Most historians agree that the American Presidential elections of 1932 when the country was floundering amidst a Worldwide Depression and 1968 when the country was torn apart by racial strife at home and disastrous war abroad top the list of "Turning Point" elections within the last hundred years.
Today almost all observers would concur that the election we are careening toward this November will be of similar magnitude.
What is most striking is the absolutely yawning chasm between the two visions of America’s future being offered by the Democratic and Republican Parties. Republicans essentially defend the status quo declaring it to be "Great" economically and otherwise, while Democrats with near unanimity propose a dramatic transformation of the country led by an activist Federal government.
Among the broadly supported proposals offered by Democrats are "Medicare For All", wealth redistribution via taxation, "Green New Deal", and student debt relief. What is particularly interesting is that Democrats are not shying away from the terms "Socialism" or "Democratic Socialism", and with good reason since a wide variety of recent polls show that large segments of the American people, particularly the young are very open to these ideas.
A recent Harris Poll found that 50% of adults under 38 would "prefer living in a socialist country". Further polling shows that many people perceive "Socialism" as a more "generous" basis for government while conversely associating "Capitalism" with "greed" and "selfishness".
It is against this background that we strongly recommend a recent book by the distinguished journalist and historian Amity Shlaes: Great Society: A New History
A longtime writer for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg, Ms. Shlaes is a resident scholar at the King's College in Manhattan and the author of several well regarded histories including the much-praised account of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man.
The present volume examines what the author calls the "Great Society Era" compassing the sweeping reforms enacted by three Presidents--Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon--that dramatically expanded and transformed the social, legal, and financial role of the Federal government in American life.
Because the term "Socialism" was considered too risky politically in the Sixties these reforms generally advanced under the rubric "liberal" or "progressive", but clearly the governments seen, as models were Britain's Labour Party, and the social democracies of Northern Europe.
In her riveting and well-researched narrative, Ms. Shlaes provides vivid portraits of the reformers--theoreticians, politicians, administrators--who gave life to the Great society- men like the Socialist Michael Harrington, whose book The Other Americacaptured the imagination of JFK; Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who became LBJ's "Poverty Czar"; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon's resident sociologist who promoted the failed Guaranteed Annual Income--and as influential as any, the brilliant labor leader Walter Reuther.
Also memorably on stage are powerful mayors like Los Angeles' Sam Yorty, and Chicago’s Richard Daley who liked the cascading dollars of the Great Society, but then began a vigorous revolt against what they saw as the arrogant overreach of the empire builders in Washington.
Ms. Shlaes’ central thesis is that the problems addressed by the Great Society, while mitigated were never solved, and that the effort itself has burdened society with a metastasizing "Entitlement State" the unaffordability of which is crippling our attempts to deal with the myriad challenges we face today.
A further legacy was the creation of a "permanent underclass" for which well-intended government programs disincentivised work and undermined families. In that vein she describes her book as a cautionary tale of "lovable people who, despite themselves hurt those they loved".
Very germane to all of this is the fading of "historical memory". Many mistakes of the Great Society happened because reformers forgot the shortcomings of the New Deal, and perhaps today's reformers have forgotten the reasons why the Great Society ended badly, and ruined America's economy in the Seventies
In TheTempest, Shakespeare tells us "What is Past is Prologue". Before embracing the promises and panaceas of another generation of well-intentioned reformers Americans would do well to study their past, and thereby heed the warning of the philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ".
In this momentous election year, Amity Shlaes’ superb book is an excellent place to start.
Bill Moloney is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University's Centennial Institute and a former Colorado Education Commissioner. He studied at Oxford and the University of London and obtained his doctoral degree at Harvard University.
