The Great Society at Fifty: The Triumph and the Tragedy

by Nicholas Eberstadt

May 22, 2014, marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” address, delivered at the spring commencement for the University of Michigan. That speech remains the most ambitious call to date by any American president to use the awesome powers of the American state to affect a far-reaching transformation for the society that state was established to serve. It also stands as the high-water mark for Washington’s confidence in the broad meliorative properties of government social policy, scientifically applied. Half a century later, how should we assess the Great Society? What has been its legacy—both for good and for ill—for those alive today, who have inherited a world so decisively shaped by it? Demographer and scholar Nicholas Eberstadt considers post-1964 America’s record on two ostensibly separate but actually tightly related fronts: civil rights and poverty alleviation.

Genres: Sociology

47 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2014

Reviews

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very short book on the Great Society at 50 by AEI scholar Nicholas Eberstadt. The author's conclusions are not surprising. They argue that the Great Society had two significant effects - it materially reduced the legal stain of discrimination and it virtually eliminated "the sort of material deprivation that tens of millions of Americans suffered in the 1960s." But the tradeoff was a much bigger government and several negative trends. The tradeoffs of the expansion of the welfare state has "left a trail of social wreckage" in its wake - he names three trends - Welfare dependency, Flight from Work and Family Breakdown.

Each of those trends are demonstrated in stats. What concerns me is that while it is clear that the Great Society was a major contributor to these trends - it was not the only contributor.