Many of our current domestic disasters stem from a slate of legislation passed six decades ago: President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which resulted in a disastrous centralization of power in the Washington bureaucracy and then sought to impose its destructive values on Americans.
READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: The Anti-American Left Emerges
After enduring two generations of such federal supervision and interference, our school systems are so bad — take, for example, the 13 Baltimore public schools that have zero students who are proficient in math — that they constitute a threat to our national survival as we compete with Communist China and other American enemies. In 1960, about 9 percent of children were born outside of wedlock; today, that number is around 40 percent, and a devastating number of young males are growing up without a male figure in their lives. The anti-family structure of the Great Society welfare programs — and the provisions that made it more profitable to be a single mother than to have a male in the household — still shape the patterns of our culture.
People are no longer individually responsible for crimes they commit — or for their own poverty. Those who break the law or refuse to work are now treated as victims of an oppressive society. Again, for this, we can thank the Great Society, under which the Kerner Commission, reporting on the more than 150 riots in the summer of 1967, described group guilt as the cause: “[W]hite society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Long before the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the emergence of “white guilt” as a standard left-wing explanation, the Great Society started the process of moving from individual to collective guilt. It is no longer the criminal’s fault, or the rioter’s fault, or the failing student’s fault. It is white society’s fault. (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: The Rise of Black Power and Widespread Violence)
Lastly, the federal government’s centralized regulation of almost every segment of the economy began in the New Deal, but it was dramatically deepened and accelerated by the Great Society. Now, huge Washington office buildings house tens of thousands of bureaucrats. They issue countless orders to places they have never been — and that affect industries of which they have no understanding.
Johnson’s Great Society birthed a fundamental abdication of self-government, creating a nation under the rule of bureaucracies.
Through his Great Society programs, Johnson had a foundational impact on moving America away from the rule of law and toward the rule of power. He expanded the Vietnam War without a strategy for winning — or convincing the American people that it was worth the cost in lives and money. He launched the War on Poverty, which promised great breakthroughs at reasonable cost and achieved mostly negative results at enormous cost. While the civil rights legislation was an historic achievement of great moral and practical value, the War on Poverty became a nightmare of bad policies, bureaucracies, and enormous corruption. Contrary to Johnson’s vision, self-interested outside pressure groups have crippled the poor, increased poverty, and decreased the ability to rise in America. His policy has enabled our current culture of dependence, lack of job training, and failure to learn. The Great Society ultimately subordinated state and local governments, volunteer organizations, individuals, and local businesses into a centralized bureaucratic system unlike anything America had ever experienced in peacetime.
The tragedy is that large bureaucracies, with their interest-group allies and propaganda media supporters, create an iron triangle that is virtually impossible to challenge and change. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but practical reality guaranteed it.
One of the great differences between government programs and a competitive private sector is the reaction to failure. When a private-sector company has a product or service that is not attracting customers, it must learn and change or go bankrupt. When a government bureaucracy has a product or service that fails to meet its clients’ needs, it simply increases the amount being spent on the project while claiming success in the middle of failure.
The difference between customers in the private sector and clients in the public sector helps define why it is so hard to reform or change a failing government program. Customers are the center of power in the private sector. If a better solution comes along, they can take their money and leave the old business for the new, better solution. Think of Kmart, Montgomery Ward, Sears Roebuck, and a remarkable number of historically successful retail firms that simply could not adapt to competing with Walmart, Amazon, Target, Costco, and others.
Clients are served (and dictated to) by a government bureaucracy. They have no market power and no freedom to choose. The center of authority is in the bureaucrat, not the client.
This power of the bureaucracy to grow while failing — and to be self-centered and self-protective — eluded the designers of the Great Society’s domestic policies, just as guerrilla warfare, protracted conflict, and the history of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists were missed by the Great Society’s national security counterparts.
