“It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won,” he said. It was here that the new president famously declared “unconditional war on poverty” to a country still reeling from John F. Johnson’s first major attempt to frame an answer, his first State of the Union address to Congress in 1964, is the one we tend to remember. The question wasn’t whether to fight poverty, but how. Federal aid to primary and secondary education.
Health insurance for the elderly and the poor. On the evening of November 22, 1963, from his bedroom at the Elms-the Johnson family’s stately home in Northwest Washington, D.C.-he told aides Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti, “You know, when I went into that office tonight and they came in and started briefing me on what I have to do, do you realize that every issue that is on my desk tonight was on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” Civil rights. And understanding those myths is the key to figuring out what to do now.įrom the moment his presidency began, Johnson was committed to completing the unfinished legacy of the New Deal and Fair Deal, including measures to alleviate the sting of poverty. But it’s a myth to say the Great Society failed, just as it’s a myth to portray it as a radical left-wing, big-government project. The idea that the economy might someday stop growing, or that inequality would increase, rarely factored seriously into liberal thinking.įifty years later, it’s perfectly legitimate to ask whether Johnson’s vision is adequate in a country in which fewer workers enjoy employer pensions and health care, 31 percent of children live in single-parent families (up from 12 percent in 1960), household wages have long been stagnant, and inequality has reverted to levels we have not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. Governing in an age of unmatched prosperity, the architects of the Great Society were convinced that the means to a more just society was not cutting the pie into smaller slices so that everyone would enjoy an equal share, but baking a larger pie.
THE GREAT SOCIETY SPEECH CENTRAL DISAGREEMENT FULL
They did not broadly support quantitative measures like cash transfers or a guaranteed minimum income but, rather, believed that qualitative measures like education, workforce training, access to health care, food security and full political empowerment would ensure each American a level playing field and equal opportunity to share in the nation’s prosperity. The presidential aides who conceived and implemented its component parts rejected policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth or condition. Yet for all Johnson’s grandiose rhetoric, the Great Society was more centrist-and is more critical to the nation’s social and economic fabric-than has been commonly understood. Indeed, there is no more a dogged advocate of overhauling the Great Society’s antipoverty programs than House Speaker Paul Ryan, who claims that their “top-down approach” “created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities.” Many signature items of Johnson’s legacy-from civil and voting rights to environmental protections and aid to public schools-are today under assault. Congressional Republicans control both chambers and are far more conservative in their views than they were in Reagan’s time. Johnson’s legacy reinforced the what Reagan called the “central political error of our time”: the flawed notion that “government and bureaucracy” were the “primary vehicle for social change.”Ī Democratic Congress blocked Reagan in his attempts to unravel Johnson’s work, but no such obstacle encumbers President Donald Trump. Twenty-one years later, in a scorching address delivered in 1983, President Ronald Reagan denounced the Great Society as a bundle of expensive and failed initiatives that contributed to, rather than alleviated, suffering.
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