scheme for this class war in a May 1969 editorial titled “Producers and Non-Producers”: “We are increasingly becoming a nation of producers and non-producers,” the Journal wrote, “with the former expected to support the latter no matter how stiff the price grows.”
This way of looking at welfare drew the line between the working population, regardless of income level, on one side against a fraction of the people receiving federal transfer payments—but not those receiving middle-class entitlements—and their allies and enablers. This was a much more populist and potentially popular approach to welfare than the one the Wall Street Journal had articulated four years earlier. It was a new class-war approach to welfare, in which conservatives took the side of the taxpayers against the welfare recipients and the recipients’ allies, and sought to speak for the interests of the worker regardless of the worker’s income level.
As Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin have observed, “In the course of the 1960s, the imagery of class conflict in America was turned on its head. Liberals—who had been thought of as defenders of the working classes in the 1930s, and who in the early 1960s embraced the cause of the most downtrodden of Americans, southern blacks and the poor—by the mid-1960s were viewed by many as an arrogant elite of ‘limousine liberals.’”
Conservatives—those “economic royalists denounced by FDR in the 1930s as the aristocratic defenders of privilege and power—were emerging in the 1960s as the new populists, speaking for the common man and woman.” Isserman and Kazin were writing about the crime issue, but they might as well have been referring to the conservative reorientation on welfare. Conservative journalists had dialed back their critique of middle and working-class oriented welfare state programs and focused their hostility on AFDC and associated programs. They also crafted a pro-taxpayer rhetoric on welfare that was as inclusive of the working-class as of the wealthy. What we saw in the recently leaked tape of Mitt Romney’s remarks was a return to that earlier rhetoric—politically unsuccessful as it was morally problematic.
And this does not even get to all that wrong with what Romney said, because even that second, more politically prudent conservative class war rhetoric fell short as a reform strategy. The class war strategy of pitting the “producers against the non-producers” did not lead to welfare reform. Railing against welfare may have helped some candidates win elections, but welfare remained stubbornly unreformed for decades.
Conservatives only got the initiative on welfare policy when they put themselves on the side of welfare recipients. Writers like George Gilder, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead did not write off welfare recipients or argue that those on welfare did not want to take responsibility for their own lives. These conservative and libertarian writers put themselves on the side of the welfare recipients and against a dysfunctional system that was hurting those it was supposed to help. Conservatives did best on welfare when they stopped writing off the non-working poor. Conservatives of the 1960s were able to find common ground with working-class voters who expected to receive government-provided old age benefits. Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s were able to craft a pro-welfare recipient rhetoric and policy agenda on welfare reform. That should give Mitt Romney (and the rest of us) some clues about how to handle the 47% who happen not to have an income tax liability in a given year.
Pete Spiliakos writes for Postmodern Conservative.
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Comments:
It appears to me from this single example that the rich and very rich are "takers" from the government to a far greater degree than any layers of the poor or middle-class. Many other examples of "taking" from the government by the rich could be cited, including by Romney himself; this probably explains his continuing refusal to make public his tax returns (journalist Matt Taibbi has recently chronicled, among other things, how Romney's own company was saved from bankruptcy by a government handout).
However, The TARP and its follow-on government giveaways are such obvious, large, and well-publicized examples of blatant "taking" by the rich that it continues to boggle my mind how commentators on these issues whose supreme desire is for justice could simple ignore their relevance to the discussion.
Also, Social Security is NOT an entitlement in the same way that welfare is. Those who receive it have been paying into it their entire working lives. They are thus merely having returned to them what was originally taken away from them by the government, and not receiving a "free handout."
SR
I agree with quite a bit in your essays. A part of me feels that no one person's labor should earn them $250 million dollars. I was shocked when a "social justice liberal" friend of mine could condemn a businessman for making $1 million but give a pass to Albert Pujols for his $67 million contract with the Cardinals. Her defense when I pointed out her hypocrisy was, "But he's so good. He's worth it."
I bring up the Pujols example because I think it points to two other issues getting lost in the polemics surrounding this issue:
1) Personal Property Rights.
and
2) Freedom and Differences in how we value things.