Friedrich Hayek had warned of this bureaucratic control tendency in his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944. Peter Drucker’s entire career as the leading management writer of the 20th century focused on competitive markets oriented toward customers as the alternative to fascist and communist state-controlled bureaucracies imposing their values on citizens. The best modern example of bureaucracy’s ability to reinterpret everything to its advantage and avoid any effort by the public to assert control is found in Antony Jay’s Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister TV and book series. Anyone who watches Jay’s work will understand how self-serving and deceitful large bureaucracies become. They have to be deceitful because they can’t be honest about their failures. They also can’t openly assert the right to control citizens, including their elected representatives. Jay himself was a senior adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His shows were her favorites, and most of the stories were based on real events inside the British bureaucracy. (READ MORE: Remembering Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Magnolia)
Since bureaucracy was the only understandable form of government services in Johnson’s day, it became the vehicle for transforming poverty in America.
Johnson grew up in a poor part of Texas and had seen the power of government to build roads, create schools, develop lakes, and bring electricity and telephones to rural America. He had served in World War II and knew the power of government to mobilize resources and develop an enormous number of big projects.
Liberals of that generation profoundly misunderstood the lesson of World War II mobilization. Modeled in many ways on Gen. Erich Ludendorff’s mobilization of the German economy in World War I, it was true that, for a brief period, government could create an enormous surge in directed energy and resources. This was especially true when coming out of a depression that had idled both human and physical resources. There was a reservoir of capability that could be easily mobilized.
This centrally directed surge taught a lot of the younger bureaucrats a model that has haunted America ever since. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith is a good example of those who learned principles from wartime mobilization that simply do not work in the long run in peacetime conditions.
Galbraith was a Ph.D. in economics who briefly went to Washington. In 1934, at the peak of the New Deal activism, he was teaching at Harvard. He was 25. He then returned to the nation’s capital for a major job in 1940 at the age of 30. Within a year he was the deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration. The OPA controlled prices and rents for the entire economy. It was designed to avoid the inflation that had exploded during World War I.
Galbraith had a heady experience of controlling large segments of the largest economy in the world. The OPA started with six staff. During the war, it grew into a 15,000-person bureaucracy. In just one year, the OPA enforcement division issued 250,000 citations for violations of wage and price controls.
The system of centralized government management was powerful for a few years, leading many of the youthful leaders who had amazing power for their age and experience level to conclude that it could always work.
As the collapse of the Soviet system under Mikhail Gorbachev showed, centralized control systems rapidly degenerate into corruption, systemic dishonesty, and inefficiency. Because they are self-protective, these massive, centralized bureaucracies tend to lie about results, minimize mistakes, and avoid embarrassment. Once they are created, it is virtually impossible to find accurate information about their performance — or to hold their leaders accountable for failures.
However, liberal academics such as Galbraith came out of World War II believing that rational planning was more efficient than markets. They further believed that governments were more benevolent and trustworthy than profit-oriented businesses. These academic-bureaucratic-politicians became regarded as “experts” and “fixers.” They moved smoothly back and forth between academe, think tanks, government jobs, and the political process. They became convinced they knew more than other community leaders — and far more than mere citizens.
Because bigness had been essential to winning World War II, they had a deep bias in favor of large systems and bureaucracies. Furthermore, as people who had spent their entire careers in libraries, campuses, and government offices, they had a liberal, theoretical understanding of how the world worked. These were the people who were confident they could reshape America through big government programs, which they called the Great Society.
The same spirit of cultural elitism produced people who were confident they could technocratically manage the war in Vietnam. They ignored the military advice of people who had spent their lifetimes fighting and studying war, instead imposing their own academic theories. David Halberstam wrote a devastating book, The Best and the Brightest, explaining why the elites could not come to grips with the realities of Vietnam.
In the most telling single story, Halberstam captured the tragic hubris of people who were self-consciously the best and the brightest:
It was an extraordinary confluence of time and men, and many people in the know quoted Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to them at the first Cabinet meeting. He, the outsider, like us, looked at them with a certain awe, which was no wonder, since they had forgotten to invite him to the meeting, and only at the last minute, when the others were arriving, did someone remember the Vice-President and a desperate telephone search went on to find him. They were all so glamorous and bright that it was hard to tell who was the most brilliant, but the one who impressed him the most was “the fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair.” The fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair! A terrific line, because it once again delineated Johnson, who, Vice-President or no, seemed more a part of the Eisenhower era than this one. What was not so widely quoted in Washington (which was a shame because it was a far more prophetic comment) was the reaction of Lyndon’s great friend Sam Rayburn to Johnson’s enthusiasm about the new men. Stunned by their glamour and intellect, he had rushed back to tell Rayburn, his great and crafty mentor, about them, about how brilliant each was, that fellow Bundy from Harvard, Rusk from Rockefeller, McNamara from Ford. On he went, naming them all. “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” said Rayburn, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Rayburn understood that there were simple realities that must be learned through immersion and experience. Too many brilliant, self-confident, mutually admiring elitists lead to huge errors of judgement — and enormous difficulty coming to grips with the real world. This critique applies to the Left’s current inability to deal with Afghanistan, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a host of other dangerous foreign policy challenges.
