Why Do We Hate Poor People?

Part 3: Because Blaming the Poor Helps Those in Power Avoid Blame Themselves

“The poor have few defenders, no effective lobby, and little economic clout. They are the easiest people in the country to demonize.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times, 2005

The word scapegoat comes to English from the 1530s translation of the Hebrew Bible, specifically Leviticus 16. In the ritual of Yom Kippur, two goats were chosen: one was sacrificed to God, the other was symbolically loaded with the sins of the community and sent into the wilderness; azazel, the “goat of departure.”¹ The latter carried away guilt, shame, and blame so the community could go on unburdened.

The term took hold in English as a metaphor for displaced blame. Literally assigning responsibility to someone else, often someone powerless, so others might be cleansed of doubt or consequence. Over time, scapegoating became shorthand for the political art of misdirection: shifting public anger away from institutions and toward convenient targets.

In modern politics, poor people have become that target.

They are cast as economically marginal and morally suspect. Held responsible for crime, urban decay, addiction, and the so-called burden on public finances. This is one of the tools of neoliberal capitalism. Scapegoating the poor serves an essential political function: it converts structural crises into manageable narratives. Instead of interrogating failing housing markets, gutted labor protections, or fiscal austerity, blame is redirected. The system stays intact. The target changes.

In this part, we examine how that targeting works. First, we explore how poor people are constructed as social threats through political language and media framing. Second, we trace how laws and policing practices criminalize poverty itself. And third, we look at the erosion of public obligation—the shift from collective responsibility to surveillance and control.

Poor People as Political Scapegoats

In times of social anxiety, those in power rarely invite scrutiny of the system. They look for someone else to blame. And in modern governance, few targets are more politically convenient than the poor. Unlike corporations or financiers, they have no lobbying arm. Unlike the middle class, they lack swing-vote leverage. Unlike the wealthy, they’re not donors. They are, as Barbara Ehrenreich put it, the easiest people in the country to demonize.²

Scapegoating poor people is a governing technique. When recessions hit, deficits balloon, or housing becomes unaffordable, the script is already written: someone is cheating the system. Someone is living off your taxes. Someone is getting something they don’t deserve. This manufactured resentment reroutes attention away from capital flight, deregulation, and austerity, and directs it downward.

The 1970s and 1980s saw this logic hardened into political orthodoxy. In the United States, Ronald Reagan used the invented figure of the “welfare queen” to stir public anger at social programs.³ In Canada, conservative leaders invoked “abuse of the system” to justify welfare cuts and to stigmatize those receiving assistance.⁴ Media campaigns depicted poor people through a lens of suspicion: as con artists, addicts, or dangerous vagrants. These stories weren’t just sensational; they were strategic.

Sociologist Stuart Hall called this tactic “moral panic”, a process where certain groups are exaggerated into threats so that crackdowns feel justified.⁵ These panics build consent for policies that might otherwise seem cruel: welfare caps, workfare requirements, drug testing for assistance. Each measure reinforces the idea that poverty is a problem of discipline, not economics.

It’s no accident that these narratives escalate during crisis. The 2008 financial crash, caused by predatory lending and regulatory failure, was followed not by a reckoning with Wall Street, but by a wave of cuts to social spending and a renewed culture war over who “deserved” help.⁶ The same pattern repeated during COVID-19, as temporary support measures gave way to moralizing about labor shortages and laziness.

Political utility lies in this inversion: the more a system fails, the more blame is offloaded. The poor are framed not just as unproductive, but as obstacles to everyone else’s success. They become symbols of everything the dominant class claims to oppose: dependence, disorder, deviance. That symbolism is crucial. It makes their exclusion seem like protection.

Law, Order, and Carceral Management

Modern policing responds to the visibility of poverty. Across North America, the most heavily policed spaces are the ones where the poor live, gather, or sleep. What’s being managed is presence as well as behaviour.

From colonial vagrancy statutes to contemporary loitering laws, poor people have long been treated as out of place when seen in public. In Canada, municipal bylaws regularly target panhandling, sleeping outdoors, or even “causing a nuisance”; broad categories designed not to address harm, but to displace the visibly destitute.⁷ In Ontario, Bill 6 proposes a provincial trespass regime that could preemptively remove people from parks, encampments, or transit shelters without criminal charges or due process.⁸ It’s not about crime. It’s about containment.

Sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls this the “criminalization of social insecurity.”⁹ When the welfare state recedes, the penal state expands. Prisons and police become tools for managing the consequences of inequality—homelessness, untreated mental illness, substance use—while leaving their root causes intact. The result is a political inversion: poverty becomes a police matter rather than a policy failure.

The 1990s “broken windows” theory intensified this shift. Its premise was that visible signs of disorder—graffiti, loitering, petty offenses—invited more serious crime. In practice, it authorized a wave of aggressive policing in poor neighborhoods, especially in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto.¹⁰ The targets weren’t criminals. They were people coded as out of place: Black teenagers, unhoused men, street-level sex workers. These weren’t security threats. They were symbols of social decline.

This logic persists in newer forms. In California, the CARE Court system empowers judges to mandate treatment plans for people with serious mental illness—often those living on the street—while giving law enforcement wide discretion over who qualifies.¹¹ Though marketed as compassionate, these measures function as tools of social triage. Services are not expanded; surveillance is.

