50 Years since LBJ’s Great [Slave] 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.”
~LBJ, “Great Society” Speech, University of Michigan (May 22, 1964)
“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”
~ Dr. Thomas Sowell
50 years ago on May 22, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a historical Commencement Address at the University of Michigan. That speech introduced America to his utopian vision called the Great Society, the most recent stage in the evolution of Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism and Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights socialist revolution. Until I started researching for this article I did not know that those grainy recordings I heard of LBJ touting his Marxist vision for America was made at U of M, yet I am not surprised. From 1985-87, I attended graduate school at U of M and in 1989 was an editor at the Michigan Law Review. It was a great experience but I’ve never been to a university so reflexively and uncritically in love with everything socialist, Marxist, even communist than my alma mater U of M (although Harvard would be a close second).
Remember the turbulent times in America in the 1960s: LBJ gave his Great Society speech just 6 months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the country was reeling from societal angst, counter-cultural upheaval and grotesque Jim Crow racism and discrimination against Blacks. President Lyndon Johnson boldly proposed his Leviathan monster he called the Great Society as the antidote to these societal ills. In this speech Johnson conflates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was being filibustered in Congress) with his legions of comprehensive new federal programs – the apotheosis of FDR’s New Deal, Part 2. The madly utopian expectations and experimental recklessness in social engineering took modern progressives into a crisis and historically prolonged the socialist Leviathan State into every aspect of our daily lives, with all its waste, fraud and abuse, regulatory fascism and bureaucratic entanglements amounting to a verifiable loss of our constitutional liberty, inalienable freedoms and societal morality.
This Great Society, Johnson declares, is no “finished work” but “a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.” As with Wilson, Roosevelt and John Dewey’s education atheism, the decisive target is by design to obscure, to pervert, to deconstruct American exceptionalism, thus LBJ’s Great Society is an enterprise well past the material necessity and the eradication of poverty they presuppose. It is an existential enterprise that will never end.
Johnson war on poverty programs are directed to the cities, the environment, and education. In each venue Johnson sought both utility and beauty. Thus, Great Society urban policy should not only “rebuild the entire urban United States” in the next 50 years (by 2014) but promote “community” and combat “loneliness and boredom and indifference.” The environment should not only be unpolluted but allow men to “wonder at nature.” Education will not only bring children out of poverty, it will give them “hours of leisure.” Johnson is self-assured that a socialist government, reliant on Deweyan education atheism and social engineering experimentation in government programs, can achieve both political and spiritual transformation. Under the paradigm of “creative federalism” the Constitution’s true principle of federalism is deconstructed and ultimately destroyed without amending one word of the U.S. Constitution. It is all done by autocratic executive decree, an activist, lawless Supreme Court and a lazy, unaccountable Congress: just like Obamacare was passed in our era.
Remember historically like the communists: Lenin, Stalin, Mao or the fascists: Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, education for the socialist left has always been the most irresistible (and effective way) to take over, deconstruct and destroy a society and culture and rebuild it into their own grotesque image. Remember Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin who said regarding education: Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. The Democrat Socialist Party has controlled education at all levels (particularly colleges and the public schools) much longer than the advent of LBJ’s Great Society 50 years ago which belies the fact that plummeting standardized test scores and public school dropout rates are at an all-time high. This is not by accident but by design because only in a poorly educated country can the majority of sheeple be controlled and manipulated with socialist collectivist public policies like the Great Society.
To advance such populist and uplifting programs, Johnson promised to “assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.” With their help, he asks students to fight four battles: for civil rights, against poverty, for enduring international peace, and, finally, for the Great Society, which seeks a “richer life of mind and spirit.” On all these fronts he retains all the utopianism of Progressivism, socialism and secular humanism as his anti-American polices propels society ever deeper into the abyss.
Johnson claims that the Great Society marks a watershed in America’s history, which men will appreciatively look back on this day and say: “It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life” – LBJ’s myopic view of history implies that great presidents like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Coolidge had no indication about leading a significant life, without demanding an ever-growing socialist state.
