Akkam’s Razor

Why did the interventions of the New Deal (and our victory in World War II) largely work while the attempts of Johnson’s Great Society fail?  What was different?

From a group dynamics perspective, the shared misery of the Great Depression, funneled into the collective efforts of the recovery allowed Americans to unite based on task specific actions.  The further sacrifices, both direct via the military service of eligible males as well as the indirect sacrifices in wages, resources, and comfort good by the populace briefly made us a cohesive, high performing society.  The monetary gains and ideological shifts of the 1950s forward then cleaved society into thinner demographic slices.  By the late 1960s, poverty, sickness, and racism were absent from a great majority of Americans.  The Americans affected by those issues would find no empathy nor sympathy from those unaffected.  We further declined into a society of us versus them, the have-and-have-nots.

Fast-forwarding to today, particularly through the lens of the environmental crisis, particularly peak oil, the spectre of outstripping, the water problem, and global warming, one can easily see how the conditions that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, contributed to the greatness of the country and her people through the New Deal, and Ultimately won World War II and the immediate post-war period appear to be re-manifesting themselves.  We will all be affected by the scarcity of those resources and the effects they will have on our lives.  Our collective cooperation, whether through innovation, conservation, or re-configuration will change us as a people.  Once the American people begin to view their lives in terms of kilowatt hours, gallons-per-day, and dollars-per-mile, and begin doing what they have to do to get those costs and consumptions in line, we will have primed the pump for the next great period in American history.  This is what the Republicans fear - a Democratically unified country around those principles undoes how the GOP has done business for all of the 20th century.