Former President Lyndon Johnson in many ways stood for the antithesis of what President Donald Trump does today, backing the expansion of civil rights, social assistance, and immigration — some of which Trump is directly undoing. But his complicated legacy helped to lay the groundwork for the current president's rampage over the federal system, wrote Jonathan Farmer for Slate.
"I’m starting to see the value in using LBJ to think about Trump," wrote Farmer. "Because in almost every facet of his political career — his style, his agenda, his keen nose for everyone else’s hypocrisy, his disdain for the complex federal bureaucracy, for complexity in any form — Trump is reacting to the America that Johnson helped compose, one that is more just but less local, more intricate, and harder to understand."
A fundamental issue, Farmer wrote, is that Johnson "left behind a government that was harder to understand and — thanks in part to his moral and political failures in Vietnam, as well as his increasingly glaring dishonesty — harder to trust."
In essence, Johnson worked to nationalize politics in a way that is still being felt today, which was necessary to take on Jim Crow as no state was going to end it themselves. "But it’s also true that in trying to include something for everyone in his Great Society, Johnson created something — many things — for everyone to object to. And so the new world Johnson ushered in was also one that felt further removed from many people’s lives."
Since Johnson left office, wrote Farmer, the "alienation" that started only grew: "the globalization of manufacturing, our increasing confusion of capitalism and ethics, the Democrats’ long drift from labor to Wall Street, the loss of any civic trust that could allow a politician to command, 'Ask not what your country can do for you …,' the evolution of a liberal shibboleth based on laughing at the kinds of people who would eventually form Trump’s base, massive tidal swells of racism and xenophobia — but much of that has worked itself out inside the complex and nationalized systems LBJ created and grew."
Johnson's goal of "scaling compassion to the level of justice," Farmer concluded, managed to make it into law, allowing it to "outlast the brief historical window he passed them through. But I suspect that the entanglement of complexity and justice that this required has something to do with the window that Donald Trump has come crashing through."
