The Great Society and "Failed Liberal Policies"

[UdoKier]

It's almost become a truism in the media and the mainstream culture that LBJ's Great Society, the attempt to end poverty "failed" in terms of ending poverty and in creating budget-busting new entitlements. I personally disagree that it failed, although I don't think many of its components were executed as effectively as the highly successful New Deal Programs of 30 years prior. From the New Deal dams and electrification to the Interstate highway system to the space program, I personally think that most liberal policies have not only been successful, they have been instrumental in the prosperity of this country and the wealthy elites who control it.

Do you think the Great Society "failed"? Do liberal programs ever really fail, or are they just so sullied by the politicians that they are seldom implemented in the way they were originally envisioned?

What would you characterize as the greatest success of a liberal policy in this country?

My personal favorite is the New Deal, followed by the space program, which I personally believe was Kennedy's sneaky idea to eventually shunt away funding from the military-industrial complex to more peaceful applications toward a real, positive goal.

[Kanary]

1. Of course those programs failed! Unless..... you actually wanted to save

lives. Then, they succeeded. Not perfectly, by any means, but certainly there are people alive who wouldn't be if it weren't for these programs.

From my vantage point, the one thing that caused failure was the overbearing and paternalistic rules that that hemmed people in so much that they couldn't get back on their feet again, and contributed to the breaking up of families. For instance, the welfare rule that a woman and children couldn't get welfare if the husband/father was in the home. So, in order for his family to survive, many men had to leave and abandon them so they could get even a meager amount to live on. That is just criminal! And, now our society is paying the price of so many homes without males.

The list of those sorts of built-in failures is long. It was a cynical way to make people fail.

Kanary

[UdoKier]

3. To me, one of the worst failures was in urban planning.

The mammoth blocks of government housing like Cabrini Green in Chicago served to concentrate the poor in one area, cutting them off from other segments of society, ensuring that police would be late in responding to crime (if they showed at all), leaving the majority of law-abiding folks at the mercy of the minority of thugs in the project.

I had a friend who told me that an official at HUD had told him way back in the 60s that this was deliberate - that they tried to make the public housing as unpleasant as possible to as to discourage as many people as possible from making use of it.

As far as that goes, I think we've made some progress. The newer government projects I see here in San Francisco are much more in keeping with the scale and architecture of the city, and arre attractive places to live. Of course there isn't nearly enough affordable housing to meet demand.

[Kanary]

4. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn there was "embedded" crap

That's part of what I was saying about the paternalism. There was this idea that it would create "Lazy" people, so they purposely made it not only unpleasant, but destructive. What a sick society we are!

I know that in the building where I live, there is a very abusive assistant manager, and nothing can be done to get rid of the sadistic creep. Section 8 has no built-in protections. I caught him physically abusing an elderly Chinese woman, but couldn't even get anything done about that! That is just insane!

I wish all the people who think it's such a giveaway had to live with it for a couple of years. I'd love to watch 'em slowly lose their minds. :)

If you have any resources for that info, I'd sure appreciate seeing it.

Thanks for the input!

Kanary

[UdoKier]

6. Resources on block housing or on the newer models?

I don't have a lot, but what speciffically are you curious about? Sounds like you may know a bit more about it than me.

[Kanary]

13. Either one, I'm not picky. ^_^

Probably more on the older projects, but I do collect this info.

Anything you have would be much appreciated!

Did you know that HUD has been cut 63% in 25 years??? Isn't that just terrific? I guess it's because the number of homeless people has gone down 63% in 25 years. :crazy:

Kanary

[izzie]

10. I am not so sure it is home with out males.

Wars and work have often taking men away but usually one had the rest of the family around and people used to live together to get along. That two women lived together to raise kids I think was a common thing. Or children with mother's and grand mother's. I knew lots of families like that in the small town I grew up in. I was born in the early 30's so I would have seen it in a very depressed time and WW2. The 50's were not really like TV either.

[Kanary]

14. I think you're confused about what I wrote.

I wasn't writing about the war.... I was writing about welfare regulations.

And I am correct on that one. Social workers would come in and inspect to see if there was any evidence of a man living there.

Kanary

[blackcat77]

2. The Great Society was misguided at times but....

...not a failure. Stuff like Head Start, affirmative action, civil rights, etc were all outgrowths of the Great Society. Of course so were giveaways and the politics of guilt.

[Selatius]

5. Great Society

I don't think in the long run it failed because I don't think the programs that came out of it did more harm than good. Can anyone here honestly say that Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start hurt more than it helped? I don't think so.

What overshadowed the Great Society was simply because of LBJ's other project: Vietnam. That war tore this country apart and simply overshadowed anything accomplished due to these social programs. "Mr. Johnson's War" sort of tainted everything else he was associated with.

[shraby]

7. What needs to be done, is to

examine why head start, medicare and medicaid are successful, then apply those same principles to other programs that are necessary. Another one is the after school activities that fill in when parents aren't home from work when the children get out of school.

[izzie]

11. Funny you should talk of after school

You know we in my age (70) just spent hours playing outside after school. Do not see that now. Then every one knew you in the small town I grew up in and they also knew if you did a thing wrong and you knew your parents would hear of it. It did take a village to raise a kid. I know a friend who grew up in NYC and she said it was the same. Someone would yell at you from a window. But I think the news was different. We knew the nuts in town and the men girls should not go around and had been in jail but most really bad stuff was not on the radio or papers that came into your home. That was in police papers. Sort of underground so I think we felt safer than mother's do with their children now.

