Lyndon Johnson and Progressivism

Recent opinion pieces have said that progressives may end up liking Biden as president, because they also had doubts about Lyndon Johnson at first but he turned out to be one of the two most progressive presidents in history (along with Franklin Roosevelt).

This claim shows that today's progressives have not learned from the successes and failures of 1960s progressivism.

One of the great successes was Medicare. For the first time, everyone more than 65 years old could afford health care.

One of the great failures was public housing. Federal funding let cities demolish existing neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance and replace them with public housing.  Yet studies showed that the public housing had higher crime rates than older neighborhoods nearby with the same demographics, and things were so bad that hundreds of housing projects were later demolished under the HOPE VI program.

Progressives should have learned that:

• The Federal government is good at making transfer payments, taxing the wealthy and distributing income or vouchers to the poor. In addition to Medicare, examples of successful federal anti-poverty programs are Social Security and Food Stamps (now called SNAP food benefits). What these programs have in common is that they give income or vouchers that people can spend more-or-less as they choose. 

• The Federal government is not good at micromanaging the lives of the poor. Centralized programs are likely to use the sort of impersonal, mass-production methods that are so obvious in the design of mid-century housing projects. And when centralized programs make mistakes, they make them on a vast scale; decentralization has the advantage of letting us try many different methods, so we can imitate the successful ones and abandon the unsuccessful ones without very widespread damage. 

Yet progressive have not learned this second lesson. They seem to be able to think about only one thing at a time - that they want to help the poor - and can't think at the same time about what sort of program to help the poor is most likely to be successful. Most self-styled progressives have not even learned the most obvious lesson of the 1960s and still want housing projects for low-income people. 

To give the most striking example, almost all progressives support universal preschool. But what if the federal government makes an error in designing this universal program, as they made an error in designing mid-century housing projects? The housing projects were built for decades before this error became apparent to everyone, and the universal preschool would continue for decades before any errors that it makes become apparent when the children grow up.

The housing projects blighted low-income urban neighborhoods physically. Errors in designing universal preschool could do much worse damage: they could blight an entire generation of Americans psychologically.

The obvious alternative it to give an allowance to all parents of pre-school children that they could use to pay for preschool or to supplement their income so they could stay at home and care for their own children, at least part-time. This is the sort of transfer payment that has been successful in helping the poor, rather than the sort of micromanaged system that has been a failure. But I don't hear any progressives advocating it. They all want a centralized, top-down system of universal preschools.