However, once elected, Johnson didn’t brag about his support for the New’ Deal, He learned from the defeat of the Texas congressman Maury Maverick that getting praise from East Coast liberals didn’t help you much in Texas. When he heard that the New Republic was going to profile him along with other influential New Deal congressmen, LBJ panicked. He called a friend at the International Labor Organization and implored her: “You must have some friend in the labor movement. Can’t you call him and have him denounce me? [If] they put out that... I’m a liberal hero up here, I’ll get killed. You’ve got to find somebody to denounce me!”
When he became president in his own right, he no longer had to keep his true feelings secret. He could finally and unabashedly come out of the closet as a liberal. JFK’s death, meanwhile, was the perfect psychological crisis for liberalism’s new phase. Woodrow Wilson used war to achieve his social ends, FDR used economic depression and war. JFK used the threat of war and Soviet domination. Johnson’s crisis mechanism came in the form of spiritual anguish and alienation. And he exploited it to the hilt.
When Johnson picked up the fallen flag of liberalism, he did so with the succinct, almost biblical phrase “let us continue.” But continue what? Surely not mere whiz-kid wonkery or touch football games at Hyannis Port. Johnson was tasked with building the church of liberalism on the rock of Kennedy’s memory, only he needed to do so in the psychological buzz phrases of “meaning” and “healing.” He cast himself—or allowed himself to be cast—as the secular Saint Paul to the fallen liberal Messiah, LBJ’s Great Society would be the church built upon the imagined “word” of Camelot.
On May 22, 1964. Johnson offered his first description of the Great Society: “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,”
It was an ambitious project, to put it mildly. In the Great Society all wants would be fulfilled, all needs satisfied. No good thing would come at the cost of another good thing. The state would foster, nurture, and guarantee every legitimate happiness. Even leisure would be maximized so that every citizen would find “meaning” in life,
Johnson conceded that such a subsidized nirvana couldn’t materialize overnight. It would require the single-minded loyalty and effort of every American citizen and the talents of a new wave of experts. “I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems,” he admitted. “But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.” Johnson established some fifteen committees to answer the question, what is the Great Society?
The renaissance in liberal ambition transpired even as America’s intrinsic antistatist antibodies were reaching a critical mass. In 1955 National Review was born, giving an intellectual home to a heterodox collection of thinkers who would form modern conservatism. It’s revealing that while William F. Buckley had always been a classical liberal and Catholic traditionalist, nearly all of the intellectual co-founders of National Review were former socialists and communists who’d soured on the god that failed.
In 1964 Senator Barry Gold water was National Review’s candidate of choice rather than of compromise. Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Coolidge to break with the core assumptions of Progressivism, including what Goldwater called “me-too Republicanism.” As a result, Goldwater was demonized as the candidate of “hate” and nascent fascism. LBJ accused him of “preach[ing] hate” and consistently tried to tie him to terrorist “hate groups” like the Klan (whose constituency was, of course, traditionally Democratic). In a speech before steelworkers in September 1964, Johnson denounced Goldwater’s philosophy of the “soup line”—as if free-market capitalism’s ideal is to send men to the poor-house—and scorned the “prejudice and bigotry and hatred and division” represented by the affable Arizonan. Needless to say, this was a gross distortion. Goldwater was a champion of limited government who put his faith in the decency of the American people rather than in a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington. His one great mistake, which he later admitted and apologized for, was to vote against the Civil Rights Act.
Few liberals, then or now, would dispute that the Great Society was premised on love and unity. “We will do all these things because we love people instead of hate them...because you know it takes a man who loves his country to build a house instead of a raving, ranting demagogue who wants to tear down one. Beware of those who fear and doubt and those who rave and rant about the dangers of progress,” Johnson railed. Meanwhile, the establishment worked overtime to insinuate that Goldwater was an architect of the “climate of hate” that had claimed Kennedy’s life. As befitted the newly psychologized Zeitgeist, Goldwater was denounced as, quite literally, insane. An ad in the New York Tunes reported that 1,189 psychiatrists had diagnosed him as not “psychologically fit” to be president. The charge was then recycled in excessive “free media” coverage. Dan Rathers colleague Daniel Schorr (now a senior correspondent with National Public Radio) reported on the CBS Evening News, with no factual basis whatsoever, that candidate Goldwater’s vacation to Germany was “a move by Senator Goldwater to link up” with neo-Nazi elements.
Goldwater lost in a landslide. And given LBJ’s monumental ego as well as the hubris of his intellectual coterie, it’s no wonder that the election results were greeted as an overwhelming endorsement of the Great Society project.
