Socialism and the Twisted Legacy of Slavery: A Cautionary Tale from the “Great Society”

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Listen to the reading of this longform essay here. Listen as Trent Hunter, David Schrock, and Kevin Briggins discuss the essay here.

Like you, I’m busy. I’m a pastor with a sermon to write and a flock to tend. Why did I read a 400-page book about the history of 1960s America? Shouldn’t I read, instead, about our own turbulent times?

My answer to that question might not lead you to read Amity Shlaes’s Great Society: A New History.[1] However, I hope it will inspire you to become more familiar with the vision of some of our fellow Americans during this period, a vision that they dubbed “The Great Society”—a program, like so many other grand schemes, that failed to live up to its name. Some truly great legislation came from this era, but enmeshed within them came much damaging legislation as well.[2] As Shlaes reminds us, “Nothing is new, just forgotten.”[3] Or as Solomon put it, “There’s nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9).

1. Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History (New York: Harper, 2019).

2. See Brad Green’s essay, “One Constitution, or Two? Reviewing The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell,” Christ Over All (July 31, 2023).

3. Shlaes, Great Society, 17.

So, what was The Great Society? Why did it fail? And what must we learn from it? That is the question that this review essay attempts to answer as it follows and interacts with the story Shlaes tells of this epoch. It is a tornado siren for our own day. Those who care deeply about justice in our day will care deeply about the weather conditions that caused so much systemic wreckage for the precious people with whom justice is concerned.

Truly, Shlaes offers a cautionary tale for our compassionate nation.

This essay is a Christian exercise in stewarding history’s lessons in love for neighbor. This is a pastoral exercise in guarding the church from faulty visions of both humanity and heaven. It’s long, but only because this is a long-neglected subject. We have heard much over the last decade—from politicians and pastors alike—about the legacy of slavery in the form of a straight line from American’s founding to Jim Crow to the present as an explanation for real problems in America. Americans at our best are concerned to get our history right for the sake of doing right by our neighbors today. But what about that period we call “The Sixties” that was filled with programs and projects designed to eradicate poverty and racism? And why do we hear so little about these dramatic political efforts and their outcomes? Why is this so, especially given that their aims are the aims of modern justice movers and shakers today?

If you care about justice, about the poor, and about the lingering effects of slavery, then come with me on this journey into our country’s more recent history.

The Legacy of Slavery or the Legacy of Liberalism?

An exchange between columnists back in 2014 piqued my interest in this period. Nicholas Kristof, in his New York Times piece titled “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” writes the following: “The presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century.”[4] Racists have existed and do exist. No problem with this claim. But Kristof says more: that present inequities are shaped by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, by past and enduring racism, both personal and systemic.

4. When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4,” New York Times (November 16, 2014).

Thomas Sowell sees the same situation differently: “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state.”[5] The title of his piece was his thesis, “A Legacy of Liberalism.” According to Sowell, “Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began . . . from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.”[6]

5. A Legacy of Liberalism,” Creators (November, 18, 2014).

6. Jason Riley has a book-length treatment, False Black Power?, telling the forgotten but inspiring story of unprecedented black progress in the years after slavery. See this link for one insightful chapter.

This resonated with me.

Cabrini-Green Homes, the public housing project just outside my window in downtown Chicago when I was a college student in the late nineties, was by then notorious for crime and violence. “The Projects”—Whose idea was that? And what precisely did they expect to achieve by building these inner city monoliths?

My father, then a district manager for a retail chain in St. Louis, was awakened many nights by the police due to break-ins at his stores in East St. Louis. What was the backstory for that “bad part of town”? Later, when I sold cell phones to fund my years as a seminary student, I encountered different cultures in different stores, each with their own admirable qualities and predictable sins. Upper-middle-class folks worked hard but frequently asked to split their accounts following a divorce. Rural folks frequently needed new phones for a child returning from Afghanistan or else for a man in the home who lost his phone in another drunken fishing incident. Then there were the black urban poor, many lovely individuals and loving mothers. In this community, however, few were married, “baby daddies” were a daily thing, and there was a refrain in the context of selling: “I’m waiting on my check,” that is, a government check. This was a cultural norm. More than the rest, this part of town felt stuck, trapped, downtrodden.

