The loaded, coded reference to those who are “deserving” as opposed to “underserving” rationalizes the status quo of a citizenry divided between earthly heavens and hells — that is, between suburban utopia and ghetto squalor, good white families and bad black men, the rights-endowed and “aliens,” the innately intelligent and dumb savage brutes, civilized taxpayers and the lazy underclass. The sense of divine inevitability that informs this civic vision allows us to wash our hands of a whole raft of otherwise obvious political and biblical injunctions: feed the poor, heal the sick, educate the illiterate, house the homeless, rehabilitate the wounded. Instead we have watched the divisions in the United States grow wider and wider. The distance between the rich and the poor has never been bigger. Nationally, public schools are more segregated than they were in 1954 when the Brown case was decided.
“An Egregious Collocation of Vocables,” in What Orwell Didn’t Know, edited by András Szántó, pp. 47-48