Johnson challenges America’s graduating youth to join him in his noble crusade but in reality surrenders to the most radical of them, as his Great Society pronounces the prophecy of the Students for a Democratic Society. Founded in 1962, two years before this address, the SDS protested the Vietnam War while hijacking universities and demanding a complete transformation of society (sound familiar?) along the lines envisioned by Dewey’s evolution education campaign. This radical utopianism was virtually synonymous with the evolutionary worldview of the man they would soon spew hatred at, Lyndon Johnson. History is filled with such ironic twists in the dialogues of those who abandon the natural law, natural rights and constitutional government of the Framers for the 30 pieces of silver of socialism and evolution atheism.
When I recently read LBJ’s Great Society speech given 50 years ago I felt like it was Groundhog’s Day all over again where America, overcome with collective dementia, wakes up each day only to experience the same day as before; everyday Americans are beset by the same retarded rhetoric and failed public policies that our forefathers suffered through 50 years ago. Beginning with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1990, socialism and an evolution atheist worldview has failed in every country where it was implemented, yet like inmates in a poorly run mental asylum we seem incapable or oblivious to the words of Einstein who said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush and president of Ari Fleischer Communications wrote a provocative yet compelling critique directed at President Obama’s ‘income inequality’ proposals but indirectly against LBJ’s 50 year Great Society catastrophe which has decimated the Black family. Since 1965 the Democrat Socialist Party spent according to a Cato Institute study almost $15 trillion to eradicate poverty in America, yet 50 years later every socio-economic demographic proves that the Great Society not only was an utter disaster but pushed more people into poverty where they remained generation after generation after generation without hope or redemption.
Instead of spending trillions to eradicate something that will be with humanity forever (Jesus said, “The poor ye have with you forever.”) Congress should minimize the negative effects of poverty. For example, Ari Fleischer, using simple, yet profound wisdom reminiscent of the great Jewish Rabbis and philosophers of antiquity like Maimonides (1135-1204) or Moses Mendelsohn (1729-86) wroting, “If President Obama wants to reduce income inequality, he should focus less on redistributing income and more on fighting a major cause of modern poverty: the breakdown of the family.” In other words how does America fight Income Inequality: Get Married. As proof Ari offers statistics that in families headed by married couples, the poverty level in 2012 was just 7.5%. Those with a single mother: 33.9%. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%. Among black married couples, the poverty rate was only 7%, but the rate for non-married black families was 35.6%.
In conclusion, Ari wrote, “Given how deep the problem of poverty is, taking even more money from one citizen and handing it to another will only diminish one while doing very little to help the other. A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children – in that order.”
The Democrat Socialist Party (and virtually all of their appointees including secretary heads, administrative agencies and judges) have nothing but utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution, natural law, the original intent of the constitutional Framers and biblical values. Long before he was president, Barack Obama was already plotting to deconstruct and destroy the U.S. Constitution while “fundamentally transforming America” into a servile socialist state. As far back as 2001 Obama, in a chilling public radio interview, boldly confessed that the Constitution was a “charter of negative liberties,” full of constraints imposed upon us by our Founding Fathers.
This is what you get for 100+ years of socialism slavery where since the Age of the Imperial Presidency – from Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) to Woodrow Wilson (1913-21); from FDR’s New Deal and Welfare State (1933-45) to LBJ’s Great Society and phony civil rights scams (1963-69). Writer Roger Stone in his blockbuster new book, The Man Who Killed JFK, said of LBJ: “I think he’s an amoral psychopath,” further writing, “I think he’s crude, evil, vicious, vindictive, drunk.” Right up to Obama (2009-present), who contrary to progressive/socialist propaganda isn’t at all unique or transcendent; historically he’s just another Alinsky demagogue in a long line of political hacks whose Napoleonic, narcissistic ego compels him to rule not as a statesman using presidential restraint, but as an arrogant dictator who in his first speech to lawmakers of 2014 threatened to continue to bypass Congress via his authoritarian rule by executive order. Obama boasted: “I have a pen and I have a phone” [to make whatever laws I decree].
If America is to survive this existential Progressive Revolution (circa 1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species – present) which systematically seeks to replace Christianity, the Bible, and intelligent design with evolution atheism; natural law with positive law; capitalism with socialism and the rule of law with tyranny and executive decrees, then We the People must tell Obama – Yes, President Obama, you have a pen and a phone, but we have a Constitution and a Congress and the Tea Party… and God.
Sic Semper Tyrannous – Down with the tyrant!
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© Ellis Washington
Category: Commentary