As statistics will show, not all blacks are stuck. Not hardly. The community I encountered does not characterize the whole of blacks in America, an important clarification. Today 82% of black Americans are above the poverty line despite only 30% being married.[7] 94% of black married couples are above the poverty line.[8] That we hear so much about black poverty is owing more to political rhetoric that exploits poor urban blacks, painting this subculture as the state of blacks as a whole. The dynamics I explore in this essay apply equally to whites and blacks, a point Shlaes makes.[9] The difference is that one group’s poor are exploited for political and social gain and the other are not.

7. See, “Poverty Rate for the Black Population Fell Below Pre-Pandemic Levels,” at Census Bureau (September 12, 2023).

8. See, “Poverty rate of Black married-couple families in the United States from 1990 to 2022,” at Statista (November 28, 2023).

9. Bob Woodson explores this dynamic in his pursuit of a deracialized approach to poverty in his book, Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.

For that downtrodden part of town in my sales experience, it did seem that something structural was going on—something systemic that shaped cultures and the precious individuals embedded within them. But I did not resonate with Kristof’s take in the New York Times.

What were these “war on poverty” programs Sowell wrote of, and how were they related to the passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s? What were these “serious retrogressions,” and what might they have to do with “the liberal welfare state,” as Sowell claims? Sowell’s own body of work has been helpful on these questions, especially in the realm of researched statistics.[10]

10. See, for example, Intellectuals and Race (New York: Basic Books, 2013), and Discrimination and Disparities (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

But what is the story behind these stats, these policies? Who were the personalities involved in them? Why did the American public embrace them? What might all of this have to do with the “legacy of slavery” and the various disparities we see today?

Shlaes’s book Great Society tells that story.

This is the story not of cruel people, but in Shlaes’s words, “lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved.”[11]

11. Shlaes, Great Society, 17.

America Was Doing Good—Real Good

At the start of the 1960s the country was affluent. That’s the first word that describes America at the start of the decade. The post-war American industries stood head and shoulders above those of other countries. The sharpest contrast was in the automotive industry. That a small Japanese company like Toyota could ever be competitive in the US was not on even the shrewdest industry leader’s mind. The American middle class thrived, work was in demand, and jobs paid well. If you weren’t skilled, a company would train you and then employ you. Young people growing up at this time had a different perspective than their parents who grew up during the Great Depression. Poverty was the exception rather than the rule. Add to this America’s recent industrial and managerial achievements in the Second World War and you have a generation marked by a second word: confidence. This was an optimistic generation. America could do anything and in particular, the United States government could do anything. Trust in government was high and so were hopes in the possibilities of government. We hear it in Kennedy’s words at Rice University on the Nation’s space effort in 1962: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”[12] This affluence and confidence made for a generation intrigued with socialism. Sound familiar?

12. See, John F. Kennedy, “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort,” Rice University, September 12, 1962.

The New Deal era programs of the 1930s failed to address the economic depression, leading to a truly Great Depression.[13] The Second World War pulled the country out of its economic plight. But those failures had faded just enough for a renewed optimism in big-government solutions.

13. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, (New York: Harper, 2008). A 2004 study by two UCLA economists, Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole, concluded that Roosevelt’s policies extended the depression by seven years. “Professor’s ‘big intellectual risk’ grabs eyeballs years later,” UCLA Newsroom (June 6, 2016).

The 60s were also dominated by ambition, a third word for the era that stirred popular intrigue with socialism to political action. This was a moral ambition, ambition for a cause, ambition with “a fierce urgency of now.”[14] The Great Depression era had its great crisis to overcome, and the World War II generation accomplished a truly great feat overseas. What great achievement might this generation undertake? If that wasn’t on the mind of average Americans, it was certainly on the mind of their political leaders. President Lyndon B. Johnson answered that question with what he called “The Great Society.”

14. Shlaes, Great Society, 5.

What Was the Great Society?

We can answer that question from six angles: legal, historical, religious, political, sociological, and economic. This is not the outline for Shlaes’s book, which works across the sixties chronologically. Her story dramatizes the events of this period and humanizes its many characters. I commend it to you. This here is my attempt to synthesize what I learned from her narrative account.

1. Legally, the Great Society was Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping domestic legislative agenda to eliminate poverty and racial disparities.

Yes, that’s exactly what it was. This was in an era before the loss of trust in the government that makes that kind of legislative ambition sound hollow. In fact, it was in part the great failure of these promises that explains our present cynicism. But make no mistake: this is what they set out to do by legislation.

