A criação de programas de assistência aos desprovidos nos EUA, em 1964,
representou uma dramática alteração dos comportamentos sociais, com a
preservação, não a eliminação, da pobreza.
40 anos depois, o Brasil também tomava o mesmo caminho. 10 anos depois
da criação do curral eleitoral do Bolsa Família, já se conseguiu consolidar um
exército de assistidos significativamente maior: um terço da população vive da
caridade pública.
É essa a nação que gostaríamos de ter?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The
slow decline of America since LBJ launched the Great Society
George F. Will
The Washington
Post, May
16 at 7:34 PM
Standing on his presidential limousine,
Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a
bullhorn: “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against
mighty few.” This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier.
Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the
University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed
legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and
racial injustice, “but that is just the beginning.” It would “rebuild the
entire urban United States” while fending off “boredom and restlessness,”
slaking “the hunger for community” and enhancing “the meaning of our lives” —
all by assembling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge.”
In 1964, 76 percent of
Americanstrusted government to do the right thing “just about always
or most of the time”; today, 19 percent do.
The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one
consequence of his doing so.
Barry Goldwater, Johnson’s 1964 opponent
who assumed that Americans would vote to have a third president in 14
months, suffered a landslide defeat.
After voters rebuked FDR in 1938 for attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court,
Republicans and Southern Democrats prevented any liberal legislating majority
in Congress until 1965. That year, however, when 68 senators and 295
representatives were Democrats, Johnson was unfettered.
He remains, regarding government’s role,
much the most consequential 20th-century president. Indeed, the American
Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, in his measured new booklet “The Great Society at Fifty: The
Triumph and the Tragedy,” says LBJ, more than FDR, “profoundly
recast the common understanding of the ends of governance.”
When Johnson became president in 1963,
Social Security was America’s only nationwide social program. His programs and
those they subsequently legitimated put the nation on the path to the present,
in which changed social norms — dependency on government has been destigmatized
— have changed America’s national character.
Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on
Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged
by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in
2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading”
because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption
levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability
payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made
income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark
material deprivation is now rare:
“By 2011 . . . average per
capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for
1980. . . . [Many] appliances were more common in officially
impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of
1980.. . . DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are
now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could
avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”
But the institutionalization of
anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the
dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined
that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among
African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities,
includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”
Twenty-nine percent of Americans — about
47 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Hispanics — live in households receiving
means-tested benefits. And “the proportion of men 20 and older who are employed
has dramatically and almost steadily dropped since the start of the War on
Poverty, falling from 80.6 percent in January 1964 to 67.6 percent 50 years
later.” Because work — independence, self-reliance — is essential to the
culture of freedom, ominous developments have coincided with Great Society
policies:
For every adult man ages 20 to 64 who is
between jobs and looking for work, more than three are neither working nor
seeking work, a trend that began with the Great Society. And what Eberstadt
calls “the earthquake that shook family structure in the era of expansive
anti-poverty policies” has seen out-of-wedlock births increase from 7.7 percent
in 1965 to more than 40 percent in 2012, including 72 percent of black babies.
LBJ’s starkly bifurcated legacy includes
the triumphant Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and the
tragic aftermath of much of his other works. Eberstadt asks: Is it “simply a
coincidence” that male flight from work and family breakdown have coincided
with Great Society policies, and that dependence on government is more
widespread and perhaps more habitual than ever? Goldwater’s insistent 1964
question is increasingly pertinent: “What’s happening to this country of ours?”
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