Opinion: What the ‘woke student’ and the ‘welfare queen’ have in common

Every age seems to need a bogeyman, some negative image against which good people measure themselves. When I entered college in the mid-1970s, the term "welfare queen" was being popularized by Ronald Reagan as he campaigned for president and was starting to be taken up by the mass media. It would soon go on to upstage the outworn "commie" and well-worn "dirty hippie" as objects of vitriol in the American political imagination. Self-described regular, decent Americans had in "welfare queen" a new image against which to define themselves.