This package of legislative initiatives created new federal programs and whole agencies to help Americans in nearly every area of life: education, housing, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation, including bussing for school integration.

In her narrative history, Shlaes spends most of her volume tracing the personalities around the President during this time—aids, fed chairmen, famed economists, and union bosses. The mingling of genuine altruistic motives and blinding political ambition—often in the same characters—is a study of human nature and the nature of government. Among this cast of characters, President Johnson, as one of his aids put it, “made laws the way other men eat chocolate chip cookies.”[15] That was his expertise from the Senate. That’s what he became famous for in the White House. The sheer amount of legislation passed during this period was unparalleled.

15. Shlaes, Great Society, 6.

2. Historically, the Great Society was an ambitious moniker reflecting that period’s mindset: confidence in what government could do and should do.

“Let’s not alleviate poverty; let’s cure it,”[16] President Johnson stridently and repeatedly insisted. He meant it. America after the Second World War was confident in its federal government. So too were government officials. Lyndon Johnson wanted to expand government in a way that eclipsed Roosevelt’s transformative presidency, but Johnson did not have Roosevelt’s crises: economic depression and war. Johnson, rather, had affluence. Things were not just going well for Americans, but exceptionally well. Johnson’s challenge, then, was to generate a sense of urgency for America to see it go well for everyone—literally.[17] His legacy as president—and the legacy of those whose careers were bound to his presidency—depended on such grand plans.

16. Shlaes, Great Society, 89.

17. Shlaes, Great Society, 102.

A “good society” would not do. He rejected that suggestion.[18] He insisted, rather, on a “Great Society,” and this became his rallying cry. America had already organized itself to finish a war overseas. Winning the war on poverty, it was said, would be a “mopping up action.”[19] This war, like any war, would be a job for the federal government. They were not sloganeering. They really were that optimistic in the power and precision of government planning.

18. Shlaes, Great Society, 97, 101.

19. Shlaes, Great Society, 5.

3. Religiously, the Great Society was the expression of the nation’s collective human and religious—even Christian-informed—impulse to do something good for those who are hurting.

This legislative vision did not emerge in a vacuum. Johnson’s vision was a continuation of what President Kennedy pursued before him, in part, and what President Nixon continued after him. In his own time, it was marketable as the political expression of the human desire to help those in need, a good desire shaped by America’s Christian roots.

It was President Kennedy who by executive order established the Peace Corps, headed by Yale-grad and decorated officer Sargent Shriver. Shriver became President Johnson’s poverty czar, the principal architect of his “War on Poverty,” and head of the Office for Economic Opportunity. Along with many Americans, Shriver believed that what the church already did for the poor, the federal government could and should do through its programs.[20] To a national conscience informed by its Christian heritage, this just seemed right.

20. Shlaes, Great Society, 109–110.

4. Politically, the Great Society was a political project with all the incentives and complexities intrinsic to politics.

Political motivations and incentives abounded. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vision was curious on the heels of Kennedy’s death. Lyndon Johnson to that point was known for his opposition to civil rights legislation.[21] Johnson wanted to exceed the accomplishments of his predecessor, President Kennedy. This was something of a political imperative given that the House and the Senate went to Democrats following Kennedy’s assassination. He must do more. But he also wanted to best his intellectual and political father, President Roosevelt, and his New Deal. What Roosevelt did in creating infrastructure jobs to supposedly energize the economy, Johnson intended to do with the influx of cash to impoverished communities. Johnson expected these communities to begin to work, to contribute, and to join the rest of their American peers in their share of affluence. Without the crisis of a depression, Johnson leveraged the crisis of Kennedy’s death to move on this apparent political opportunity.[22] He forwarded this vision on a wave of empathy and optimism. As they said, Roosevelt had his “New Deal,” and Johnson had his “Fast Deal.” But had it, he did.[23]

21. Shlaes, Great Society, 121.

22. Shlaes, Great Society, 88.

23. Shlaes, Great Society, 92.

A lawmaker by trade, Johnson was more attentive to legislative inputs and intentions than he was to results. Laws—and the promises they held out—were the goal. The more the better. Not so much the outcomes. As the war in Vietnam became complicated and politically costly, neither Johnson nor his successor, Richard Nixon, could afford politically to go back on these promises. The Great Society had to move forward no matter the results. The priority of winning elections consumed and compromised even the most principled economists and advisors at the time to such an embarrassing extent that many later acknowledged their complicity.[24]

