60 years ago today, the United States declared war on poverty.

If the outcome of such a war was not clear 5 years later, 10 years later, 25 years later, or even 50 years later, it is clear by now that poverty won.

To put in perspective just how long this war has been waged, the current Vice President of the United States, now the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, was born exactly two months after Lyndon Johnson kick-started the war by signing the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  A war now twice the length of the Thirty Years War; this period has been longer, in fact, than the period between the Supreme Court’s initial decision upholding racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and subsequent decision destroying it in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

As such, President Johnson is responsible for initiating not just one of America’s longest wars ever, but two.  Earlier in the same August, his Administration manipulated a false flag attack on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to authorize greater military engagement (without a declaration of war) in the ongoing and by-then near decade long Vietnam War.  The conscription draft was already in the works, and by the end of that year there would be over 20,000 servicemen deployed to Vietnam.  Within 5 years, that number would rise to half a million. The lies Johnson told the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin and the scope of his interest in Vietnam (“…we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves”) magnified what was already a significant credibility gap that had taken shape in the aftermath of the assassination of his predecessor.  The Warren Commission published its final draft one month after the enactment of the EO Act, and nearly everyone – left, right, and center – smelled foul play.  Even if Earl Warren’s findings – i.e. that John F. Kennedy was, in fact, shot and killed by a disgruntled communist acting alone, who was himself rage-murdered by a nightclub owner days later – were true, few believed it.

Johnson’s lies about Vietnam were especially ironic given the ad campaign Johnson used against his opponent Barry Goldwater over his apparent intention to nuke the Daisy Girl.  Nevertheless, later that year, the American people rewarded Johnson and the Democratic Party with one of the biggest landslide victories in history, including a 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress.

It is worth nothing that in 1964, when Johnson began his two wars – one domestic, one foreign – America’s future still looked promising, even with the unrest that followed the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing and the angry confusion over Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.  The country was still resting comfortably on its laurels from its victories in World War II.  The Korean War had ended in armistice terms the public generally accepted.  The economy was growing after the Rolling Adjustment Recession of 1960-61, and Kennedy’s tactical supply-side policies appeared to be working in the short term.  Over the long term, the economy had undergone fifteen years of steady and nearly uninterrupted growth.  The baby boomer generation was turning 18, and they inherited the strongest economy, military, and political system not only in the world, but in the entire history of civilization.

Poverty rates and crime rates had fallen sharply over that same period of time, and in particular the black poverty and black crime rates.  From 1940 to 1960, well before the federal government enacted any major anti-poverty program or comprehensive civil rights law, the black family poverty rate fell from 87% to 47%.  In several skilled trades, black income relative to white income had more than doubled between 1936 and 1959.  The rise of black employees in professional and high-level occupations in the American economy was higher in the preceding 5 years before Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the 5 years after it.  And despite misguided amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1949, 1955, and 1961, all of which adjusted the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for young black men, relative to young white men, had not yet begun to sharply rise the way it would later on.  Even at the worst levels of black poverty and white racism in the early-mid 1950s, violent crime within black ghettos and neighborhoods was far less than what it would later become.  Murder rates among black males had fallen during the 1940s, and during the 1950s they fell even sharper.

Looking even longer term, though it might have been impossible to appreciate given the prevalence of segregation and racism throughout the nation, you might call 1964 the end of a “hidden century of black progress” and racial uplift that began with Lincoln’s Emancipation and the end of the Civil War.  Thomas Sowell has the receipts, most of which can be found in his landmark book Wealth, Poverty and Politics (2016).  In 1960, only 22% of black children were raised by a single mother.  Rates of teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases among blacks had fallen during the 1950s into the early 1960s.  Non-white rates of cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholism were lower than among whites during the 1950s.  In the Philadelphia housing projects of the 1940s, which were just as black populated then as they are now, the neighborhoods had no graffiti, and it was common to see old men playing checkers and card games on the street, content with life as the time went by.  Those who grew up in Harlem during the 1930s-40s rarely, if ever, heard the sound of a gunshot.  In the schools there, black children’s test scores were always comparable, sometimes greater, than those of white schools in New York’s lower east side.  In New Orleans, no stranger a city to violent resistance to desegregation in the 1960s, a black school that had existed for only a decade, St. Augustine, saw average IQs of its students rise by 20 points, commensurate with the national average and significantly higher than the average IQs of white and black kids in the South at that time.  The achievement of Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the 1890s through the 1950s is well documented.  Less well known is the success of schools like Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., an overwhelmingly impoverished black school, which in 1953 sent 81% of its graduates to college – more than any white school in the tristate area.

Nearly all of this progress evaporated in the ‘60s, starting with Johnson’s War on Poverty and the creation of the American Welfare State.  A program where good behavior was taxed and bad behavior subsidized.  Violent crime soared, race riots and ghetto riots ballooned, education floundered and the black school dropout rate increased, the decline of black poverty slowed and then all but flattened, STDs became rampant, and, most tragically, the black nuclear family unit was destroyed.

In today’s enlightened time, the 1960s are romanticized and mythologized as an exciting era of happy revolutions, summertime love fests, great music, and going to the moon.  The real picture is far darker and more complex.  Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy were all assassinated within less than five years.  The domestic policy overhauls that began with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and continued with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” (Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, and all manner of other failed experiments followed from Johnson’s passage of the EO Act) redistributed wealth, resources, and opportunities from rich individuals and businesses to rich non-profit organizations.  And the government threw its reluctant, if not outright unwilling, citizens into a full-scale war on the other side of the world based on lies and a misguided perception of public will and confidence.