There are only a few ways to eliminate the "excesses of Wall Street". Both require legally and philosophically undermining the very things such eliminations would seek to secure--the well-being of the middle and lower classes--because they would undermine the very standing of Personal Property Rights and Freedom.
If Romney doesn't have the right to spend the money others freely gave him under legal contracts, then what right do you and I have to spend our earnings as we see fit?
Marx was not mistaken in presuming that the logical consequence of societal equality was the dissolution of personal freedoms and personal property. He did fail to see the practical reality proven by every Communist regime that equality only guarantees the lowest common denominator for all.
So there is an extremely slippery slope we are treading on here. Ironically, it is a slope that is elegantly dealt with by Christian theology in the concepts of voluntary charity and generosity. But the sad movement of society away from Christianity and toward secularism has impeded the very remedy to the excesses we all lament.
CotEast, you mention that in, "ongoing discussions about "givers" versus "takers," the elephant in the room is that by far the biggest "takers" in recent years have been the high titans of finance."
The choice of words is interesting, doubly so because the discussion elsewhere hasn't been about "givers", but "makers". Those who "gave" to the "titans of finance" were members of both political parties who "gave" things they did not themselves make. Are they "givers" or "thieves"? They gave the "titans" money that was not theirs, but ours (those of us who pay taxes, anyway).
We cannot escape the difficult truth that we in a sense authorized them to do this by the nature of our representative democracy.
We cannot escape the difficult truth that "bailing out Wall Street" was in fact bailing out many, many middle-class Americans. We are the stock market. Every one of us that works for a business that is publicly traded, whose estimation of value hinges on whether we (collectively) contribute to the company or steal from it. Every one of us that has done the responsible thing and tried to invest in our own retirement through 501K or 403b, Roth, IRA, etc. is also part of "Wall Street".
It strikes me that in this common endeavor called "culture", "society", and "life" we cannot escape that we are all bound together collectively, but also suffer tremendously when many 1) fail to act as though their future rested on their own efforts alone and 2) fail to live lives of virtue and generosity.
"Pray as though everything depended on God. Act as though everything depended on oneself."
Does Class Warfare benefit anyone but the corrupt politicians? Does ignoring the cultural drought in personal responsibility benefit anyone at all?
Romney is not totally wrong in pointing out the disparity or destructiveness inherent in our tax system or the Entitlement mentality of too many. Neither is he completely right in seemingly painting with such a broad brush.
Democracy is unworkable unless the citizenry is virtuous (e.g., do not vote primarily based on their personal economic self interest), because might-makes-right rule (i.e., majority rule) inevitably results in adverse selection of leadership: responsible (i.e. honest) leaders lose; irresponsible leaders—those who tell the people what they want to hear (i.e., that they can have their cake and eat it, too—win. Sooner or later, the foundation crumbles. †
What the welfare state has created, 47% of us hate 53% of us because they see them as greedy and 53% of us hate 47% of us because they see them as lazy. The government stands in the middle and throws gas on each fire. And now, your telling me, we can't discuss it, or fix it, out of the fear that someone will call us names and we'll lose elections.
When the government gets involved, it usually make a mess. The "greatest generation" was the greatest generation because they had to. They took care of each other not because they had to, but because they knew it was the right thing to do. And when you received a helping hand from your family or friend, you were grateful and counted it as a blessing. You also wanted to return the favor. All that is gone thanks to the welfare state; and the topic to toxic to discuss openly.
Democracy is unworkable unless the citizenry is virtuous (e.g., they do not routinely vote primarily based on their personal economic self interest), because might-makes-right, majority rule inevitably results in adverse selection of leadership: responsible (i.e. honest) leaders lose; irresponsible leaders—those who tell the people what they want to hear (i.e., that they can have their cake and eat it, too)—win. Sooner or later, the foundation crumbles. †
No, actually, the Republicans were doing a brilliant job of snatching the populist banner from the hands of the Democrats by the late 60s. The "solid South" became solidly Republican, and Reagan seemed to seal the fate of the "brie-nibling, chardonney sipping", Democrats in their university ivory towers. Until Romney came along. He just may single-handedly undo the whole thing, as Mr. Spiliakos points out so well.