24. Shlaes, Great Society, 11.

5. Sociologically, the Great Society institutionalized America’s commitment to a desegregated society.

The Great Society was an expansive vision that merged ambitions and political visions beyond an interest in helping the poor. In one of his famous speeches, Johnson, who was fashioned as the “Great Emancipator” of the twentieth century, said, “We’ve got to find a way to let Negroes get what most white folks already have.” He continued, “Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who has been hobbled by chains and put him at the starting line of a race and say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” What the nation needed was, “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”[25]

25. Shlaes, Great Society, 166.

Thomas Sowell, a young economist at the time, disagreed: “To expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree.”[26] Blacks, for all the gains they had remarkably made, were nevertheless underdeveloped and, for that reason, genuinely and understandably discouraged.[27] Much to the embarrassment of whites and blacks, reading scores were significantly lower among blacks. From Sowell’s perspective, the black community should have turned away from counting on political leaders to change their circumstances and toward an investment in “our own self-development as a people.”[28] As Sowell has demonstrated in his own research, this is how any formerly-oppressed group rises out of the developmental consequences of their oppression.

26. Shlaes, Great Society, 120.

27. Shlaes, Great Society, 126.

28. Thomas Sowell, A Personal Odyssey (Free Press, 2002), 162.

In this attempt to compensate the black community, Johnson went further than the vision to which Martin Luther King Jr. rallied a generation in his early speeches. He went further than the call for equal treatment before the law, further than seeing that the children of the civil rights era were treated “according to the content of their character.”[29] Instead, Johnson wanted a policy of redistribution to make up for what was lost in the black community’s development under oppressive laws. Not only was school segregation outlawed—a good thing—but mandated school integration required that students be bussed from one part of town to another, a bad decision, as we’ll see.

29. To be precise, King’s original rally cry was not the whole of his vision. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was given in 1963. In 1967, King delivered a different kind of speech calling for guaranteed income. His initial vision for civil rights included progress toward economic “justice” by means of state redistribution. See, “How We Can Make Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream of Ending Poverty A Reality,” from TIME (January 16, 2023). See also When King And Johnson Joined Forces To Fight The War On Poverty,” from NPR (January 18, 2014). This piece reports that “King walked out of the White House having agreed to help Johnson’s anti-poverty agenda but emphasized that blacks would not accept ‘any watering down’ of a civil rights bill.”

6. Economically, the Great Society was ultimately a form of socialism.

Americans had two paths forward in bringing about this vision for a great society: the private sector or the public sector. The country chose the public sector and relegated the private sector to “milk cow” and “consultant.” Of course, it was the immense growth of the private sector that made wining the Second World War possible. It was the private sector that gave us Flint and Detroit. But then only the government could build a military or win a war. This was, it seemed, a job for the government.

Curing poverty seemed greatly desirable, the right thing to do, and not that difficult. But to whom?

One of the great stories of Shlaes’s history is the meeting of a group of young and bright-eyed college upperclassmen who made their way to Port Huron, Michigan, for a week with their thirty-something thought leaders to dream about America’s future. They would become an activist movement called Students for a Democratic Society. The roots and fruit of this movement, contrary to their name, were plainly socialist. Their manifesto reflected this socialist vision. It began as we might expect, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” They gave their lives to activism for its cause. One author among them, Michael Harrington—author of The Other America, which was the Hillbilly Elegy equivalent of that era—would go on to miraculously land a job in the Johnson administration overseeing the creation and expansion of a redistributive anti-poverty program.

Yet another character in Shlaes’s telling reveals that this assignment was not as miraculous as it may have seemed to those students. Their meeting was organized by a man whose name dominated the headlines and stories of his day, a kind of George Soros of the times: Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers. It was to Reuther that Johnson made a phone call on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, a man whose influence could secure the votes and confidence of some ten million union voters.[30] However independent and anti-establishment these students may have believed themselves to be, they were hosted and helped along at every step by a man who met with the president weekly, who was himself one of America’s most powerful men—and also a socialist.

30. Shlaes, Great Society, 87.

Michael Harrington, who was both Reuther’s plant and the man in Johnson’s ear, said this in a candid moment: “There is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system.” Anti-poverty legislation was a launchpad for his anti-capitalist movement.

