THE GREAT SOCIETY TODAY

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson and his Democratic Party pushed through very liberal and idealistic programs entitled “The Great Society.” I confess to supporting those lofty concepts in my young college days.

Fresh off my days in the Roman Catholic seminary in Fresno, California, my youthful mind honestly believed that human nature always and instinctively chooses good over evil.

Boy was I wrong! As Winston Churchill so aptly put it: “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart; and if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain!”

In case you missed it, please read William McGurn’s October 2, 2023 discussion of Senator Tim Scott’s candid discussion of the massive failure of the Great Society in the WSJ. (link here)

CLICK HERE TO READ WSJ ARTICLE

“Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was Johnson’s Great Society, where they decided to put money – where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail.” 

“And you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation. If you want to restore hope, you’ve got to restore the family, restore capitalism and put Americans back at work together as one American family.

Tim Scott told the truth that night at the Republican debate. And as McGurn notes, “For a Republican, especially a black Republican, to point to liberal government programs as a major cause of that collapse just isn’t done in polite society.”

Thomas Sowell, a man I greatly admire and now one of my Great Truths authors, said “in 1960 – almost 100 years after slavery – only 22% of African American children grew up in homes with one parent. By 1990, only thirty years later, after the expansion of the welfare state under the Great Society, that percentage had tripled to more than 65%.” Today it is believed to be 80%!

The damage was not only to black Americans – whites in Appalachia suffered similar results.

What started as a good idea filled with lofty intentions has not turned out well. Government should study the results of their Great Experiment, admit the mistakes and CHANGE their policies. I hear even President Biden is finally acknowledging that there is a migrant crisis at our borders and is changing. Will wonders never cease!

So once again I have hope for America. Arrogant intellectuals have swung the pendulum so far to the left today that chaos reigns in the streets of America.

And that leads me to my Addendum to last week’s Criminal Justice remarks. What should we do about wrongfully convicted individuals? My original thought was that the percentage would be quite small. While the liberal in me says even 1 wrongful conviction is too much, the pragmatic realist in me says that the facts confirm that 95-99% of all convicted criminals are indeed guilty. To minimize the chances of wrongful convictions I propose that we add the law simultaneously that states:

“Any law enforcement or prosecuting officer or witness who fabricates (lies) under oath shall be fired immediately, have their pension removed forever without hope of reinstatement, and be incarcerated for triple the time the innocent and wrongfully convicted individual has served with no chance of parole or release until that full sentence has been served.”
That will keep the onus on the criminals in America where the true responsibility lies.

What do you think?

These are my thoughts on The Great Society and Criminal Justice in America today, October 7, 2023