AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 30 September 2008

The right and Democratic centrists have taught us to think of the Great Society in terms of its failures, like the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program, which drove a wedge between Washington and local Democratic municipal administrations and supposedly empowered all manner of swindlers and “poverty pimps.” We should focus instead on Johnson’s remarkable number of broad-based accomplishments in those first 22 months. We now take for granted the notion that the elderly have a right to medical care, that the government should provide aid for education, that immigration policy should not discriminate on the basis of race, and that the government should concern itself with clean air. It would be unimaginable to see them reversed — in part because of the constitutional inertia that made them so difficult to achieve in the first place. They are the kind of things Republicans now pretend they were in favor of all along. This is the way social change works. It is the responsibility of the next progressive president to crash through a similar set of reforms for the next generation to take for granted. Rick Perlstein

A GNT creation ©2007–2011