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December 13, 2019|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|

Is it true what they say about planning and centralized government power?

October 21, 2019|Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Nancy Beck Young, Two Suns of the Southwest

The Losing Winner and the Winning Loser of 1964

by Lee Edwards|

President Lyndon Johnson (White House photo / alamy.com)
Goldwater believed in individuals. Johnson thought in electoral blocs. Goldwater swore by the Constitution, Johnson by the New Deal.

March 26, 2018|Crime wave, John DiIulio, Lyndon Baines Johnson, mass incarceration, Office of Economic Opportunity, Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace, War on Poverty

Is It Time to Give Up Aggressive Crime-Fighting?

by Barry Latzer|

Sharkey acknowledges that the decline in crime happened because of mass incarceration and a ramped up criminal justice system.

October 31, 2016|Cass Sunstein, Great Society, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Prisoners of Hope, Progressivism, Randall B. Woods

Duped by Grand Expectations

by Paul Moreno|

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…

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February 22, 2016|Alan Ehrenhalt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Our Kids, Robert Nisbet, Robert Putnam, The Quest for Community

Putnam’s Quest for Community

by Ben Peterson|

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…

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March 19, 2015|Administrative State, Barack Obama, Ferguson Report, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Moynihan Report, Selma, Voting Rights Act

Civil Rights at the End of History: Hands Down, All Moot!

by Ken Masugi|

lbj

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.

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May 16, 2014|

Wind in the Willows

by Wilfred M. McClay|

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…

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More Responses

The Politics of Dependency

by Tom Palmer

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…

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The Great Exception

by Yuval Levin

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…

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
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