Halberstam should have written a second book, The Best and the Brightest Screw up America, to go with his study of what went wrong in Vietnam. The same academic arrogance, inability to deal with reality, and contempt for people with real experience was brought to bear in designing and implementing the Great Society.
Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy were all generally liberal. But they were grounded in reality. They were cautious about how much the world was malleable and could be reshaped by government intervention. The Great Society was a fundamental break with incremental liberalism. It was designed by stunningly arrogant people who felt they had the power to reshape the world to fit their values and ideals. Just as their national-security counterparts did not need to learn about Vietnam, they did not need to learn about the practical realities and limitations of societal engineering.
The designers and implementers of the Great Society were what Milovan Djilas called “the New Class” in describing the power structure of the Soviet system. His stunning 1957 book of that name showed a total corruption of the Communist idealism. It was replaced by a hierarchy of entrenched power.
It turned out that there was a new class in America too: an interlocking series of relationships that took care of each other, shared the same values, and protected each other and their institutions from being challenged or held to account. Charles Murray described the incestuous pattern of this American new class in the remarkable book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. As Murray put it, based on zip-code analysis, members of the elite (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.) lived together, married each other, sent their kids to the same schools, and formed enclaves identifiable by zip code. They are clearly separate from 95 percent of America.
The New Class lost the Vietnam War (and has crippled our effectiveness in all subsequent wars) because it does not understand violence and determination in real wars. The New Class ignored all the practical advice of people who worked with the poor for the previous 200 years. Given the right diplomas and relationships, the members of the New Class knew they could reshape everything and always win (or, at least, cover up their failures and pay no cost for them).
And, so, the Great Society was designed by government bureaucrats, academics, liberal ideologues, and pro-government interest groups. These were people who disdained everyday Americans and were determined to fundamentally change America — not just make it slightly better. The effort violated virtually every principle of effective change in America. It also violated virtually every principle about how to help the poor. And it failed.
Today, 58 years later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation estimated, in its report “Unleashing Opportunity: What Can Texas Learn From U.S. Poverty Relief Efforts?,” that the War on Poverty in the Great Society system had spent $25 trillion (inflation adjusted) and clearly achieved none of its goals.
As an example of the scale of Johnson’s big-government domestic effort, in 1967, state and federal spending on welfare was $75 billion. The Vietnam War that year cost only $22 billion (according to a study by the CATO Institute).
Johnson was a devout Roosevelt supporter before World War II. He saw himself as a New Deal Democrat. But his policies in the Great Society were the opposite of what FDR advocated. Consider this warning from Roosevelt in the 1935 State of the Union:
The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
Tragically, Roosevelt was right. The Great Society would go on bureaucratically with enormous resources, a growing federal bureaucracy, and the power to impose federal rules on state and local governments, voluntary associations, and private businesses.
The system and values that would trap the poor, weaken the middle class, undermine business, and create a focus on government rather than achievement was set in place. For the next 58 years, it would grow bigger, more powerful, more unaccountable, and more destructive.
The Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is the direct result of the wrong system, values, and outcomes. The power of fanatic belief, the capacity of cognitive dissonance to reject information that threatens key beliefs, and the desperate need to prop up the bureaucracy and its allies with money have only grown. They have overwhelmed the truth about how much damage big government and bad policies are doing to America.
We will get to the devastating effect of the Great Society on the poor and education in future articles, but first we need to look at the three presidential conventions that transformed American politics — the GOP in 1964 and the Democrats in 1968 and 1972.
Editor’s Note: This is the eighth installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, and the seventh here.