Again, Johnson was in many ways a perfect incarnation of liberalism’s passions and contradictions. His first job (tellingly enough) was as a schoolteacher during the rising tide of the Deweyan revolution in education. Indeed, as some observed during the debates over the Great Society, the roots of the phrase stretched back to Dewey himself. The phrase appears over and over in Dewey’s 1927 The Public and Its Problems. Ultimate credit, however, should properly go to the co-founder of Fabian socialism, Graham Wallas, who in 1914 published The Great Society, a book familiar to the two Johnson aides who claimed credit for coining Johnson’s “the Great Society.”
One of those aides was Richard Goodwin, a golden boy of the Kennedy administration (he graduated first in his class at Harvard Law) who came to JFK’s attention for his work as a congressional investigator probing the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. LBJ inherited Goodwin as a speech writer. In the summer of 1965 Goodwin offered what the New York Times called “the most sophisticated and revealing commentary to date” on the question, what is the Great Society? His answer lay in the need for the state to give “meaning” to individuals and “make the world a more enjoyable and above all enriching place to live in.” “The Great Society,” Goodwin explained, “is concerned not with the quantity of our goods but the quality of our lives.” Though he didn’t say so directly, it was clear that the Great Society would offer the opposite of the “hate” that killed Kennedy: love.
But it was also to be a tough love. Goodwin made it clear that if the citizenry didn’t want to find meaning through state action or measure the quality of their lives on a bureaucratic slide rule, such reluctance would be overcome. But not necessarily via persuasion. Rather, it was the government’s task “to spur them into action or the support of action.” Here again Dewey’s ghost was hard at work.
Goodwin declared that the Great Society must “ensure our people the environment, the capacities, and the social structures which will give them a meaningful chance to pursue their individual happiness.” This differed very little from Dewey’s version of state-directed democracy. Dewey held that “[n]atural rights and natural liberties exist on
ly in the kingdom of mythological social zoology” and that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the only means to create “free” individuals.
The religious character of modern liberalism was never far from the surface. Indeed, the 1960s should be seen as another in a series of “great awakenings” in American history—a widespread yearning for new meaning that gave rise to a tumultuous social and political movement. The only difference was that this awakening largely left God behind. Paul Goodman, whose 1960 Growing Up Absurd helped launch the politics of hope in the first part of the decade, came to recognize in the second half how insufficient his original diagnosis had been: “I...imagined that the world-wide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw [in 1969] that we had to do with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen hundreds, when not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon.”
This view of the 1960s as essentially a religious phenomenon has gained a good deal of respectability in recent years, and scholars now debate the finer points of its trajectory. The deeply perceptive journalist John Judis, for example, argues that the 1960s revolt had two phases, a postmillennial politics of hope followed by a premillennial politics of despair, the latter ushered in by the escalation of the war, race riots at home, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Postmillennialism” and “premillennialism” are theologically freighted terms for two related religious visions. Postmillennialists believe that man can create a kingdom of God on earth. The Social Gospellers were mostly postmillennialists in their aspirations; they believed the Hegelian God-state was the kingdom of heaven on earth. Premillennialists believe that the world is coming to an end and can’t get better before it gets worse.
Judis’s chronological scheme has its merits, but ultimately it makes more sense to see these visions not as distinct phases of liberalism but as contending strains within liberalism itself. The left has always had an apocalyptic streak. Lenin argued “the worse the better.” Georges Sorel’s writings make no sense unless you understand that he saw politics as an essentially religious enterprise. The revolutionary vanguard has always demanded that destruction come before creation. The Futurists, anarchists, vorticists, Maoists, and various other modernist and left-wing avant-gardes believed that hammers were for smashing first, building second. Hitler was, of course, a great believer in the social benefits of destruction (though, as he often explained, he understood that real power came not from destroying but from corrupting institutions).
We should also note the apocalyptic logic of Progressivism generally. If the wheel of history, the state, is moving us forward to the kingdom of heaven, then anytime the “enemy” takes over, we are moving in a metaphysically wrong direction. This is never more transparent than when the mainstream media describe socialistic reforms as a “step forward” and free-market ones as “going backward” or “turning back the clock.” And when non-progressives are in charge too long, the demands from the left to “tear the whole thing down” grow louder and louder.
In other words, the apocalyptic fervor Judis identifies in the late 1960s had its roots not just in the disillusion of the Kennedy assassination and the failures of Great Society liberalism but in the pent-up religious impulses inherent to Progressivism generally. The patient reformists had their chance; now it was time to “burn, baby, burn!”