Loveable People, Simple Arrogance

Reuther was a warm-hearted man who believed that the social-democratic experiment he had conducted within the auto industry should go nation-wide. From his seat, it was going swimmingly. But it would not last. In a few years, the US auto industry would be on the decline, falling to competition from Japan’s Toyota. While Reuther was busy provoking and managing competition between auto workers and their motor companies, Toyota was busy being competitive.[31] It helped that their workers didn’t need lake homes. It also helped Toyota’s problem-solving creativity that their workers were for the companies they worked for. Reuther’s socialist vision was, as Shlaes puts it, the economic murder of Flint and Detroit, Michigan, as it fostered an adversarial relationship from employee to employer. This destruction of trust led to a decrease in productivity, competitiveness, and ultimately, profit. The influence of Reuther’s ideas on Johnson and his administration was the effective murder of the hopes and dreams of so many American poor.

31. Shlaes, Great Society, 303–309.

The government thought they were helping by housing the poor. They envisioned “flourishing communities” enjoying, in their own words, “the good life.”[32] They also imagined their own political legacies in the form of impressive buildings.[33] But the opposite occurred when entire communities had no stake in their own place. They did not want to be housed. They wanted homes of their own. Downtrodden properties and people followed.[34]

32. Shlaes, Great Society, 231–233.

33. Shlaes, Great Society, 233.

34. Shlaes, Great Society, 426.

The government imagined that a scheme of rent assistance for single mothers would help raise these families from poverty. Yet this required a small army of social workers to patrol communities and inspect homes to ensure the absence of fathers.[35] It is no wonder that an emerging culture of fatherlessness was exacerbated. Dads stayed away. A generation later, there are fewer dads.[36] A good impulse; an unforeseen consequence.

35. Shlaes, Great Society, 240–242.

36. Thomas Sowell: “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state,” from, “Liberalism versus Blacks,” National Review (January 15, 2013).

With the Supreme Court’s sanctioned abuse of eminent domain, the government thought they were helping by bulldozing hundreds of acres of slum community homes.[37] But the subsidized cement high-rises they put in their place in the name of “urban renewal” became havens of intractable crime, violence, and hopelessness. The former streets and slums replaced by high rises were embarrassing to the elite class, but much loved by those who lived here.[38] In one egregious case in St. Louis, demolition crews destroyed five thousand buildings, including forty-three historic churches.[39] In reality, slums were not inevitable or permanent. These areas could “unslum” over time, as Shlaes put it.[40] They were flexible in that respect, rising with the community. But the high rises that replaced them were a cement trap, holding the community down.

37. Shlaes, Great Society, 238.

38. Shlaes, Great Society, 175, 236.

39. Shlaes, Great Society, 239.

40. Shlaes, Great Society, 250.

The government thought they were helping by giving welfare checks, thinking that would quickly propel the poor into productive work. But this turned into the state paying people not to work, for as their wages went up so did their rent.[41] Worse still, they thought they were doing right by making these checks a form of new legal “property,” or “a matter of right,” thus removing the discretion of local social workers in their allocation and distribution.[42] The result of these good intentions? A culture of “entitlement” remains with us to this day and holds whole communities in helpless and hopeless generational dependence on the state. They set out to eradicate poverty; they institutionalized it instead, creating “a system of pauperism,” as one study put it.[43] By expanding the meaning of property rights, they also weakened the property rights principle in American culture.

41. Shlaes, Great Society, 201, 245.

42. Shlaes, Great Society, 195, 344, 367.

43. Shlaes, Great Society, 334.

The government thought that minimum-wage policies would help those working at the lower end of our economy. But this was a form of self-deception. In fact, such policies only priced less-skilled workers out of jobs, with a disproportionate impact on younger workers just getting a start. As the 1960s dawned, unemployment among the youth was below 10%. During that decade, however, double digits became the norm.

The government thought bussing kids from one part of town to another was a good idea so that schools would be integrated, black and white. But this was less popular among blacks than modern Americans would care to admit. It didn’t help anyone for parents to be thrust into mandated isolation from the schools and teachers to whom parents used to be in close proximity. Lost time, resources, and fragmented relationships hurt the children in obvious ways.

