Liberalism's third act?

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION

MODERN LIBERALISM, rifled the New Deal, opened on the American stage in the 1930s under the direction of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its promise was to bring some minimum guarantees of a decent life to U.S. citizens. What followed was the Social Security program, unemployment insurance, public works spending, welfare for widows and orphans, and, during World War II, the most successful program, the GI Bill of Rights. By today's standards, these initiatives were quite modest. Nonetheless, Roosevelt insinuated into the American political mainstream the idea that the government was responsible for providing the good life.

The second act of American liberalism, the Great Society, introduced by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, was, reflecting the man, hardly modest, and took Roosevelt's ideas to the next level. This cornucopia included, among other programs, vast Federal subsidies to elementary and secondary education, Medicare, Model Cities, an array of antipoverty initiatives, and aid to the arts and humanities. Unlike Roosevelt's New Deal, which came in the midst of the Great Depression, when there was a public demand for government action, Johnson's Great Society emerged in a time of unprecedented prosperity. In his zeal to take advantage of the massive congressional Democratic majorities his 1964 landslide produced, Johnson designed programs--with the exception of Medicare and aid to education--for which there had been no grassroots demand. His Great Society was the product of an emerging new class of policy intellectuals made up of social scientists, lawyers, and social workers. Poverty, they assumed, resulted from behavior pathologies that could be ameliorated by the right mix of interventionist strategies and government programs. These initiatives, such as the Job Corps, Community Action Programs, Manpower Development, and Model Cities, had mixed results at best. They did generate a bureaucratic enclave designed to serve a special constituency of governmental clients. In short, the Great Society made little impact on most working- and middle-class Americans. If you were not elderly, poor, or a minority, the Great Society was something you only paid for or read about.

The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, accompanied by Democratic congressional majorities close to what Johnson enjoyed, was to have ushered in the third act of American liberalism. Sadly, it was a show dressed up with nowhere to go. Carter had no overarching agenda and...