And to continue with children: what about the children of the chronically poor, whether through their own fault or otherwise: are these children to blame for the improvidence of their parents, and should we thus abandon them to their own devices, or does society have a responsibility to them?
And IF society does have a responsibility to them, does that go only as far as minimal sustenance?
Most of the people I read on sites like this live in a completely different America from the people you will find waiting in that office. Not that they don't see one another elsewhere, but the ones in uniform flipping burgers behind the stainless steel counter are largely just scenery to the good people who take the bags away with them. That's part of what the uniforms are for, to insulate the served from the common humanity of the server--or, if you like, to allow the served to forget that the servers have immortal souls and are equally important to God.
There is nothing philosophically incoherent in the "class baiting" quoted above, though I both disagree with it, and find it offends my taste. But, having myself lived through these last 60 years of it and listened to it as it happens, what is most consistent about it is the flat out factual ignorance of those who broadcast it. Particularly the ignorance of the spiritual nature and the common humanity of the people being baited.
For I presume all here are sure that, on The Last Day, no one will be asking whether or not any of us paid income tax.
I presume that by the "greatest generation" you mean the WWII generation. That's the usual meaning. So, they defeated nazism, fascism, and Imperial Japan without government help? Maybe some little old ladies growing victory gardens did their bit without the government, but the entire effort was government orchestrated and funded. Most men were in the military, which was government employment the last time I looked, and Rosie the Riveter was working at a defense plant that was funded by government contracts. I think it's safe to say the government didn't make too big a mess of that project.
If you invest in doing good and it also makes money for you, that is bad, or at least questionable. If you invest trying to do good and fail, clearly a saint. If you are successful, recognize a problem and offer a solution, really questionable. Promise heaven for the poor for several generations without any way of fulfilling the promise, that's great. Very intelligent.
I must say that the notion of The Greatest Generation "winning WW II" is rather spurious. The people born from 1905 to 1925 were basically callow kids who fought the war in its lowest ranks. The people who won that war were those born between 1885 and 1905, who passed on in the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's virtually without remark, and who had been tagged long before as The Lost Generation. They were the people doing the leading and making the decisions, most good, some dreadful.
The real achievement of The Greatest Generation was the 30 years that they kept us from thermonuclear war until the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight. And their major contribution was caution and restraint toward an enemy that was, as far as they knew, set to endure for decades longer. Nobody pays much attention to this, as great as the people were who pulled it off. Their real achievement was not fighting, it was keeping the peace, and their failures occurred from the few times they actually used military force.
We could have learned this lesson from them far better than we have done, for most of our failures stem from the same cause.
Unnecessary millions were slaughtered under Stalin (12-18 million), Mao (50-80 million), and Pol Pot (2+ million), to name but a few of the tyrants that were allowed to roam free. Perhaps even more under the "peace" of the Cold War than were lost in all of WWII. The economies of many of those countries still haven't recovered, leaving the people still in such poverty and despair that Russians abort 7 of every 10 pregnancies.
It is difficult to play the "what if" game of history, but it's irrefutable that there was a three year window when the U.S. could have brought down the Soviets and curtailed such bloodshed and misery. The window would've been larger if Oppenheimer hadn't turned traitor.
That sham "peace" you speak of was bought at too high a price. That "real achievement" (of avoiding thermonuclear war) happened more purely by Providence than any human effort. I'd also say it's a sad day when mere survival is considered something to be lauded most highly.
Interesting comment. I now realize that I am a member of the Greatest Generation, and I didn't even know it! I was a B-52 crewmember in the mid-sixties in North Dakota. Very tedious, endless duty, but as you said, it guaranteed the peace. The Soviets were never going to dare an attack. You make a plausible point about our errors in getting into actual combat. I would say with the exception of the Korean War, though. We had the entire UN behind us, and it succeeded in keeping the South free. I always thought, and still think, though, that the Vietnam War was a pointless fiasco, just as our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be. Now the peace may be kept by bankruptcy. We can't afford any more wars.
