Public housing in the United States, sadly, has rarely been beautiful or sanitary. “If those who govern the District of Columbia decide that the nation’s capital shall be beautiful as well as sanitary, there is nothing in the Fifth Amendment that stands in the way,” the court wrote. Shlaes, who has a good eye for quotes, picks a beauty from a court decision allowing the destruction of a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
She tells a compelling if familiar story of the infuriating arrogance of government planners, who repeatedly destroyed poor communities in the belief that they could build better places. Shlaes also devotes a chapter to public housing projects, which expanded under Johnson. But it is indefensible as a matter of scholarship to completely omit the success of other Great Society programs. This choice serves her purposes as a polemicist, because the government failed for the most part in its efforts to promote job creation. Instead she chooses to treat the first of the major Great Society bills, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, as representative of the broader legislative program. Other major Great Society initiatives, including the Head Start preschool program, food stamps for hungry families and increased federal funding for public schools in low-income communities, also largely escape Shlaes’s notice. But Shlaes’s evidence is highly selective: Medicare and Medicaid, the largest antipoverty programs created by the Johnson administration, are barely mentioned. Shlaes relies on her talents as a narrator to make the case that, as she puts it, “the government lost the war on poverty.” The book is well written it goes down easy.
“Great Society,” however, is a deeply flawed contribution to that discourse.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves increasingly begin in the 1960s and, for the perpetual debate about the role of government in society, the shift from the Depression to more recent facts and anecdotes is a welcome development. Shlaes’s book is part of a broader shift in the focus of popular historical narratives. She writes that Johnson’s effort to build what he called a Great Society came “close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.” That failure, she says, should serve as a warning to the new generation of bleeding hearts who are again advocating for more government spending: “May this book serve as a cautionary tale of lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved.” Despite the change in scenery, Shlaes’s conclusions remain unchanged. In her latest book, “Great Society: A New History,” Shlaes shifts her focus forward by about a quarter-century, offering an account of the 1960s centered on President Johnson’s campaign to eliminate poverty by expanding the social safety net. Along the way, I will make some comments of a ‘meta’ nature about the kind of interpretation I am offering of harmony in the Confucian texts and the use to which I am putting this interpretation by setting it in the context of societies that in important respects are quite different from the ones from which concepts of harmony originally emerged.Amity Shlaes made her name as a conservative historian by narrating the Great Depression as a tragedy of the best intentions: The Roosevelt administration tried to lift Americans from misery, but succeeded only in making things worse. I shall point out how the Confucian notion of harmony resonates with the Indian King Asoka's project of promoting religious pluralism.
Is the ancient Confucian ideal of he 和, ‘harmony,’ a viable ideal in pluralistic societies composed of people and groups who subscribe to different ideals of the good and moral life? Is harmony compatible with accepting, even encouraging, difference and the freedom to think differently? I start with seminal characterizations of harmony in Confucian texts and then aim to chart ways harmony and freedom can be compatible and even mutually supportive while recognizing the constant possibility of conflict between them.
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