In Windsor, Ottawa, and Hamilton, police are now embedded in encampment clearings, outreach teams, and crisis response units.¹² The goal is no longer to solve homelessness. It’s to manage its optics. Evictions don’t create housing, but they create visibility wins. Arrests don’t address addiction, but they reassure business owners. Poverty becomes both the symptom and the justification.

Governance by police reframes social crisis as personal deviance. It transforms poverty from a failure of collective provision into an individual threat to be removed. It replaces investment with enforcement. And once this logic takes hold, it becomes harder to imagine any other kind of response.

Together, these mechanisms reveal that hating the poor is more than a cultural bias. It’s a strategy of power.

The Death of Public Obligation

For most of modern history, liberal democracies operated under at least a nominal social contract: the idea that citizens, regardless of status, had a claim on shared infrastructure: schools, hospitals, housing, transit, clean water. That claim was never evenly honored, but it served as a political baseline. Today, that baseline is eroding. And as the commons withdraw, poor people are recast as burdens on society, not members of it.

This shift didn’t happen all at once. It was staged through decades of policy moves that reframed public services as sites of inefficiency, dependency, and fraud.¹³ Welfare was rebranded as a problem. Social housing was renamed "supportive housing," then underfunded or privatized. Universal programs gave way to targeted interventions that are means-tested, surveillance-heavy, and conditional. In each case, the rationale was the same: to prevent abuse.

Accountability replaced accessibility as the core value of service provision. In place of trust, we got audits. Recipients of social assistance were required to report income monthly, verify housing status, and disclose relationships that might “affect eligibility.”¹⁴ In Ontario, failure to report changes promptly could trigger fines, claw-backs, or disqualification. Public libraries and food banks increasingly adopted registration systems, ID checks, and behavior contracts. You could still access support, but only after proving you wouldn’t misuse it.

Wendy Brown calls this the hollowing out of democracy: a process where public institutions adopt market logic, treating people as clients or risks rather than rights-bearing participants.¹⁵ The poor are no longer owed anything. They must qualify. And those who fail to qualify are punished, not neglected.

This logic expands beyond welfare. Cities now use “defensive ^(hostile) architecture” to keep unhoused people from resting. Spiked ledges, segmented benches, or locked public bathrooms are seen throughout.¹⁶ Affordable housing waitlists stretch into decades. Public transit systems increase fines and enforcement while reducing coverage in low-income areas. In smart cities, digital access becomes the new gatekeeper: services are online-only, app-dependent, monitored through facial recognition or mobile tracking.¹⁷ These mechanisms don’t just restrict access. They send a message: this system is not for you.

The more conditional the commons becomes, the easier it is to treat poor people as outsiders. They are no longer members of a shared civic body. They are framed as drains on a system already strained. This story of scarcity, abuse, and moral failure justifies further withdrawal. Public good becomes private service. Rights become permissions. And exclusion looks like policy.

Because Hate Is Easier Than Accountability

We hate poor people because it’s politically useful to do so. Not in private, maybe, not always in word, but in policy, in media, in the decisions we normalize. Hatred, in this context, isn’t a feeling. It’s a function. It redirects blame. It manufactures enemies. It gives austerity moral cover, wraps policing in public interest, and turns underfunding into discipline. It allows those who benefit from inequality to pretend they’re defending order.

When poor people are framed as threats, their exclusion feels like safety. When they’re framed as cheats, their surveillance feels like fairness. When they’re framed as morally inferior, their suffering feels earned. This is what scapegoating does. It takes the violence of systemic failure and assigns it a face. And once the face is familiar, once the story is repeated enough, it no longer needs to be justified.

The poor absorb the blame for poverty. They absorb the consequences of every structural breakdown—housing, health care, labor, education—and still get told the problem is them. The scapegoat never gets invited back into the community. That’s the point.

In Part 4, we’ll examine how this political logic becomes emotional common sense through culture. How poor people are depicted, erased, humiliated, and distorted—until hatred no longer looks like hate at all. It looks like entertainment. It looks like news.

Footnotes

1. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 1020–1025.

1. Barbara Ehrenreich, “How Poor Is Poor?” New York Times, March 9, 2005.

2. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 108–117.

3. John Clarke, Disabling Professions: Welfare, Policy, and the Politics of Disablement (London: Open University Press, 2004), 65–73.

4. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 182–205.

5. Elizabeth Kolbert, “The New Poor,” The New Yorker, February 2009.

6. Bruce Porter, “Poverty, Rights, and the Rule of Law: Addressing the Legal Needs of the Poor,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 41, no. 1 (2003): 63–77.

7. Ontario Bill 6, Keeping Students in Class Act, 2022; analysis via Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO), 2023.

8. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 41–70.

9. Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 89–112.

10. CARE Court Fact Sheet, California Health and Human Services Agency, 2022.

11. City of Windsor Council Reports, 2023–2024; reports compiled by Windsor Alliance to End Homelessness.

12. Daniel Béland, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the Welfare State in the United States and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 93–105.

13. Income and Employment Reporting Rules, Ontario Works Policy Directives, Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, 2023.

14. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 123–151.

15. Selena Savić, “Hostile Urban Architecture: The Surveillance and Regulation of Public Space,” in Invisible Seams: Surveillance in the City, ed. A. Flynn and D. Skoll (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2021), 88–96.

16. Vincent Mosco, The Smart City in a Digital World (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2019), 147–167.