(KFTK) – Historian and chair of the Coolidge Presidential Foundation Amity Shlaes joined Randy to discuss her latest book, Great Society: A New History, which Dr Tobler sees as increasingly relevant during the Covid-19 pandemic.
"It's a warning about government, and about looking to government for too much" says Shlaes. "The Great Society period started differently, that was a period, we're talking about the early 60s, of increidble optimism. America was prosperous, and it thought it could do anything. So it's sort of like our country a year ago."
Shlaes says their was a movement among lawmaker and writers to, "go from pretty good, to great, and the government will take us that distance. So we had the government step-in in a massive way, and that's whats sort of similar to now. The government stepped-in in a massive way to make society great, not good."
Lyndon Johnson wanted a Great Society, as he stated at the University of Michigan commencement in 1964, "the emphasis is poverty. Our official goal in the 60s was to cure, C-U-R-E, cure poverty. We didn't cure poverty."
Read more about the Great Society HERE
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