Has America Lost its Social Conscience-And How Will it Get it Back?

Abstract

Exactly twenty years ago, in a burst of national euphoria and confidence, President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress completed the enactment of the Great Society -the greatest spate of domestic legislation in thirty years and one of the most exuberant expressions of social conscience in our history. The Great Society dealt forcefully with virtually every social problem that activists and reformers at that time had been agitating about. And the country felt good about it. The Congress that passed those historic measures had a popular approval rating certainly exceeding that of any Congress since, and probably higher than that of any Congress since the 1930s -71 percent approval late in 1965 by a Louis Harris poll.I And President Johnson was riding nearly as high; his approval rating in the Gallup poll was in the high 60s and 70s throughout most of that climax year of the Great Society. The legislative outpouring of 1964-65 was a surge of national compassion. True, some of the legislation of the period conferred its benefits on the rich, the middle class, and the poor alike-Medicare, for instance, and environmental measures. But the central measures of the Great Society were designed specifically to bring aid and opportunity to the poor and the dispossessed. The great civil rights measures guaranteed equal social and political rights, and the War on Poverty aimed to en-