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...
“But after watching the Nixon Kennedy debate some years ago, I saw that he was actually quite liberal.”
Yep. The “JFK would be a conservative” meme gets popularized by Hannity and Limbaugh, neither of whom appear to know anything about his Presidency other than tax cuts and being a Cold Warrior.
There’s been a few times in recent years when Republicans held the Presidency, the House and the Senate. They didn’t kill a single one of those programs.
There’s a lesson in it about what Republicans really intend to do despite all their empty promises.
That’s pretty horrifying.
Just as there's a distinction between early boomers and late boomers, the early wave of the GI generation that came of age well before the war was different from the later members of the generation who were just finishing up high school when the war started.
Johnson and others had the experience of finishing school during the Great Depression when jobs were hard to find and many people were dependent on the government so they were inclined to look to the government for solutions.
The younger members of the generation certainly benefitted from the GI Bill, but they were further from power during the Johnson years, I think. Johnson got along so well with Richard Russell and others from the earlier Lost Generation, that it's hard to think of him as an archetypal member of the "Greatest Generation."
I kind of think supporting the Black Panthers was a sign that Hillary wasn't nowise going to go on voting Republican.
Republicans had their own far Left wing radicals back in the day. It’s long been my view that many of these left for the DNC around that time and combined with the Democrats own far Left swept into many of the functions of the party.
Carter was a sort of last push back by the old Democrat party in the face of the growing unwholesomeness that is the Left. Any administration in those years would have been more or less doomed because it was during that time that our own economy finished going through one of those capital reinvestment phases that the Keynesians dread but which led to the 1980s. Carter was further hampered somewhat by his style but mostly by the fact that he couldn’t trust people in his own party (they weren’t calling the far Left the “Never Carter” because they could hide it better back then).
After Carter couldn’t push back against the far Left the Reagan Democrats finally walked out of the party.
I think the late 70s compares in some ways to the present. With Carter the old Democrats tried to push back against the recently entrenched far Left, the Alinsky Left of which Hillary is a sample pustule. With Trump the folks sick and tired of the establishment in both parties have tried to push back. As with Carter, if Trump cannot manage to make inroads against the establishment because of the virulence of their opposition the nation will lose a vital respite from the deep state and the far Left. Worse, we’ll have no other vehicle from which to fight if the “moderate” Republicans / Never Trumpers can push us back ... just as they seem to know that if they lose they’ll no place to go now that the DNC is deep in commieland.
But where the late 70s and now are decidedly different is not just that we’re in a favorable phase in the normal economic attrition of our productive capacity, which Trump is trying to capitalize on with tariffs while our industrial base has yet to completely wither and we all trot off into the madman’s paradise of a service economy, but that the Stockholm Syndrome inflicted RNC has many who would rather lose and be liked than win and be disliked, who will run up a white flag to the real enemy so they can attack their friends rather than try to win as the Democrats never stop doing no matter what it takes.
I think the acrimony of the election in ‘16 is evidence of this, as Republicans increasingly have listened to Democrats and a media that is no longer just nakedly biased but nakedly partisan and yet many Republcans seem to want to refuse to see it.
We need something like tetanus shot for unwanted exposure to the looney Left of the SJWs.
Most of those GIs were still in school during the Depression/New Deal.
The people cheering were more likely their parents, and after years of Depression can you really blame them that much?
The 1964 election was very atypical: many people were still mourning Kennedy, and Goldwater was far from an ideal candidate.
You forgot that a large part of the electorate in 1964 was still composed of the "Greatest Generation's" parents.
And it's still true that the older members of the GI generation had had different experiences from the younger members of the generation.
I didn't have the experiences of either cohort. If I did, I might have voted as they did.
Avg. age of US GI in WWII was 26. That would make them about 45(+) at the 64 election. Considering life expectancies, I doubt if their parents made up as much of the electorate as the Silent Generation at that time.
Fact is, and I make no attempt to give a reason why, it WAS the Greatest Generation that gave us LBJ and the 89th.
Yes, i can. People’s circumstances are not Amendment processes no matter how dire.
They received the Republic as described by the Constitution, transmitted only Arbitrary government. They let the badly termed “progressives” finally do just as they’d been dreaming since the 19th century.
Their failure in that respect overshadows everything.
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