More Great Society
With regard to the post below, commenter rab wants to know: “If Matt’s intent is to ‘debunk’ a ‘myth’, maybe he should address some of the reasons why people think the Great Society programs were a failure first.”
Sure. I don’t think this is too difficult. There were tons of domestic policy shifts undertaken under the “Great Society” rubric. Taken as a whole, the package was extremely successful. But several Great Society initiatives were either poorly designed or else outright failures. At around the same time there were political backlashes against cultural liberalism and liberal approaches to things like crime and national security. As a result of those backlashes, conservatives moved into political ascendancy. One of several consequences of this is that the “Great Society” concept has come to be identified with the unpopular elements of the Johnson-era domestic agenda — AFDC, “maximum feasible participation,” etc. But the Great Society programs that made the biggest difference — notably Medicare, Medicaid, and Title I federal aid to education — remain so extremely popular that conservative politicians don’t dare mount frontal assaults on them.
34 Responses to “More Great Society”
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August 27th, 2008 at 9:28 am
“Sure. I don’t think this is too difficult.”
yup. the answers you give say a lot of it.
plus the fact that, even if the great society agenda had contained not even one clunker in the whole batch, the republicans would have hated it and invented smears about it, as they did.
not because it failed. but because it succeeded.
you see, when this nations wealth flows to the poor and lifts them out of poverty, then the mega-rich republicans get a little less. and they can’t tolerate that.
and when working people get a living wage, they start demanding broader justice and a bigger stake.
and republicans hate that.
republicans don’t see a living wage: they see “higher labor costs”.
face it: they were going to invent smears about the great society no matter how much it succeeded. indeed, the more it succeeded, they more they had to smear it.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:30 am
In addition, there had been a huge, long-term, organized right wing reaction against the more effective and more just New Deal programs which had been compared to socialism. The provision of real employment, whether directly by the government in works programs or in revamped other initiatives, would drive up wages, and of course would be opposed by all the political forces who oppose the rising of wages.
Local reform initiatives such as the North Carolina governor Terry Sanford had encouraged (and which preceded the Great Society) attempted to help with real jobs attainment, home ownership, and the like, but seemed to encourage cross-racial organizing, so conservatives reacted harshly to them.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am
The greatest failure of the Great Society was the Office of Economic Opportunity. But it was slightly funded and largely experimental. It was driven by ideological assumptions about radical democracy rather than empirical testing and adjustment. But in the scope of things, it was less of a failure than the rest of the Great Society was a success.
But the real cost of the Great Society was the rise in unrealistic expectations generated by both Johnson and the American left. Their rhetoric at the time left themselves open to decades of uninformed attacks because they promised so much in such a short time.
Yes, we reached the moon in less than a decade. But that was simple compared to pushing poverty out of Appalachia and Harlem.
The anti-poverty programs should never have been described as a “War.” Wars have ends (at least they used to). Wars have goals (at least they used to). Wars have clear costs (at least they used to).
A sober assessment of the Great Society would have to consider both the real-world changes generated by the programs (largely Great) and the cultural and political opportunities squandered or missed (largely horrifying).
– Siva
August 27th, 2008 at 9:56 am
“the Great Society programs that made the biggest difference — notably Medicare, Medicaid, and Title I federal aid to education — remain so extremely popular that conservative politicians don’t dare mount frontal assaults on them.”
Well, in 1995, the entire Republican Party attempted a massive frontal assault on Medicare and Medicaid.
They failed, and the fallout from that is just as responsible as the Iraqi Misadventure for the fact that we now live in a Democratic leaning nation.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Another thing needs to be said here, which is that in a certain way, eliminating poverty is not something people want to do. Decreasing poverty meant increasing the lot for many people who were in direct competition with the poor whites who were also seeking favor in the employment/housing/etc. market. The simple fact is that it was (rather accurately) perceived as an embrace of the white and black poor at the expense of the white working class, and they didn’t like it precisely because it worked.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:04 am
It is a fact that the poverty rate was cut in half during the sixties, but its not quite as clear if that was the result of the Great Society. The Economic Opportunity Act was passed in 1964 and Medicare in 1965. Remember that Johnson pushed most of these things through after Kennedy died in November 1963. Conservatives might point to the cut in the marginal tax rate that Kennedy Proposed — cutting the top marginal tax rate from top marginal rate from 91 to 70 percent. But this was also passed by Johnson in 1964 (which conservatives are reluctant to divulge). What might be more close to the truth is that the marginal tax rates did induce some growth, and that programs such as Medicaid and Medicare have worked to keep the poverty rate from jumping back up to above 20 percent.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Good post and good comments so far.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I think the two elements of the Great Society that were most responsible for the backlash were affirmative action and busing, even though both were really court-driven rather than legislation-driven. These, plus the Warren and Burger courts’ liberal rulings on social issues, are what damaged teh Democratic brand.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am
When you say:
At around the same time there were political backlashes against cultural liberalism and liberal approaches to things like crime and national security.