The 1960s wasn’t all about “fire in the streets,” though—just as the French Revolution wasn’t all about the Terror. Complex bureaucracies designed to “rationalize” the economy employed more Jacobins than the guillotine ever did. The born-again spirit of reform provided the drumbeat for the “long march through the institutions.” Ralph Nader’s consumerist crusade was launched in the 1960s, as was the modern environmental movement. Betty Friedarf s Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. The Stonewall riots, which gave birth to the gay pride movement, took place in the summer of 1969. Once again, the line between formal religion and Progressive politics was blurred beyond recognition. Once again, religious leaders in the “mainline” churches were seduced by radical politics. The Methodist youth magazine motive—a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton—featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others. All of these political crusades were grounded in a moralizing fervor and a spiritual yearning for something more than bread alone. Most of the radicals of the New Left later explained that theirs was really a spiritual quest more than a political one. Indeed, that’s why so many of them disappeared into the communes and EST seminars, searching for “meaning,” “authenticity,” “community,” and, most of all, “themselves.” For the 1960s generation “self-actualization” became the new secular grace.
In 1965 Harvey Cox, an obscure Baptist minister and former Oberlin College chaplain, wrote The Secular City, which turned him into an overnight prophet. Selling more than one million copies, The Secular City argued for a kind of desacralization of Christianity in favor of a new transcendence found in the “technopolis,” which was “the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization.” Modern religion and spirituality required “the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols.” Instead, we must spiritualize the material culture to perfect man and society through technology and social planning. In The Secular City “politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology.” Authentic worship was done not by kneeling in a church but by “standing in a picket line.” The Secular City was an important intellectual hinge to the transition of the 1960s (though we should note that Cox recanted much of its argument twenty years later).
Evidence of liberalism’s divided nature can be found in the enduring love-hate relationship between “hopeful” liberals and “apocalyptic” leftists. Throughout the 1960s, centrist liberals made allowances and apologies for the radicals to their left. And when push came to shove—as it did at Cornell—they capitulated to the radicals. Even today, mainstream liberals are far more inclined to romanticize the “revolutionaries” of the 1960s, in part because so many of them played that role in their youth. On college campuses today, administrators—often living fossils from the 1960s—applaud the Kabuki dance of left-wing protest as a central part of higher education. The only time they get worried is when the protest comes from the right.
But the most important legacy of the 1960s has to be liberal guilt. Guilt over their inability to create the Great Society. Guilt over leaving children, blacks, and the rest of the Coalition of the Oppressed “behind.” Guilt is among the most religious of emotions and has a way of rapidly devolving into a narcissistic God complex. Liberals were proud of how guilty they felt. Why? Because it confirmed liberal omnipotence. Kennedy and Johnson represented the belief that an enlightened affluent society could solve every problem, redress every wrong. Normally you don’t feel guilty when forces outside your control do evil. But when you have the power to control everything, you feel guilty about everything. Lyndon Johnson not only accelerated Kennedy’s politics of expectation when he declared, “We can do it all; we’re the richest country in the world,” but rendered any shortcomings, anywhere, evidence of sagging commitment, racism, insensitivity. or just plain “hate.” Feeling guilty was a sign of grace, for it proved your heart was in the right place.
Conservatives were caught in a trap. If you rejected the concept of the omnipotent state, it was proof that you hated those whom government sought to help. And the only way to prove you didn’t hate them—whoever “they” were—was to support government intervention (or “affirmative action.” in Kennedy’s phrase) on their behalf. The idea of a “good conservative” was oxymoronic. Conservatism by definition “holds us back”—leaves some “behind”—when we all know that the solution to every problem lies just around the corner.
The result was a cleavage in the American political landscape. On one side
were the radicals and rioters, who metaphorically—and sometimes literally—got away with murder. On the other were conservatives—hateful, sick, pre-fascist—who deserved no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Liberals were caught in the middle, and most, when forced to choose, sided with the radicals (”they’re too impatient, but at least they care!”). The fact that the radicals despised liberals for not going far enough fast enough only confirmed their moral status in the minds of guilt-ridden liberals.
In this climate, a liberal spending spree was inevitable. Like noblemen of yore purchasing indulgences from the Church, establishment liberals sought to expiate their guilt by providing the “oppressed” with as much swag as possible. Fear, of course, played an important role as well. Pragmatic liberals—while understandably reluctant to admit it publicly—undoubtedly bought into the Bismarckian logic of placating the radicals with legislative reforms and government largesse. For others, the very real threat of radicalism provided precisely the sort of “crisis mechanism” liberals are always in search of. The “race crisis” panic sweeping through liberalism was often cited as a justification to dust off every statist scheme sitting on a progressive shelf.