Vietnam complicates the decade in ways that go deeper.  There are two “civil rights” movements of that era, not one.  There is the well-memorialized passive Civil Rights Movement of the post-Brown era that gave us Emmett Till’s open casket, Rosa Parks’s refusal to vacate her bus seat in Montgomery, the bravery of the Little Rock Nine, “We Shall Overcome” by Joan Baez, and, of course, the greatest American speech of the century delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  It ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Then there is the post-Malcolm X assassination and post-Operations Flaming Dart and Rolling Thunder civil rights era of violence and turmoil.  As Johnson’s dual wars intensified, so too did the unrest at home.

In August of 1965, less than a week after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a young black man was beaten while resisting arrest for drunk driving.  The riot that ensued in the greater Los Angeles area killed 34 people and burned much of the city to the ground, with most of the destruction occurring within black neighborhoods.  As familiar as that may sound today, the Watts Riots ended the prospect of a third term for California Democratic Governor Pat Brown, and set into motion the return of Richard Nixon and the rise of future governor and president Ronald Reagan.

Around the same time, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began shifting away from its practiced principle of non-violence to a more “flexible” means of resistance.  And once the Watts Riots occurred, that organization’s pretense of non-violence was gone.

By 1967, the new face of Civil Rights was no longer Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis.  It was now Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Muhammad Ali in opposition to the Vietnam draft.  Throughout the period of 1966-67, the practice of non-violent sit-ins and freedom riding gave way to the creation of the Black Panther Party and increasing unrest that culminated in the Long Hot Summer of 1967.  Detroit in particular suffered the worst of it, even though black median family income there was just a few points shy of white median family income, black unemployment was at 3.4%, and black home ownership was higher there than in any other major city in the entire country.  The fires would reach even more furious levels in the following year.

Martin Luther King himself, despite his allegiance with Johnson on the landmark legislation of the time, became an increasing critic of the Vietnam War.  By 1967, exactly one year before his death, his new career was defined almost entirely by his opposition to it.  But nobody better exemplifies just how dramatically the country changed from the early ‘60s to the late ‘60s than Richard Nixon.  In 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon was a moderate, dignified statesman who lost a close election to his similar enough Democratic opponent.  In 1967-68, after years in the doghouse, Nixon returned to national politics and ran as a cop with a knight stick.  Much of the New Left culture died upon his ascension to the White House.

As punishment for his successes, Nixon today bears the imputations of the worst of the 1960s.  He is remembered for being a paranoid liar, a corrupt crony, a grumpy spoilsport, a jack-booted tyrant stomping on free speech, and a warmongering imperialist.  Nearly all of these projected labels, if any are justified at all, belong just as much, if not more-so, to Lyndon Johnson.  We exist today in the vast shadow of his domestic war and with the scars of his foreign war.  Today’s Democratic Party and America’s left-wing cultural movements look to endlessly repeat, re-create, and expound upon the ideals and glories of the ‘60s, whether in contemplation of economic policy or in crusading against racial issues – real or fictitious.  In 2020, it took the shape of an insurgency that capitalized on a crisis and ousted President Donald Trump, who was utterly unprepared for it.

As for the long-term consequences, the growth of the economy in the 1980s-90s and the brief periods of growth in early-mid 2000s and late 2010s, could never keep the growth of the national debt in check, nor can today’s “non-recession” even pretend to.  Republicans and Democrats are both responsible for the discretionary spending, but the compounding pyramid schemes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are what sent the debt into outer space.  Poverty remains mostly where it was since before Johnson declared his war on it, and instead the casualties have been to those social, cultural, economic, and educational institutions that, well before 1964, had done far more work to lift black Americans out of poverty than anything anyone could have dreamed of doing later.

The humiliating memory of the ending of the Vietnam War also returned to us recently when we withdrew from Afghanistan, 13 service members were killed, and we saw children clinging to the wheels of American jets taking off just in time to mark the 20^th anniversary of 9/11.

The good news for the nation is that at least some of the worst byproducts of Johnson’s legacy were mitigated by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s and the Contract with America in the 1990s.  Some but not all of the worst abuses by the Supreme Court in continuing Earl Warren’s legacy into the 1970s (Roe, Bakke, and Lemon) have been overturned by today’s more faithful Supreme Court as a result of long overdue Republican hardball by Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.  Ultimately, however, it makes for little difference.  Today’s America is a nation of affluent, wealthy elites and the permanent subsidized underclass.  Today’s America is a weakened power that can’t win a war unless it’s to liberate Kuwait in 1991; whose citizens no longer have confidence in the military, let alone any overwhelming desire to join it.  Today’s America is a gilded and depleted piggy bank with little left to loot but a few coins of inflated value.

And today’s America is a nation built upon a new paralyzing culture of racism that began around the same time the old one ended.  A culture that overlooks a century of real racial and social progress and pretends that nothing of significance happened until the government showed up in the 1960s.  A culture that converted the soft bigotry of low expectations into an entrenched, bureaucratic system of actual bigotry against groups of “privilege” on an imaginary totem pole of oppression.  A culture where people are taught to see significance in racial differences, and to adjust manners and deference accordingly.  A culture where Americans, black and white, are more pessimistic about race relations today than they were 25 years ago.

Three score after Johnson’s War on Poverty, our national culture is all the more impoverished.

– Vivek