Constitutional foundation and the General Welfare Clause
In an episode on federal involvement in education, Andrew J. Coulson argued that the constitutional basis for Great Society programs came from a reinterpretation of the General Welfare Clause. Before FDR, Coulson said, the overwhelmingly upheld interpretation treated the clause as a general preamble to the enumerated powers. After Roosevelt, he said, a new interpretation held sway under which the general welfare was its own power, so that anything the federal government did that legislators claimed would help people was constitutional. Coulson stated that it is only because of this interpretation that there can be a federal Department of Education, a No Child Left Behind Act, or a Race to the Top, and that without it none of this would be legal and it would be overturned by the Supreme Court instantly End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Bob Zadek framed the federal role in education as a takeover traceable to Lyndon Johnson’s accession after the death of John F. Kennedy. Zadek said that Kennedy’s death was the only way Johnson got to be president, and that it created the 1965 legislation, which he called the first real meaningful federal foray into education. Zadek quoted Johnson as saying, when the first federal bill involving education was signed, that it was a new day of greatness in the American society, and added that we are still waiting for this American greatness End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Coulson said that charts of 17-year-old students’ performance on tests administered to nationally representative samples back to 1970 are flatlines, and that the specific things the Great Society education programs were supposed to achieve—narrowing the achievement gap by race and by income—failed. He said the children of college students and the children of high school dropouts are about as far apart academically today as when the programs were enacted, and that closing that gap was the central aim. Coulson said the federal government has spent $1.85 trillion on education since Johnson’s Great Society education legislation was passed End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Amity Shlaes on the Great Society
Historian Amity Shlaes, discussing her book Great Society: A New History, described the old history of the 1960s as a collage in which the narrative falls apart and authors go psychedelic, mixing Napalm with Woodstock, Charles Manson, civil rights and assassinations. She said the second revision in her book concerns the tendency to think Johnson’s Great Society was heroic, with emphasis on his facility in pushing through legislation—it was said he passed laws the way other people eat chocolate chip cookies—which begs the question of whether the legislation worked and advanced the principles of the United States or the prosperity and happiness of Americans. She said the evidence is that most of that legislation was overly ambitious, sometimes wrong-headed, sometimes folly, sometimes incredibly destructive. She also said she includes Richard Nixon in the Great Society, and that there is far less difference between Johnson and Nixon than we assume, both parties having written exaggerated law that hurt the economy and gave us the depressed decade of the 1970s Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes distinguished the 1930s, when Roosevelt brought the New Deal, from the 1960s, when Johnson brought the Great Society. In the 30s, she said, one in four men was unemployed and the stock market went down almost 90 percent. In the 60s, we were doing pretty well, and poverty as it existed came down dramatically in the 50s and going into the 60s. Johnson created the War on Poverty and promised to cure poverty, using that verb. Shlaes said poverty dropped under the Great Society, though not more rapidly than it had been dropping before, and then settled with all our Great Society commitments above 10 percent, where it about is today. She said the writer Norman Podhoretz, who had served overseas, said the Great Society was just a mopping-up action in the view of most. She noted discrete problems including lynching and only one in ten blacks registered to vote in the state of Mississippi, and said there is no evidence we had a national disaster, so it was a bigger program than the nation needed, written in the name of idealism and ambition Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes also discussed Martin Luther King’s mission creep. She said the best part of the student movement and of King’s movement was the work in the South, where change needed to come, and that the movement was then translated to the North. She said King spent time in Chicago trying to desegregate housing and work on landlords, and that there was still a culture of covenants in Chicago even though the law had shifted. She said King also marched against poverty, and that one of his allies was Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, whose union helped bail King out of the Birmingham jail. The unions wanted a bigger campaign, not just about voting rights in the South or an end to lynching, and wanted everything to be equal everywhere. Shlaes said these movements lost their focus when they did that, because economic change generally is up to the individual, not to a government, and usually isn’t brought about by a new law Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Compulsory service and the Great Society precedent
In an episode on conscription, Bob Zadek argued that compulsory public service is a form of taxation, no different from forcing him to pay taxes to allow the government to do a charitable activity. He said a lot of what the government does is public sector charity, and that charity is good but compulsory charity does not feel so good. He asked Warren Gibson whether compelling an 18-year-old under threat of prison to give a year of life to an activity they otherwise do not want to do has an economic value, and whether that is any different from saying all 18-year-olds have to pay a special tax. Gibson agreed that it is not different, calling it a compulsory extraction of value Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020).
Zadek said that during the Civil War draft, young men drafted by Lincoln had to serve but could hire somebody else to serve in the military in their place, and that this makes it even more clearly that conscription is nothing other than a tax. He compared it to taxes assessed in England in the Middle Ages paid not by money but by grain or livestock, and said taxes are never limited just to money. Gibson re-emphasized that service is a good thing and that it is good for young people to have some experience serving voluntarily and locally, but that it is not a primary obligation and should not be forced Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020).
Zadek said politicians were already identifying areas eligible for public service, including a suggestion that the federal government needs a Climate Corps to get 18-year-olds to work for below-market wages, and a National Infrastructure Apprenticeship Program, which he said means cleaning up parks and federal buildings, janitorial services in effect. He said we actually experienced that in the 60s during the various job programs during the Great Society Conscription Gets a Face Lift (2020).
Statistical categories and racial preferences
David Bernstein said the transition from visual identification for statistical purposes to self-identification happened in the 70s, partly as a result of lobbying by civil rights organizations who wanted the government to get better data for certain kinds of laws that were more group-based than individual-based. He said we developed a large social welfare bureaucracy during the Great Society in the 60s where we want to check the social progress of various groups—how well black or Hispanic or Asian or whoever students are doing on educational tests, how many are graduating high school. He said the statistics were invented to enforce both the laws and to track the progress of various groups Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022).
Bernstein said every government agency had its own definition of which groups counted for statistical purposes, with some agencies including Cubans in the Hispanic category and some not, some using Spanish-speaking households and some Spanish-language households. Some agencies even had an other category including white ethnics like Cajuns or French Canadians or Italian Americans, groups with low socioeconomic progress at the time. He said the government decided in the mid-70s that it needed uniform data to compare apples to apples, and created an interagency government committee to decide the official classifications and definitions. He said it was not especially controversial at the time because no one realized the implications—that this would become the baseline for affirmative action programs and racial preferences, that identity politics would revolve around these classifications, and that medical treatment would be divided up based on these very unscientific categories Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022).
Across episodes
The topic is touched in four episodes spanning 2009 to 2022. The 2009 episode with Andrew J. Coulson treats the Great Society through the General Welfare Clause and education spending; the 2019 episode with Amity Shlaes treats it through economic history and poverty metrics; the 2020 episode with Warren Gibson treats compulsory service as a tax and cites Great Society job programs as precedent; and the 2022 episode with David Bernstein treats the Great Society as the origin of the social welfare bureaucracy that produced uniform racial classifications. The excerpts show no development of a single argument across these episodes, but rather different guests applying the topic to different concerns.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the names of the 1965 education bill or the War on Poverty legislation, nor the specific statutes creating the programs discussed. They do not give the founding date or full text of the General Welfare Clause, nor the case in which the Supreme Court is said to have approved the New Deal reinterpretation. The excerpts do not state what any court held about the Great Society programs or which amendment any challenge turned on. They also do not cover the end of the Great Society era or the later legislative history of the programs named.