I think that nails it. This explanation also shows the difference between the New Deal and the Great Society. Namely, in the broadest possible terms, the New Deal was predicated upon the need to help working families. It was, therefore, affirming of traditional American culture. The Great Society (elements of it), by contrast, pro-actively ‘eroded’, in the minds of conservatives, traditional American values such as self-reliance, etc.
Matt
August 27th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I also think it’s tough to show the success of a program that ameliorated, but didn’t eliminate, a problem. Media coverage of economic issues tends to focus on specific examples, and it’s certainly not hard to find cases of, say, desperate poverty in Appalachia and report on them.
It’s not that the reporting itself is a bad thing — rural poverty is largely hidden from most people. Absent a larger context, though, when it gets contrasted with (as Siva says) lofty rhetoric from supporters, it’s ready made for right-wing stories about how Government Just Doesn’t Work.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Conservatives might point to the cut in the marginal tax rate that Kennedy Proposed — cutting the top marginal tax rate from top marginal rate from 91 to 70 percent.
Let them. No Democrat in the 21st Century thinks that marginal tax rates that high is a good idea.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Say what you want about AFDC and the details of how it was administered but the poverty rate was cut in half.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:22 am
matt bondy–
i don’t disagree with you altogether.
but i think if you were to dig into the republican reaction to the new deal, you would find plenty of rhetoric about it “eroding traditional american culture” etc.
that is not a charge the right invented for the great society. it’s a charge they *always* trot out. they trotted it out when child labor laws were put into place, for god’s sake.
so this contrast where new deal=american whereas great society =unamerican is pretty much just post-hoc hypocrisy. it’s a way for the right to bash the ’60s, by pretending that they supported fdr in the ’30s.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Somehow, I think Johnson’s signing civil and voting rights into law had more to do with the conservatives’ ascendency than any single other thing. Conservatives were good and mad about the passage of those two bills, and their anger was harnessed by the GOP with the so-called “Southern Strategy.” The GOP has been using that as the basis for its race-baiting politics for the last forty years.
If you think about it, poor whites and poor blacks were a natural constituency with many issues in common. We should have evolved into a class-based affirmative action initiative that would help the poor regardless of race. Instead, the GOP chose to divide us into two groups opposed to one another.
I’ve never understood why conservatives vote against their own economic interests. It’s the classic “cut off your nose to spite your face,” isn’t it? Only big corporations and the very rich do well under Republican administrations (and certainly when the Congress is also controlled by Republicans), yet poor conservatives are left entirely out of the prosperity their richer brethren enjoy. Makes no sense to me at all.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
AFDC and other welfare programs became unpopular when the believed target of those programs changed from rural poor white women to urban poor black women (this happened before urbanites became the major recepient). This isn’t hard to figure out.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
There were also the problems of the programs having early success and then stalling in the face of the more entrenched poverty and the slowing of the economic growth rate in the ’70’s. The message of the Jesse Helmses was that Democrats used the anti-poverty programs to take money from hard working white people to give it to lazy black people to buy their votes. As the economy hit rough patches in the ’70’s, this message resonated in areas far beyond the south as demonstrated by George Wallace’s success in his run for President. I put the rejection of the success of the Great Society as just another counter-factual idea that Republicans are required to believe.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Was the Great Society a success in Appalachia? You bet. Get in your time machine and go back to the mountains circa 1963. When you return, revisit the mountains.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
You should have included Headstart as a Great Society program that has worked well over the long haul.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
What I’d heard — I don’t have a link, but this is the argument I’d seen in the past — was that various measures of African-Americans’ well-being had declined, like percent out of poverty, percent in two-parent households, etc.
I haven’t checked any of these sources, but this is what I’ve heard from conservatives railing against LBJ — people I generally disagree with. So, just to play Devil’s advocate, what I would ask would be to see if the general trend of that graph holds up across different demographic groups, specifically African-Americans.
(And if not, why?)
August 27th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
“At around the same time there were political backlashes against cultural liberalism and liberal approaches to things like crime and national security. As a result of those backlashes, conservatives moved into political ascendancy.”
That’s some rigorous delineation of cause and effect, Matt! No need to mention things like a doubling of the murder rate between 1964 and 1975 …
August 28th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Re: No need to mention things like a doubling of the murder rate between 1964 and 1975 …
The vast majority of voters were never in any particular danger of murder, and the murder rate enver came close to the highway death toll.
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