[Kanary]

15. Actually, one obvious thing to be done is

do what community organizers do, and actually TALK to the people who receive those services, and ask them what has been helpful and what hasn't.

How's that for a unique concept?

People who are the ones who are on the receiving end of these programs know them from the inside and certainly know what has kept them back. If there was a genuine interest in making life better for them, and actually helping them improve their lives, this is what would be done. Instead, they treat them like imbeciles, and like they are nothing but cardboard figures to move around.

Certainly if they talked to the people in my building, they'd learn in a hurry that they need to provide a mechanism for tenants to remove abusive managers!

Kanary

[T Town Jake]

8. "The Great Society" didn't fail...

...24 years of Nixon/Ford-Reagan/Bush I-*W administrations "failed" to follow-up on the great progress made with those programs, and, in fact, weakened them to a great deal.
It's a tragedy of history that President Robert F. Kennedy did not succeed LBJ in 1969--we would be living in a different country (and world) today. He would've taken the best of LBJ's agenda (War on Poverty; "Great Society") and carried it forward; and he would've discarded the worst, and moved on (Vietnam War).
Oh, what could have been! :cry:

[Kanary]

16. You are so very right about RFK! Which is why he's gone.

I don't know how we're going to get rid of the ugly forces in this country.

I wish that Ted was able to speak about that.

The criminal element is deeply cemented into the foundation of this country now.

:cry: indeed......

Kanary

[izzie]

9. Some work and some do not.

Take the GI bill and that was a liberal thing. Worked great. Look at the Marshall Plan. Another liberal thing and that worked. City planning seemed to stink. Can not get rid of old homes and build new and for get why they lived their in the first place. Store, eating places and all that. Old age things helped the very poor old people. I guess we will always have poor people. We did not have so many people on the streets when we could put sick people in hospitals even if some were not so good. This way does not look good either. I do not know if kids are better in foster homes or where we used to put them or not. I guess it sort of worked.

[sweetheart]

12. I think what failed

Were the social engineering policies like inner city busing. It
was a stupid way to tackle inequality, and was rightfully
tossed out.

I think they took the easy route, focusing on messing with people's
lives, rather than busting up the monopolists and oligopolists
who have overconcentrated wealth that such masses of people were
so disempowered to start with.

As well, the imperial war-mindset has been driving american
militarism and massive military spending this whole time, and that
was the ultimate failure of the great society... that nothing is
great about colonial wars and destroying other cultures for petty
egotism... and the massive cost of those wars was the money that
should have been invested directly to the people who have been
disenfranchised from previous bad policies (e.g. slavery).

Really, i think they should have pursued the entire social equality
adgenda within the tax code through transfers to the poor, and not
put it in people's face.

So instead of taking on the military industrial crime complex, the
goodwill was wasted on a failed mission that "proved" to the
subsequent generation that liberalism was failed... and we suffer
today with this legacy.... when in fact it was not liberalism at
all, or neo-liberalism at best.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. One thing that turned Republicans against the War on Poverty

was that Vista (domestic Peace Corps) workers would go into poor communities and inform poor people of their rights. It was fine when anti-poverty funds built roads in Appalachia and went toward teaching inner-city children their ABCs, but when Vista workers organized Appalachian farmers against strip mining or Harlem residents against slum lords, that was going too far, in the eyes of the conservatives.

By the way, what the "no man in the house" rule that Kanary mentions did was to break up viable families. The deindustrialization of America's cities was already beginning, as assembly plants and the like moved to the suburbs before they moved overseas. (When I was working as a temp in the early 1980s in these suburban industrial "parks," I actually heard people say that companies had relocated to outer suburbs so that inner city African Americans would find it difficult to get there.) The men of the family would be unable to find jobs that paid a living wage, but there was no welfare for the underemployed, so the father would "desert" his family to make his wife eligible for AFDC. Social workers would pay surprise visits to these women, and if they found evidence that their husband or long-term boyfriend was actually living there, no more welfare.

The "women banding together" approach would not have worked in this case, because the problem was that men who wanted to stay with their families were being forced to leave.

In such cases, European-style family allowances would have been a less-destructive approach, but American Puritanism won out with disastrous results.

[Raiden]

18. The Vista program was a great idea!

My dad was a Vista worker, in fact, that's how he met my mom. I think concepts such as the Peace Corps and Vista are brilliant and a simple way to promote the sharing of cultures and peace at home and abroad.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. The war in Vietnam defeated the Great Society.

Johnson and his idiot advisors saw Vietnam much the same way that Flubya and his advisors saw Iraq. That the mighty American military would waltz in, wipe out the guerillas, and be greeted by cheering throngs.

Wrong both times. Now it's guns and butter. Johnson had to rob the Great Society programs to pay for the war. Bush is doing much the same with now with social programs and has his sights set on Social Security to keep the GIs supplied in a lost war.

Hubris in both cases, with the usual results that such arrogance brings.

[Oak2004]

20. As a disabled person dependent upon those "failed liberal policies"

the only failure about them was the failure to adequately carry through on them and to adequately fund them.