President Johnson and The Great Society

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969)

I will avoid discussing LBJ's adventures in foreign policy. Like Mr. Carter, his presidency was so full of mishaps there is not enough space to cover them all, and Johnson's foreign policy was particularly contentious. Rather, I will focus on his long lasting social policies which have had lasting, regressive, deadly effects.

Lyndon Baines Johnson's policies laid the groundwork for victicrats Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Inner cities and black America have been relegated to poverty and lack of incentive to succeed as a direct result of Johnson's socialist policies. Many contemporary historians may consider LBJ a "progressive pioneer" but I see a different story.

Johnson was sworn in as our 36th president at Love Field in Dallas, roughly 100 minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963. LBJ was preceded by a romantic figure cut down in Johnson's home state.

Though he was elected in 1964, the GOP may have aided that victory with a somewhat polarizing candidate in Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater. The Republican nominee had a great record of supporting civil rights, but Goldwater opposed certain preferences in the bills that became the Civil Rights Act. His vote against it ultimately led to a 44 to 6 state triumph for LBJ in the general election. Johnson benefited greatly from a profound expansion in liberal control over much of the mainstream press, Hollywood, and academia, a process that, of course, continues today.

Not remembered much in current history textbooks or the media of today, was that in the 1920s Republicans proposed anti-lynching legislation, reflecting back to Civil War times when Democrats, including founders of the KKK, had been involved in this horrific act. The legislation passed the House , an opposition speech was given by a Democrat Congressman from Texas named Lyndon B. Johnson, but was killed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Finally in 1939 it passed the Senate.

LBJ and the Southern wing of the Democratic Party persisted in supporting anti-black positions. Consider, as LBJ's term neared:

- In 1956, Democrats expressed their opposition to the desegregation decision of Brown v. Board of Education in the "Southern Manifesto." One hundred members of Congress, all Democrats, signed the manifesto.

- In 1957, REPUBLICAN President Eisenhower authored a Civil Rights Bill, hoping to repair the damage done to blacks and their civil rights by Democrats for nearly a century. Passage of the bill was blocked by Senate Democrats.

- In 1959, Eisenhower authored a Voting Rights Bill, again, in an effort to undo the disenfranchisement of blacks by Democrats through poll taxes, literacy tests, and threats of violence by the KKK. And once again, passage of the bill is blocked by Senate Democrats.

But then, following the JFK assasination:

- In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is the law originally authored by Eisenhower in 1957. Democrats, including Senator Robert Byrd (a former KKK member), filibustered the bill. Once the filibuster was overcome, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for passage than did Democrats.**

- In 1965, Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law, the Voting Rights Act of 1964. This is the law originally authored by Eisenhower in 1959. A filibuster was prevented, and passage of this bill also enjoyed support from a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats. Johnson, of course, is now president and gets "credit" for this legislation -- authored by Republicans, designed by Republicans to undo a century of damage done by Democrats, and voted for by a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats.

- This was followed by the Great Society programs designed to eliminate poverty and racism.

At this point, the media and academic elite began using a powerful combination of information control and revisionist history to engineer a massive electoral shift. Falling for the blandishments of the Democrats and their media allies, blacks, once exclusively Republican, began voting Democrat in numbers greater than 90 percent,

The actual consequences of Johnson's Great Society were disastrous for blacks, discouraging initiative, encouraging a sense of entitlement and victimhood, and creating a permanent dependency class. Until 1965, 82% of black households had both a mother and a father in the home -- a statistic on par with or even slightly higher than white families. After 1965 (the year the Democrats and President Johnson decided it was time to stop oppressing blacks and start "helping" them), the presence of black fathers in the home began a precipitous decline; today, the American black out-of-wedlock birthrate is at 69%.

Unlike its socialist cousin (the New Deal), the Great Society emerged in a period of prosperity. Johnson presented his goals for the Great Society in a speech at an elite liberal public university, the University of Michigan, in May 1964. So-called "do-gooder liberals," having little faith in their common man, loved its aims. The elitist "White Guilt" (see Shelby Steele's book of the same name) resulted in terrible long-term impacts. Soon after, the programs were heavily criticized by conservatives as being ineffective and creating an underclass of lazy citizens. They have been proven correct. Current evidence makes Johnson the villain. If he were alive today to see the effects, he'd cringe.

Socialism clearly makes individuals worse. Incalculable damage has been done to the black family by the neo-socialist policies begun under Johnson, which are a perverted form of what Eisenhower wisely began a decade prior. And for that, even ignoring the Vietnam adventure, LBJ goes down as one of our three worst presidents of all time.

Source

**While this analysis seems to be in the tank for lifting up "Republicans" -- a position that is meaningless under a two-for-one party system given each sides propensity for multiculturalism -- it nevertheless reveals a major source of European Americans' population decline in 34 years.