The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism

Chapter 5 - Making Pluralism “Great”: Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society

Making Pluralism “Great” Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society Brian Balogh 145 Explicit in the title of this essay and lurking throughout the volume is a seemingly innocuous term: “pluralism.” Both Nelson Lichtenstein and Hugh Heclo argue that the Great Society killed pluralism. Lichtenstein engages pluralism in order to castigate it as a Trojan horse (designed by liberal intellectuals, no less!) that first co-opted social democracy and later succumbed to self-absorbed rights consciousness. For Heclo, the self-contradictory demands made of pluralism in the sixties— asking government to do more yet trusting government less—overwhelmed a system built on compromise. “Combining ferocious opposites and keeping each ferocious,” not the compromise and bargaining essential to pluralism, animated sixties civics, as Heclo sees it. Lichtenstein ’s attitude toward pluralism can be characterized as “good riddance.” Heclo’s? “What are we to do now?” In this essay I weigh the historical evolution of pluralism and conclude that it survived the Great Society. No doubt, the social tumult, radical demands for democratic access, and the dramatic increase in the venues for policymaking stimulated by the sixties have altered pluralism significantly. Nevertheless, the Great Society democratized politics without destroying the basic pluralist fabric which bound Americans to the public sphere in the twentieth century and which endures today. The “Challenge Constantly Renewed” The authors in this volume understand the Great Society to encompass several dimensions. Public policy is a central concern for the contributors , but so, too, is the growth of the presidency, the impact of war on social reform, and political ideology. Nelson Lichtenstein frames his account of labor in a broader context of intellectual trends that overwhelmed social democracy and celebrated cold war pluralism. Like Lichtenstein, most contributors to this volume concentrate on the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of liberals . Jerome Mileur reminds us, however, that this important internecine struggle should not eclipse an even more fundamental ideological shift from liberalism to conservatism. Viewed from the perspective of the last forty years, the Great Society served as the fulcrum, possibly even a catalyst , in this evolution.1 Lyndon Johnson, of course, looms large in any account of the Great Society. As David Shribman and William Leuchtenburg illustrate, Johnson was larger than life, and his personal motivation, experience, strengths, and shortcomings were integrally connected to the fate of the Great Society. Sidney Milkis places Johnson’s personal qualities in the context of an administrative presidency which stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and which tested its limits amid the flux of Great Society demands and promises. Vietnam also shaped the course of the Great Society. Although Johnson could do little about his personality and even less about the trajectory of the office he assumed, he did enjoy a great deal of discretion when it came to waging war or preserving peace. Johnson might have benefited from the lessons of history when American presidents often had to choose between war and reform. The Great Society seems to con- firm this pattern. Yet, the same arrogance of power that drove Johnson deeper into Vietnam, Wilson Carey McWilliams argues, was crucial to the vaulting confidence necessary to imagine a “great society.” The authors in this volume analyze the way that ideas, the diffusion of those ideas, social movements, interest groups, presidential initiative, foreign policy considerations, political culture, and the venues used to convert political preferences into action produced a distinct set of public policies. Several essays examine how these policies fared as they were implemented and challenged after the 1970s through the present. The au146 Brian Balogh thors also comment on many aspects of the policymaking system that evolved during the heyday of the Great Society and endured despite a sharp shift to the right ideologically, and leadership styles far different from LBJ’s.2 The relationship between politics, public policy, and society shifted during the “long” sixties. Hugh Heclo distills this change in the phrase “policy mindedness.” What was new about the sixties, Hugh Heclo insists , was not policy but “policy mindedness,” which was “an outlook that elevates and cleaves to one essential insight—when governing is happening or when partisan politics is churning, when all the affairs of public affairs are coming and going, the one thing that is really happening are choices about policy.” That liberal Democrats might envision the world in these terms should come as no surprise. That the...