Crazy that LBJ wanted to help Americans the most out of any president, but

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Crazy that LBJ wanted to help Americans the most out of any president, but

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

he got the country stuck in endless wars of imperialism and discredited trust in government forever

Imagine if the Great Society plans had all succeeded in their aims

I remember an essay called �Race and the American Presidency� by Prof. Kenneth O�Reilly that evaluated every single U.S. president�s treatment of African Americans- the only two he concluded who went out of their way to help black people at a personal cost were Lincoln and LBJ

What contrast, wow

# ¿ Oct 17, 2020 11:17

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 03:13

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

sat on my keys! posted:

the robert caro books about lbj have what's possibly the closest to the platonic ideal of a new deal liberal perspective it's possible to have but they're still interesting and good

LBJ learned from FDR that to pass social democracy in America you need three names and a lot of hatred for Asian people

# ¿ Oct 17, 2020 18:04

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Is there a leftist consensus on LBJ. Obviously imperialist war makes him a great satan. But what do they think of the Great Society and his attitude towards civil rights, do they denounce him as a succ reformist or as a Bismarckian who was just doing it for political machinations. Do they reconcile the two by saying the American reactionary attitude towards socialism forced him to overcompensate for his progressive domestic policy by being a rampaging Cold Warrior abroad

# ¿ Oct 18, 2020 00:23

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

FDR seems more understandable as a blue blooded NY patrician who was canny enough to see where the winds were blowing and was smart/idealistic enough to ape what other countries were doing at the time wrt building a government that can actually do poo poo to get out of the Depression. He interned Japanese Americans because he was about as racist as any other American at the time and that�s the sort of popular outrage reaction that would happen after Pearl Harbor. LBJ�s decision to get embroiled in Indochina, even going forward with the Gulf of Tonkin flimsy pretext, seems out of right field

# ¿ Oct 18, 2020 00:31

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Lord of Pie posted:

He's still in the top tier of US presidents but that says more about how truly lovely the majority of them are

Well yeah, the Civil Rights Act happening under his watch would probably guarantee his top tier placement alone for starters among mainstream historians, but I'm wondering what his legacy with leftists/Marxists is

Ardennes posted:

LBJ's war on poverty did not seem to be ingeninue, but America was always an empire and it didn't stop with LBJ. To be clear, LBJ wasn't a leftist but he was more of a determined populist that got results. Also, the voting rights act/civil rights act were heavily influenced by the Cold War and the fact that the perception of the US was dismal in much of the developing world.

Makes sense. So the Marxist view would be then that he was peddling reformist scraps to bolster America for its true war on communism? I guess to me it's still very paradoxical that his populist measures would've been fairly comprehensive (making him relatively quite left compared to all other American presidents), but his commitment to the Cold War undercut all of it.

also, how was JFK's New Frontier compared to the Great Society or the New Deal?

# ¿ Oct 18, 2020 05:41

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

vyelkin posted:

If your utilitarian calculation starts and ends at the borders of the United States he might have been one of the best presidents ever, but if your utilitarian calculation includes the sum total of human suffering worldwide he may have been one of the worst.

His foreign policy was so aggro that it counterproductively caused his domestic policy to backfire, failing to fulfill the Great Society and disrupting social cohesion for all time. It's crazy.

joepinetree posted:

There aren't innocent presidents on the imperialism front, but LBJ manages to be worse than average.

JFK being the first American president to gently caress over Iraq, paving the way to Saddam's rise is one helluva trip

# ¿ Oct 18, 2020 20:18

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Was JFK's New Frontier good or was it succ

A Russian troll farm posted:

There's only one good american president

It's "funny" how the joke answers (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, David Rice Atchison) all don't work for this one because of their odious treatment of either black people and/or Native American people outside of their short terms

Maximo Roboto has issued a correction as of 00:52 on Oct 19, 2020

# ¿ Oct 19, 2020 00:49

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

idk much about the Fair Deal compared to the New Deal but sure go for it

Mantis42 posted:

It was succ compared to the New Deal or the Great Society but still far more imaginative than anything libs would propose today.

Pairing social programs with the space race was a nice touch

# ¿ Oct 19, 2020 01:01

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Mantis42 posted:

The Fair Deal was p good and the first serious attempt to implement Universal Healthcare. Unfortunately Congress was in GOP hands, so Truman couldn't do much. At least he vetoed Taft Hartley.

I wonder if there had been any possible way to prevent the Red Scare. American culture was too squeamish towards socialism and it seemed like liberals/leftists were never able to formulate the messaging of "this is social democracy reformism that saps socialist support, read a history book about Bismarck jeez" or even remind Republicans of their own Roosevelt and their Progressive Era days

# ¿ Oct 19, 2020 01:13

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

joepinetree posted:

Yeah. But the research I am talking about is international in scope. The key defining aspect of the expansion of the welfare state was not the election of social democrats, but the threat of communist victory. In places like West Germany and France a lot of the welfare state expansions were done by center right christian democratic parties, and the real deciding factor there was if there was a "threat" of communism becoming popular.

Yeah, that's basically the pattern that Bismarck kicked off. Out-populisting the socialists with your own sweeping reforms. Or was it Napoleon?

# ¿ May 11, 2021 19:54