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."

~ President Lyndon Johson, "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

Fifty 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 socialist vision called the Great Society, the most recent phase in the evolution of Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism and Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights liberalism. Until I started researching for this column, 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. 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 U of M (although Harvard would be a close second).

Remember the turbulent times in America back then: LBJ gave this speech just six months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the country was reeling from societal angst and counter-cultural upheaval. With this backdrop President Johnson boldly proposed the Great Society. In this speech, Johnson conflates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was being filibustered in Congress) and his legions of comprehensive new federal programs into what in essence amounted to FDR's New Deal, Part 2. The madly utopian expectations (and experimental recklessness in social engineering) histrionically prolonged the Leviathan State into the 21st century, with all its expenses, regulatory reach and entanglements in our daily lives amounting to a verifiable loss of constitutional liberty and freedoms and the deconstruction of the family.

Johnson offered a trilogy of programs directed to the cities, the environment and education. In each venue, Johnson sought both utility and splendor. 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 evolution 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 executive decree, an activist, lawless Supreme Court and a lazy, unaccountable Congress.

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 catastrophe called the Great Society. The Democratic Socialist Party, according to a Cato Institute study, spent 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 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 of antiquity like Maimonides and Moses Mendelsohn, boldly sad: "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 Fleischer offers statistics that in families headed by married couples, the poverty level in 2012 was just 7.5 percent. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9 percent."

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."

This is what you get for 100-plus years of socialism slavery, 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. Author 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." Today's imperial president, contrary to the socialist propaganda, isn't at all unique or transcendent; historically he's just another 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," to the present), which systematically seeks to replace Christianity, the Bible and intelligent design with evolution, natural law with positive law, capitalism with socialism and the rule of law with tyranny and executive decrees, 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!

Media wishing to interview Ellis Washington, please contact [email protected].