Having recently finished reading Amity Shlaes' Great Society: A New History about the Johnson administration's "war on poverty" in the 1960s, I couldn't help comparing the ambition then with the anemic goals of Democrat Socialists today.
Trump isn't the first politician to claim he could make America great again. President Johnson and his administration aimed for the complete elimination of poverty. The DSA wants cheaper food through government owned grocery stores, free healthcare and education, and rent control. Of course, the scaled down ambitions of the extreme left probably has a lot to do with the massive failures of Johnson's Great Society depicted in Shlaes' book.
Johnson and his brain trust, really believed they could erase poverty in the US. All they had to do was give poor people enough money, problem solved. Initially, they thought $1 billion would be enough. They would find that tens of billions had little impact.
They started with trying to create jobs for unemployed teenagers. But much of the money was routed into teaching them how to protest and battle the police. That backfired when young people used that training to burn down the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1965 then parts of Detroit in 1967, followed by the riots at the 1968 Democrat Party convention in Chicago. Young people in the 60s knew how to riot. They made the black lives matter riots of 2020 look like Girl Scout picnics. But the rioting stopped after National Guard troops shot and killed four rioters at Kent Sate in 1970.
Johnson created Medicare, Medicaid and the vast welfare system that cost billions of dollars. Unfortunately, he was determined a the same time to expand the war in Vietnam, eventually stationing 535,000 troops there. Johnson was convinced the nation was rich enough to win both wars. Afraid that raising taxes would make both wars unpopular, Johnson chose to borrow the money to pay for them instead with he Fed printing enough money to keep interest rates low. The result was higher inflation, as any good economist would have predicted. Inflation continued to rise throughout the 1970s and impoverished all Americans. Real wages didn't begin to recover until the 1990s.
Welfare failed to lift anyone out of poverty, instead it created long term dependency on government handouts. The official poverty rate had declined for decades before the Great Society. The Great Society handouts crushed that improvement, halting the poverty rate at about 12% where it remains today. The government threw billions of dollars at large apartment complexes with subsidized rents, many of which were demolished later because of high crime rates and because the tenants destroyed them.
Democrat Socialist should learn from the massive failures of Johnson's attempts to make America great again. But if socialists knew history, they could no longer remain socialists.
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