Posted on 11/20/2018 7:26:25 PM PST by daniel1212
Fifty years separate us today from 1968 and the two momentous legacies of the then failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson: The declaring of war on America's supposed domestic ills in the form of the "Great Society" programs, and the aggressive military intervention in a real war in Vietnam. Both of these "wars" reflected the arrogance and hubris of the social engineer who believes that he has the power and ability to remake and direct society in his own preferred image....
A part of the Vietnam War tragedy was due to the fact that it was managed by "the best and the brightest," as David Halberstam called them in his well-known book of the same title. These were the people within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who orchestrated and escalated the war as the conflict progressed through the 1960s.
Halberstam referred to these war managers as the "whiz kids." They believed that they had the theoretical and quantitative knowledge and ability to fine-tune a military conflict..
The disaster and destruction that befell both the American and the Vietnamese people resulted from their arrogant pretense of possessing all the necessary and relevant knowledge for them to design and direct a war on the other side of the world, seemingly all according to a central plan constructed in Washington, D.C.
What they learned (or should have learned) were the inescapable limits to man's ability to consciously direct the future course of human events, and the ever-present occurrence of "unintended consequences." It was a costly lesson in the need for humility and caution in believing that it is in our power to socially engineer global affairs to our own liking.
The same was thing happened in the domestic policies of the Lyndon Johnson administration, which became known as the Great Society agenda... What guided the Great Society agenda was an arrogant pretense of knowledge. There was a general attitude among many economists and a large number of self-proclaimed social critics that most of the "evils" of the world—poverty, illiteracy, lack of decent housing or medical care, and environmental degradation—were all due to a lack of willpower and well-intentioned and implemented policy. The guiding premise was that the private sector had failed in meeting these problems and, indeed, may have contributed to them due to a disregard for "national needs," while pursuing private purposes..
Among the leading Great Society programs were:
Medicare and Medicaid (as amendments to the Social Security Act) Economic Opportunity Act Office of Economic Opportunity Community Action Agencies Elementary and Secondary Education Act Higher Education Act Model Cities Program Housing and Urban Development Act Urban Mass Transit Act Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps) National Endowments for the Arts National Endowments for the Humanities Wilderness, Endangered Species, and Federal Water Pollution Control Acts
Political Paternalism and the Reduction of Freedom
The fundamental premise the Great Society vision for America was based on was the idea of political paternalism. Good men, with enough political power, authority, and financial resources can successfully solve the problems of society. The dilemma, however, is that for government to do anything for us, it must at the same time have the police power do things to us...
And here, too, were a series of unintended consequences. These included the weakening and break-up of groups and families due to intergenerational dependency on government programs; the emergence of an "entitlement mentality" that taxpayer funded transfers from the government were as legitimate a source of income as earning a living from a private-sector job; the entrapment of those on welfare in isolated, poorly-managed, and increasingly crime-infested public housing projects; and the deterioration of educational standards in public schools, especially in inner city areas of the country...
Not to mention the 501(3)(c) in a Trojan Horse, which enables the IRS to intimidate many churches into silence over expressing support for the best candidate.
Drugs man. Drugs.
LBJ and the 89th....
Lemme see, couldn't have been the Boomers. They were too young.
Couldn't have been my Silent Generation. Whether old enough or not, we didn't have the numbers.
That leaves the Greatest Generation.
Not a put down. Just a fact.
Though without McGovern (only possible because LBJ didn’t run)...
Because of RFK's assassination, HHH took LBJ's place in '68. McGovern was in '72
It can be argued that his policies and killer Kennedy’s immigration bill started the path to the fall of the Republic.
Hopefully we have started to reverse the fall.
There were plenty of Republicans in that 89th Congress who passed LBJ’s programs for him. In fact you’ll often hear conservative talking heads boasting about how Republicans were responsible passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well they’re right, although that doesn’t explain why any conservative with a lick of sense would brag about it. Both Goldwater and Ronald Reagan opposed the bill, knowing where it would ultimately lead.
“killer Kennedy’s immigration bill”
A bill his brother Jack had wanted, which often is overlooked. That bill is what has killed California. The rest of the country is next.
I freely admit being too young to have a clue at the time I was in-country. Now, I am ready to fix bayonets. GD McNamara is dead unfortunately.
LBJ bankrupted this country in his eagerness to create a modern slave plantation.
But, we geezers may choose to go out in a blaze of glory, rather than waiting for what disease kills us first.
I’m a Boomer and my first vote was for Carter. So I’m not responsible for the Great Society. However, my parents lived through the Great Depression and WWII. I’m thinking that when JFK got shot and LBJ got the job, the Greatest Generation were looking for some guarantees. So they fell for socialism. They probably regret it now. So do we.
They won’t go on four no more
Great mid-western hardware store
Philosophy that turns away
From those who aren’t afraid to say what’s on their minds
The left behinds of the Great Society
HUNGRY FREAKS, DADDY!
So we see the consequences of a 'Rat super majority, a minority led by a self-proclaimed moderate, and a 'Rat in the WH. The sheer volume and utter failure of legislation passed in those two sessions is something few today understand or appreciate, but it should serve as warning against the apparent drift back to the 'Rat principles.
Exactly! And JFK was an asshole too despite what many republicans/conservatives like to pretend.
Imagine if Kennedy had served his term and projected 2nd term? He was just as bad as Johnson. He just didn’t get the chance to prove it.
Neocon Ttotskyists usurped the RNC after WWII. That is why they opposed both Goldwater and Reagan.
That’s a trip down memory lane, those names are all familiar to me. I was growing up in DC at that time and somehow I began following politicians the way that most kids followed baseball. I was carrying a Washington Evening Star newspaper route when I first began to regard Lyndon Johnson with visceral contempt.
Unfortunately things didn’t change much when Nixon took office. He signed a series of domestic bills that most people would imagine had to have been part of the Great Society program. Nixon just added to what LBJ had been doing. The GOP was an opposition party in name only. Meaning that the later Bush crew would be nothing new.
The anomaly was Reagan, but then he was opposed by the GOP establishment. He came in from the outside, not as dramatically as Trump but still against the wishes of the GOP elites.
.
I did not know that.
But after watching the Nixon Kennedy debate some years ago, I saw that he was actually quite liberal.
At the time if you were on welfare you received food clothing cigarettes and maybe shelter (housing projects) but you did NOT get cash. That all changed when the Democrats decided that kind of program was demeaning and an "insult" to the "inherent dignity" of the recipients.
So we started giving the "needy" cash payments for everything from food and clothing to shelter. Making them the equal in every respect to those who worked for a living and got paid in cash each week. Except the "needy" didn't have to work for their paycheck.
The "social engineers" removed the "stigma" of the government handout and turned it into a cash cow for the underclass. In exchange for cowardly surrendering to the criminal classes and paying them off to "behave" themselves and not riot, loot and burn down America's neighborhoods, we now have a country where 51% of the populace is on some form of government benefit program, and a disgraceful national debt of over $21 trillion.
(Terry) GROSS: My reading of your book - and you can tell me if this is how you see it - is that beneath all of his idealism - maybe not initially, but certainly fairly soon - beneath all that idealism was this cynicism that he knew how to play people. He developed a very large African-American following and said something - I'm just going to paraphrase here - but said something to another of his followers that if you keep them poor and hungry, they'll always stay with you, you know, because there’ll be a need.
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