@Artaban7:
Honestly, it was depressing to read your bloodthirsty comments. You seem to think we could have defeated the USSR and China with a massive nuclear first strike. In that event, which would almost certainly have ended in disaster, the body count would have dwarfed the millions of victims of communism that you cite, and whatever American president was presiding over it would now be remembered as the greatest mass murderer in history. Some top Air Force generals were pushing for this in the fifties (the window of opportunity you refer to), but Eisenhower was sane enough to veto the idea. And by the way, Oppenheimer "turning traitor" (if you insist on that terminology) didn't narrow the window of opportunity. He was quickly sidelined for his opposition to the Super, and Truman gave the go-ahead for its immediate development.
There are two great commandments in military science. First, never invade Russia. And the second is like unto it: Never invade China.
Well, you're probably right that we could've defeated the Russians and Chinese with a nuclear strike, but that's certainly NOT what I was advocating. It wouldn't have had to be massive, though. Nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed some 246,000--nowhere near the 70+ odd million slaughtered by the Communists.
As for your claim that the "body count would have dwarfed the millions that I cite", you have not a shred of factual evidence to base that upon. Many credit the fear of further bombing with causing Japanese surrender. The Japanese were a more psychologically dedicated and implacable foe than the Russians. Why do you presume we would have had to kill millions to have stopped Stalin, pre-1948?
Where exactly do you see me advocating a massive nuclear strike? Could you please point to where I say that? You sound like you're old enough to know the adage about what happens when you assume things, Rick. Your assumption is wrong.
I've never been comfortable with the U.S. use of nukes in Japan--probably the most morally questionable U.S. act of the war.
What is without question is that we had overwhelming conventional force at the conclusion of WWII, and perhaps never was our gravitas with the international community (minus the Axis) greater. Yet the full potential of those was squandered, and the leaders of the day--war weary as they were--failed to quell the Communist tyrants at their most vulnerable moment. That's a pretty glaring and costly failure.
What is truly more bloodthirsty, suggesting close to 100 million could have been saved if the U.S. had struck off the serpents head, before the Communists had nukes, or suggesting that those millions dead were preferable to a lesser number of American losses?
Alright, my error. I really thought you were talking about the nuclear window of opportunity in the early fifties, before the USSR could have retaliated with a massive nuclear counterstrike. (Maybe only several US cities incinerated.)
So, you were talking about General Patton's idea: strike east with our armies during the summer of 1945. "By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10 to 13 million men....The Red Army emerged from the war as one of the most powerful land armies in history with more tanks and artillery than all other countries combined." [Wikipedia]
Great idea! Piece of cake! Hitler had a similar idea in 1941, and we know what that came to.
Also, though we were not able to know this until after the fall of the USSR and full access to Soviet records, Marshal Zukov was one the most brilliant generals of the war, a tactical genius both on the defensive and on the offensive. Finally, the discipline and tenacity of the Red Army was second to none. Through three years of war against a proven enemy, 1 in every 4 (!) Russian military personnel died, but that army never came near to breaking. Our casualties? About 1 in 20.
In other words had we attacked the Red Army in Europe in the late 40's, we would have lost. There are now really comprehensive accounts of the Battle of Stalingrad. Go read one. And then come back and tell us that defeating the Red Army before 1948 would have been a piece of cake.
Further, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the most destructive aerial bombardments in the Pacific Theater. That honor goes to the night napalm raids on Tokyo which had occurred prior to the Atomic bombings. Tokyo was crowded, overbuilt, and largely built of paper and wood, a perfect target for napalm. Thousands of Japanese died, not instantaneously vaporized by 20 kilotons but slowly burned alive in their homes at night. But it required scores of B-29's and significant American casualties to accomplish this.
What made the Atomic raids so devastating to the Japanese, was not the destruction, but the fact that it was a single bomb carried in a single airplane, and, as such, could be used on them with near total surprise and no chance to fight back. The Japanese had no way of knowing how many bombs we had, and were perfectly well aware that we had hundreds of bombers. Not being able to fight back was the final blow to the Japanese morale--much worse than mere death, it was death with disgrace.
You should read more genuine history. Almost everybody under the age of about 50 should read more history. If they did, they would not talk such utter nonsense about both the past and the present.