The government thought that the size of the federal government was a match to problems of national scope. But when they deliberately weakened state and town programs, they undermined the kind of personalized help that assists the poor without hurting them. Further, by undermining the authority and responsibility of mayors and towns, the federal government undermined the foundation for democracy in a nation as large as the United States. During the New Deal of the 1930s, the presence of the federal government in a given community exceeded the presence of state and town governments combined. Under Johnson, federal money and leverage came to squash local governance as we knew it in America.[44]

44. Shlaes, Great Society, 153–155.

All this entitlement spending, according to the government, would energize the economy. Instead, we got a new word—“stagflation”—to describe the unexpected, unprecedented, and economically devastating combination of inflation with unemployment. By 1971, entitlement spending outpaced defense spending. “Assume growth” they said, as if the “milk cow” of the private sector was unstoppable. The ambitious government plans of this era, built as they were on this assumption, actually reversed seemingly unstoppable growth.

It all sounded so good on paper. Not so good in reality. This much, Johnson understood. He did not run for reelection in 1969. His foreign policy and his domestic policy were abysmal. He assembled “the best and the brightest” to plan the War in Vietnam and the “War on Poverty.” The planners failed, and the Great Society became the Stagnate Society. Nixon understood the growing public sentiment. He campaigned on “workfare, not welfare.”

Why did it fail?

Liberals a generation later offer explanations tied to Vietnam and political opposition. Shlaes shows just how little political resistance the left faced on the domestic front. They got what they wanted. Just not the results they promised or expected. Instead, she summarizes their failure in two words: “simple arrogance.” A fifth word to describe this era.

That sounds right to my ears. It even sounds biblical.

Not Traitors, Just Wrong: Three Failures of Socialist Policies

As Shlaes argues, arrogant people are not necessarily cruel people. “The trouble with 1960s leftists was not that they were traitors. Few were. The trouble was that they were wrong.”[45] Or, putting all of this together: the gravity of good intentions cannot compensate for the calamity of bad ideas.

45. Shlaes, Great Society, 16.

There is no field of study—from history to economics—that is not also theological. Speaking during the Great Depression on what governments do in crises, Chase Bank’s Benjamin Anderson made this simple observation: the government “plays God yet more vigorously.”[46] He was right to cast this tendency in theological terms.

46. The True Engine of Economic Recovery: A Conversation with Amity Shlaes,” Texas CEO Magazine, August 24, 2020.

Shifting now to my work as a pastor, here’s an attempt to summarize the arrogance of this era in light of a simple theological truth: humans have limits, and the Great Society did not acknowledge those limits. It did not look evil. But in fact, arrogance that denies limits is deeply evil.

1. First, the political liberals of the 1960s failed to recognize the limits of human nature.

Housing policies undermined the dignity of property ownership and the integrity of the family. Welfare policy undermined natural incentives to work for oneself or one’s family, and it trapped communities in institutionalized and generational government dependence.[47] Mandatory bussing for integration undermined local neighborhood communities. The list goes on.

47. Two passages from Paul’s letters speak to Christians on the basis of responsibilities that belong to all people. In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, Paul offers the biblical command: You don’t work, you don’t eat. In 1 Timothy 5:8, Paul insists that the one who doesn’t provide for his own household has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

In all this they failed to account for the constraints of human nature. As Thomas Sowell wrote during those days, “People who have been trying for years to tell others that Negroes are basically no different from anybody else, should not themselves lose sight of the fact that Negroes are just like everybody else in wanting something for nothing.”[48] Generous sounding programs ultimately stole the less tangible cultural norms essential to the durable emergence of any group from poverty.

48. Shlaes, Great Society, 167.

2. Second, Americans failed to recognize the limits of human government.

Prior to this era, social work had been the assumed responsibility of local communities and sometimes local government. The idea that the federal government would take responsibility for local social problems was unheard of. But this era, marked as it was by optimism and presumption, decided the federal government was the answer to one problem after another.[49] They misapplied a proper Christian (and indeed human and family) responsibility of charity to the role of human government. Is it hard to imagine solutions by any other means? Marvin Olasky’s magnificent work The Tragedy of American Compassion tells the story of America’s bustling cottage industry of local and lovingly tailored organizations that were smothered out by the growth of the government to address the same needs.[50]

49. Anti-poverty socialism plays God and ignores Jesus’s words in Mark 14:7: “The poor you will always have with you.” A Christian worldview recognizes that poverty can be alleviated but not eliminated on this side of glory.

50. Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022). The first publication of this book, now thirty years ago, was influential in the crafting and passage of bipartisan welfare reform legislation in 1996. For the story, see, “The Tragedy of American Compassion: Pilgrim Beginnings,” Capitol Research Center (May 3, 2023).

The problem of knowledge, as it would be called, became apparent during these years. Government planners planned for buildings with precision but could not calculate many other things, such as the movement of jobs out of a community where those projects were constructed. It was in response to these sorts of policies that Friedrich Hayek wrote his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society[51] and Thomas Sowell wrote his book Knowledge and Decisions.[52] Simply put, good decisions require the right information at the right time. A large centralized federal government is not suited for this. Politicians and government planners took on a job whose success required omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. [53] They were guilty, in Hayek’s terms, of “the fatal conceit.”[54] The pursuit of “cosmic justice” by man, given his intrinsic constraints, will always require that he commit actual injustice.[55] This was the era of immense promises and even bigger failures. Today we live in a context of a loss of trust in government that largely began in our American context in these years.

51. Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review (1945).

52. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

53. Shlaes, Great Society, 414–415.

54. F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

55. Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, 2002. See also his essay, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice,” Hoover Digest, 2000/01/30.

3. Third, Americans failed to recognize the limits of human history.

Shlaes opened a recent lecture on her book with this line: “We all want to get to heaven. But there’s a second step; some of us want to make heaven here.”[56] I’m not sure of Shlaes’s eschatology, but that’s some astute theology right there. Leading America to this new destination, to “turn the corner of history,” was irresistible to some politicians.[57] Clandestine trips to failed foreign socialist states did not deter them but only proved the adage that where socialism failed, it did so because it had yet to be truly tried.[58] This group of generous and energetic liberal leaders shared a faulty view of history—not only history in hindsight, but the arc of history itself. They wanted heaven now, and they thought they could bring it. Eric Voegelin’s classic phrase, popularized in the 1960s, captures it well: they wanted to “immanentize the eschaton.”[59] They acted as gods. It felt good to them. It felt good to many Americans.

56. Amity Shlaes “Not So Great Society” Keynote Address, Sumners Distinguished Lecture Series, for the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), September 30, 2022.

57. Shlaes, Great Society, 212–113.

58. Shlaes, Great Society, 227.

59. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 1987. Voegelin understood this as a misapplication of Christian theology when he wrote, “a theoretical problem arises . . . when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.”

Nowhere is this clearer than on the subject of race in America. In the Antebellum South, the government’s laws enslaved blacks. Then, after emancipation, laws and landowners drove blacks north. Then, as part of a broader project of fixing what it had broken, the government made lavish promises through law. Through law it bulldozed downtrodden (and much loved) black streets, churches, and whole communities to build them high-rise cement towers, all with the self-congratulatory thought that this would improve their lives.[60]

Instead, they got riots in Los Angeles and Detroit—no small consequence of liberal ideological arrogance that displaced and disillusioned a generation. African American writer, James Baldwin, described the projects as follows: “a monument to the folly and the cowardice of good intentions.”[61] In pursuit of their own name in the age of civil rights, these leaders set out not just to correct bad laws but to use the law to correct America’s shameful history, to redeem themselves at the expense of those whom they had oppressed.

60. Shlaes, Great Society, 426.

61. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire Magazine (July, 1960).

But only God can justify a sinner and only God can set history aright. Structures and laws are a means he has ordained, but those laws must conform to the reality of the world as it is.

Why then did The Great Society fail? For the same reason all socialist experiments fail: they reject the limits placed on us by God. In this way, socialism is itself an expression of the human ambition in Adam to be like God, to make a great name for ourselves (Gen. 3:5; 11:4).

Why did we try it in the first place? The conditions were ripe: a combination of affluence, confidence, and ambition. America, as Stalin said, was the only country that could afford socialism.[62]

62. Shlaes, Great Society, 1.

Thankfully, in America, our federalist system kept Reuther’s right-to-work vision from going nationwide. He never achieved the structured social-democracy—a step in the direction of socialism—he so sincerely believed in, even with the president’s ear each week. That is good for us. For, in the twentieth century alone, more than 100 million human casualties can be traced to the pursuit of economic equality between rich and the poor through the coercive means inherent in communist and socialist policies.[63]

63. Thaddeus J. Williams, “We Just May Be on ‘the Wrong Side of History’ If …: The Demand for Justice in Our Society Leaves Out Many of the Oppressed,” WORLD Opinions (4 March, 2022).

