|Amity Shlaes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Great Society, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Port Huron Statement, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Tom Hayden
Planning the Great Society
by Amity Shlaes|
Planning the Great Society
The Losing Winner and the Winning Loser of 1964
President Lyndon Johnson (White House photo / alamy.com)Is It Time to Give Up Aggressive Crime-Fighting?
Duped by Grand Expectations
The silver anniversary of the Great Society was last year, and perhaps the most remarkable feature of the retrospectives by the academic and media establishment was the hard feelings shown toward the man most responsible for it. As Randall B. Woods points out in his new book, liberals (with a few exceptions, like historian Robert Dallek) have never forgiven LBJ for Vietnam, and this obscures their view of the Great Society. Woods, on the other hand, is rather sympathetic to him in Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism. Or least he does not…
Putnam’s Quest for Community
Robert Putnam is on a quest for community, but in his recent bestseller Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, he’s looking in the wrong place. Thinking more collectively will not restore America’s depleted “social capital.” We need a revival of human-scale institutions, based on a more realistic understanding of community. For that, we should turn to the late Robert Nisbet, a conservative sociologist who presaged Putnam’s quest, and Alan Ehrenhalt, a senior editor at Governing magazine and an accomplished journalist who supplies us concrete pictures of community in action. Our Kids is about the expanding opportunity gap facing kids in…
Civil Rights at the End of History: Hands Down, All Moot!
The celebrations of the Selma voting rights march 50 years ago noted how unthinkable it was that a Black President would be addressing them. Actually, it may have been no less unthinkable that a White Southern President seized the moment, a half century ago, to deliver the most stirring civil rights speech ever delivered to Congress.
Wind in the Willows
In response to: The Great Society, a Half-Century On
With the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s “Great Society” speech fast approaching, we are seeing a flood of historical remembrance and analysis, and there will be more in the weeks and months ahead. The television historians and talking heads will be swooning over how much was accomplished by an 89th Congress that was, in the words of journalist Karen Tumulty, “the most productive in American history,” an assessment widely shared by historians. But more careful analysts will be asking whether the policy initiatives that we group under the “Great Society” rubric actually succeeded or failed, whether their influence was transformative…
More Responses
William Voegeli’s Liberty Forum essay reminds us of the absurdity of so much American political discourse of the past 60 years. The call for greater state-mandated redistribution and entitlements in order to “oppose the drift into the homogenized society” and “fight spiritual unemployment,” to combat “loneliness and boredom” and “build a richer life of mind…
The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” speech offers us an opportunity to reflect not just on the speech itself but also on the half century of consequences that have followed in the wake of the grand project it announced. As William Voegeli notes in his Liberty Forum essay, he commencement address Johnson delivered to the…