Second, the only fully successful military action of the period was the First Gulf War, ordered by the last of the Greatest Generation to hold high office, and masterminded by a man who truly had learned the lessons of Southeast Asia about what force can and cannot do.
It was so successful, it's very easy to forget it ever happened.
Cheers.
The above obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Army on September 27th, 2012.
@Joseph and Rick: I don't dispute the fortitude of the Russian people or strengths of the Red Army at the time of war's end, but for God's sake don't make the amateur's mistake of equating numbers to strength.
1. The industrial and agricultural basis for adequately supplying that Army was shattered by war's end. If not for the Allied material aid throughout WWII, the Soviets would've lost more than the 19 million they did to famine, and the 40 million overall. That's precisely why they had to demobilize from 11.3 million to a little over 2 million--if they didn't pull those 9 million for food production and infrastructure rehabilitation, even more millions would have starved!
2. We encircled them--unlike any other foe that's attempted protracted war.
3. As Joseph admits himself, "What made the Atomic raids so devastating to the Japanese, was not the destruction, but the fact that it was a single bomb carried in a single airplane, and, as such, could be used on them with near total surprise and no chance to fight back. The Japanese had no way of knowing how many bombs we had, and were perfectly well aware that we had hundreds of bombers. Not being able to fight back was the final blow to the Japanese morale--much worse than mere death, it was death with disgrace."
You make my case for me. The Russians had the same reason to doubt and fear as the Japanese--until Oppenheimer helped them get the bomb.
4. You grossly overestimate the influence of Zhukov. Hitler proved that the advantages of great generals and technology could be nullified by the ineptitude of the "great leader". Stalin was no less inept--and significantly more paranoid--than Hitler. Zhukov was demoted in 1946 because of this and was being further marginalized politically. And again as before, he could only be on one front.
5. The advantage that made Russia hard to conquer would've been a liability against the Americans, who had the mobility, logistics, and position to strike from all sides/fronts, forcing massive capital costs for the Russians to reposition all those tanks from Eastern Europe.
6. What was needed was not to occupy Russia at all, but to prevent Soviet domination/creation of the Eastern bloc (depriving her of the natural resources she'd use to wage the Cold War), and remove that psychopath Stalin from power. That alone would've saved millions of lives.
But we've rambled off topic enough...
Undoubtedly true, but I can't resist asking about one point.
"The Russians had the same reason to doubt and fear as the Japanese--until Oppenheimer helped them get the bomb."
I thought I was reasonably well informed about the early atomic age. I know all about Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, et. al., who thought they were doing the world a favor by slipping atomic secrets to the Soviets. But I never heard about how Oppenheimer actively helped them develop it. Could you explain?
Here's a link to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Security_hearing
There are more extreme allegations to be found elsewhere, suggesting he arranged/allowed for schematics of the bomb to fall into Soviet hands. Given the cloud of Communists surrounding him, I think it entirely believable.
As I suspected, the information you refer to details Oppenheimer's many leftist associations in the thirties, but no betrayal of atomic secrets. During the Great Depression, American progressives often had sympathies for either fascism or communism. It was looking like Marx might have been right about capitalism self-destructing from its own "inner contradictions." It didn't, of course. But many thoughtful people were looking at the Soviet experiment and the revival of Italy and Germany under fascism. Even Will Rogers (not your stereotype traitor) took some flak because he expressed admiration for Mussolini. Intellectuals were especially attracted to Marxism.
However, even your Wikipedia article concludes that Oppenheimer never betrayed the US:
" Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."
"In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but was never successful; Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan Project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union."
In the video, Romney conflates those not paying federal income tax (most elderly and low paid family people) with those who will never take responsibility for their lives ( 4.1% of the U.S. are actually on full welfare). His increased losses in swing states in this AM's polls have something to do with that. The smart and lucky are tolerated all the time in the U.S. until they diss those who worked harder in life at much lower pay. The coal miner works way harder than Romney and it shows on their faces. The coal miner though could easily need medicaid someday for a skilled nursing home when his lungs give out during his 80's. Romney will never need medicaid neither will Ryan whose wife inherited several million...Ryan who wants to cut the Federal part of mediCAID by $800 billion over ten years.