Americans woke up from their socialist dreams. Nixon won the presidency. A decade later, Ronald Reagan won his election as president with the promise to return the responsibility to the people. As he put it, “I believe the government is supposed to promote the general welfare. I do not believe it is supposed to provide it.”[64] Or, more provocatively still, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” And again, as he was famous for having said as early as 1964: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!”

64. Shlaes, Great Society, 370.

Reagan resonated with Americans in a Post-Great Society America. Which says a lot about America, divided as we often are. Not everyone in those days was carried away by Johnson’s “Great Society” vision. As Shlaes puts it, this era was marked by an epic clash between the federal government and its allies (especially the auto industry) on one side, and the rest of the nation on the other side. Through the political process, the rest of the nation won out over those who sought to remake her.

Amity Shlaes has done Americans a great service by chronicling this great clash and this spectacular outcome. Since “nothing is new, just forgotten,” we love our neighbors and the next generation by ensuring that the lessons from this period are not lost.

These lessons are urgent for us today. By the close of the decade in the 1980s, the Berlin wall would come down and, so it seemed, socialist and communist systems were on the out. For a time, that is. Today, we are more removed from the sixties than the generation of the sixties was removed from the era of the Great Depression. We are also affluent, confident, and ambitious. We are also arrogant. Socialism has a certain enduring appeal, so long as time allows a people to forget the harm of its failures.

The Twisted Legacy of Slavery

Back to our own tumultuous times and the reason I picked up this book.

I was at a large evangelical conference recently in which there was a breakout on doing justice. Justice was defined as “making things right structurally and restoring social conditions that create flourishing, especially for the vulnerable.” According to the speaker, the list of injustices common in our day that should concern pastors in their pastoring included the following: “under-employment and unemployment, disparities in housing and health care.” Oddly, the list did not include abortion and the state-promotion of transgenderism. The presenter had a list of leftist talking points, a list that required not only equal treatment under the law but redistributive policies for equal outcomes.

It sounded generous and just. But only to ears untethered from the Bible’s vision of humanity, history, and justice.[65]

65. For an excellent exposition of the Bible’s teaching on justice, see Andy Naselli’s sermon “Justice: Divine, Imputed, Imparted, Public, and Ultimate,” Heritage Bible Church (July 8, 2023).

So, why do we keep hearing about “the legacy of slavery” in connection with today’s inequities?

This is what I think is going on here. It appears that the recent fires in Maui are owing to a failure of human government at several levels and over a stretch of time. No surprise, the headlines have been dominated by government officials crying, “climate change.” It’s a retort that simultaneously distracts from their own failures, blames their political enemies, and makes the case for the accrual of more power to themselves. Unfortunately, the more honest final reports don’t make the headlines months later.

That’s what I think is going on here, too. So often when we hear “the legacy of slavery,” it’s a liberal distraction from their party’s contribution to a real problem that simultaneously blames their political opponents and advances a case to accrue still more power.

Yes, the racism of our past continues to shape our present, but not mostly in a straight line from slavery and Jim Crow to the inequities of today, but by way of a twisted line through the Great Society. This collective impulse led to an arsenal of policies—intended to help—that significantly harmed the objects of its short-sighted compassion. This impulse remains with us today. Many of these institutions remain as well, preying on the vulnerabilities of the downtrodden for good-sounding political gains.

You could even call it systemic injustice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author

  • Trent Hunter

    Trent Hunter is the pastor for preaching and teaching at Heritage Bible Church in Greer, South Carolina. Trent is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Graphical Greek, an electronic reference guide for biblical Greek, Joshua in Crossway's Knowing the Bible series, and is co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ. Trent is an Instructor for the Charles Simeon Trust Workshops on Biblical Exposition.

Picture of Trent Hunter

Trent Hunter

Trent Hunter is the pastor for preaching and teaching at Heritage Bible Church in Greer, South Carolina. Trent is a graduate of Moody Bible Institute and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Graphical Greek, an electronic reference guide for biblical Greek, Joshua in Crossway's Knowing the Bible series, and is co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ. Trent is an Instructor for the Charles Simeon Trust Workshops on Biblical Exposition.