The Great Anxiety

It must have been a great time to be alive in the mid-1960s, when I was born.  Yes, there were moments of strife, like the civil rights struggle, but in 1965, the same year as the Selma march, enormous progress seemed not only possible but doable.  It was the year of President Lyndon Johnson's first full term in office.  He promoted a new agenda of progress and advancement - the Great Society - which gave us Medicare, Head Start, the Job Corps, a fairer immigration law, the Voting Rights Act, and a "war" on poverty.  It would be a society in which everyone had a fair chance to get ahead in life.  And even as President Johnson was being inaugurated in January 1965, my parents - just married and both 25 at the time -  were living modestly and didn't have much money, like any other young couple, but they had a place of their own and were able to get by while they were just starting out, even after I was born later that year.  It looked like things could only get better for everyone.

Then everything unraveled.  President Johnson (above) deepened U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, undermining his own Great Society programs, and the glacial pace of racial integration and economic advancement led urban blacks (a term soon to become a redundancy) burned down the cities, and leaders who promised even more change - Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F Kennedy - were assassinated.  Then we got the stagflation and energy crises of the 1970s.  By the late 1980s and early 1990s, subsequent Republican administrations had pretty much dismantled most of the Great Society and had also dismantled much of the manufacturing base that made this country work.  When I was 25, I was still living at home.  At 58, I still do.  

Now the young people of today are in even worse shape.  Many of them live in their parents' basements and can't afford much, while those lucky enough to live on their own are nickeled and dimed to the point where their paychecks are in worse shape.  Despite the robust economy, President Biden is faced with the unenviable task of rebuilding four decades' with of a dismantled economic base that is rigged toward higher-income folks.  He's been doing that, but he hasn't gotten far enough.  And the effects of his policies have yet to be felt by young voters - the very voters he needs to defat Donald Trump, who is leading in many polls despite his promises to make America into another Third Reich.

Trump won't just get back in power because young people may stay home.  He'll get back in also because his base - including some young people - will turn out.  Trump supporters feel left out, scorned, and looked down upon, and a lot of young people who voted for Biden in 2020 feel the same way.  And if  Biden just squeaks by in the 2024 election, Trump will claim fraud and more chaos will ensue.  When U.S. Senator Carl Hayden (D-AZ) became the last Senate president pro tempore to announce the winner of a presidential due to a vacancy in the Vice Presidency on Wednesday, January 6, 1965, no one could have expected that on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the Vice Presidency would be threatened with being vacated by a lynching of its occupant for not helping the incumbent President stay in power.

The Great Society President Johnson envisioned is now neither great nor a society.  Welcome to the Great Anxiety.  And buckle up for a bumpy ride.

The Not-So-Great Society

Not much talk about today's fiftieth anniversary, is there?

No, not that fiftieth anniversary, the one that the Supreme Court rendered irrelevant this past June.  I'm talking about the fiftieth anniversary of the death of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who died of a heart attack at the age of 64. 

Lyndon Johnson is mostly remembered for escalating the war in Vietnam, though he spent his last year in office trying to en American combat operations in negotiations with the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese governments (a process Richard Nixon threw a monkey wrench in to help himself in the 1968 presidential election).  But Johnson's reputation has improved among historians for the sweeping and transformative programs he shepherded through Congress - the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Job Corps, Medicare, public broadcasting, the 1965 immigration law that ended restrictions on nationals from non-Western countries, conservation, highway beautification (his wife Lady Bird pushed that), and the War On Poverty.  Many lives were made better and stronger from Johnson's initiatives.

We don't need a second New Deal.  We need a second Great Society.   The trouble is, a good deal of the first one has been dismantled, and President Biden ran into road blocks in the previous Congress when he tried to push a second one through.  Although Biden has already pushed through more progressive legislation than any President since Johnson, he had to deal with small majorities in both houses and now has to deal with a Republican House of Representatives - two conditions Lyndon Johnson never had to deal with.  Also, in the 1960s, the country was more united on trying to make America better  for future generations.  Today, Americans are so polarized on how to improve their lot that nothing gets done and there are far-rightists who are hell-bent on undoing Johnson's progressive legacy as well as Biden's.  

Look upon these Mighty Works, this once Great Society . . . and despair.

It is nothing short of high irony that Johnson died five days before a cease-fire in Vietnam was announced, which President Nixon declared was "peace with honor."  It was neither.  

Below is a clip of Walter Cronkite announcing Lyndon Johnson's death on "The CBS Evening News" on Monday, January 22, 1973.

Roll Over, Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon Johnson is infamous for continuing meetings in the middle of a necessary trip to the bathroom, forcing underlings to accompany him to the toilet while he continued making his case for some sort of legislation or something like that.  But even he wouldn't have used the bathroom for what Trump used it for.

That is, destroying documents.

These are pictures provided to New York Times columnist and reporter Maggie Haberman, whom Trump famously belittled when he denied trying to flush sensitive presidential documents down the toilet to evade being found out on what he was doing.  He flushed so many documents down the toilet, the White House commode should be the site of the Trump Presidential Library!

He couldn't leave them around his dog and say the dog ate them.  He doesn't have a dog.  Geez, even Hitler had a dog! 

As funny as this may seem, the bottom line, as Haberman has stressed, is that Trump in fact did try to destroy documents - documents that could be incriminating evidence of a crime - when destroying any presidential records is against the law.  The only thing funny about it is how Trump tried to destroy them.  Had he tried to shred them, no one would be laughing.

Although I can't help chuckle at the idea of FBI agents overseeing the White House plumbers - literal plumbers, not plumbers like Nixon's crew (or overseeing plumbers in foreign hotels, where Trump was also known to, ahem, dispose of documents) as the poor guys to plunge out the paper blockage.