The 1965 education legislation and the General Welfare Clause
In the account Andrew J. Coulson gives, the constitutional ground for federal involvement in schooling was prepared before Johnson took office. Coulson says it was only after FDR, and after Roosevelt twisted the arm of the Supreme Court into approving his New Deal, that a virtually unlimited power for the federal government to legislate was created in the General Welfare Clause. Before FDR, Coulson says, the overwhelmingly upheld interpretation treated that clause as a general preamble to the enumerated powers; afterward the general welfare was treated as its own power, so that anything legislators claimed would help people was constitutional. On that reading, Coulson says, there is effectively no limit on what the federal government can do, and it is only because of this wild interpretation that a federal Department of Education, a No Child Left Behind Act or a Race to the Top could exist at all End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Bob Zadek puts Johnson at the center of the story. He tells Coulson that the person who had the most profound effect on education in America and the federal takeover was Lee Harvey Oswald, because Kennedy’s death was the only way Johnson got to be president, and that death created the 1965 legislation, which Zadek calls the first real meaningful federal foray into education. Zadek describes Kennedy as a moderate who would have been a Republican by today’s political standards and Johnson as a flaming liberal, and he quotes Johnson’s remark at the signing of the first federal bill involving education: “This is a new day of greatness in the American society.” Zadek’s comment on that promise is that we are still waiting for this American greatness End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Coulson answers with charts of 17-year-old students’ performance on tests administered to nationally representative samples back to 1970, which he describes as flatlines. He says the failure is not only in overall averages at the end of high school: the specific aims of the Great Society education programs, narrowing the achievement gap by race and by income, also failed. Children of college students and children of high school dropouts, he says, are about as far apart academically today as when the Great Society programs were enacted, though closing that gap was the central aim of those programs. Coulson concludes that the General Welfare Clause justification fails on its own terms, since the laws are not promoting anyone’s welfare, and calls the whole thing a bamboozle End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Zadek frames the same episode as the accumulation of economic power in Washington and its use to impose will on local school districts. He contrasts his own town of Sausalito, with 7,000 people, where nothing escapes scrutiny and a disliked city council action, including on schools, is fixed within about 48 hours, with the impossibility of doing that at the federal level. Coulson supplies the figure: since Johnson’s Great Society education legislation passed, the federal government has spent $1.85 trillion on education. Zadek closes the exchange by saying the education system has deteriorated over that period while the remedy proposed is more federal money and doing it their way, and that losing control of something so local breaks his heart End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
The Great Society as social democracy
Amity Shlaes, whose book covers the period from the JFK administration through the Johnson administration in detail and ends with Nixon’s first term, is quoted by Zadek as writing that Johnson’s effort to build a great society was “close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.” Zadek notes that Johnson would never have self-identified as a socialist and that there was little in his policies that was socialism as an economic concept, and asks Shlaes to explain the relationship between the word and the administration Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes answers from the Cold War frame: the claim was that the big-S socialists lived in Russia or Hanoi and redistributed everything, while the United States merely added a little bit of government here and there, the way the army adds an extra blanket for a soldier, to keep capitalism strong. Social democracy in Western Europe, on this argument, existed to protect against true socialism by keeping Europeans happy and peaceful so they would not go communist. Shlaes says that frame made it very hard to concede the damage that even a little bit of socialization does: you do not have to report to Moscow to hurt the economy and hurt people, you only have to impose programs that make the economy uncompetitive, make life too expensive, and kill jobs. She dates the beginning of that to the social democratic measures of the 60s Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Shlaes adds a generational consequence: the social democratic programs introduced then will be an incredible burden on younger people and prevent them from having a good old age, because Medicare and Medicaid are too expensive and they will pay the tax, whether through inflation by government or through technically higher statutory taxes Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019).
Johnson in the progressive lineage
David Boaz places Johnson in a line of advocates of big government that he grew up understanding to run from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, and he distinguishes that older label from the original progressives of the early 20th century. Those progressives, Boaz says, wanted to help the poor partly by producing fewer of them, favoring eugenics and passing laws that would forcibly sterilize women judged to be mentally incompetent David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
Zadek supplies the Supreme Court instance: Oliver Wendell Holmes, sitting on the Court in a case about the sterilization of a woman with mental problems, used the word then in use, “imbecile,” and said, as Zadek recalls the quotation, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Boaz confirms the quotation, calls Holmes a leading progressive, and says that was a progressive view back then, while adding that he does not think any progressives today would hold such views David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
From there Boaz states the libertarian reply to the charitable argument for the welfare system: the systems have not worked well, the welfare system has trapped generations of Americans into dependency on government, and a more robustly growing economy plus a robust charitable system would do better. Government money, he says, can get people hooked, sap the will to get a job, and produce not three generations of imbeciles but three generations of welfare dependency. He defines the welfare state as more than welfare: welfare plus government-guaranteed healthcare plus housing plus food stamps David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015).
The Fairness Doctrine and the 1964 campaign
Paul Matzko explains the Fairness Doctrine as a rule requiring a station that allows editorializing to represent both major points of view, for and against a measure such as a nuclear test ban treaty. Enforcement, he says, hinges on citizen complaints, which are taken into account when a license comes up for renewal, usually every two years, and a lost license is the kiss of death for a radio station. Matzko describes Kennedy creating a front organization, the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban, funded by and created in the Oval Office itself, as a faux grassroots body that could file complaints against stations allowing attacks on the treaty The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
The Johnson connection comes in Matzko’s account of the economic effect. He describes the Cullman Doctrine, an additional rule requiring a station to air a response for free when someone says their point of view was not represented, so that a station gets paid once but gives away two airtime slots whenever a broadcaster says something controversial. Small stations on shoestring budgets, owned by local businessmen rather than network executives, therefore avoid controversial content because it does not pay, a huge chilling effect. Matzko then cites an internal document from a Democratic National Committee-sponsored operative team using the Fairness Doctrine to gin up support for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign that year and to hurt Barry Goldwater’s campaign; after the 1964 landslide for LBJ, the team reported to the DNC chair that the effort was valuable not just for thousands of hours of free pro-Johnson airtime but because it significantly diminished the ability of right-wing hosts to find stations willing to air them. By the end of the decade, Matzko says, right-wing radio was a shell of itself The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
Across episodes: the measure of the Great Society
The excerpts show no single developing argument about Johnson so much as three separate treatments. The 2009 episode with Andrew J. Coulson argues the constitutional and educational case, treating the 1965 legislation as the first meaningful federal foray into schooling and measuring it against flat test scores and $1.85 trillion spent End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009). The 2019 episode with Amity Shlaes reframes the same program as social democracy that does damage without requiring anyone to report to Moscow, and extends the cost forward to Medicare and Medicaid Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). The 2021 episode with Paul Matzko treats Johnson not as a program-builder but as a beneficiary of Fairness Doctrine enforcement in the 1964 campaign The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021). The 2015 Boaz episode touches Johnson only as a name in the lineage of big-government advocates David Boaz on The Libertarian Mind (2015), and the 2020 Mulligan episode mentions him only inside a hypothetical fact-check about which president did more for African Americans You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020). The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatments; each episode argues its own question.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biographical narrative of Johnson’s life, no account of his congressional career, and no treatment of Vietnam, civil rights legislation, or the 1964 election beyond the Fairness Doctrine’s use in it. They do not name the 1965 education statute, describe its provisions, or identify the case in which Holmes wrote. They give no figures for the Great Society’s cost apart from the $1.85 trillion Coulson cites for federal education spending since the legislation passed, and no assessment of Johnson from any speaker who defends him.