Conrad Black provides some historical perspective. A balanced assessment as the following excerpt demonstrates:
Roosevelt's social programs were left essentially unaltered for 20 years after he died, until President Lyndon Johnson cut taxes while expanding the social ambitions of the federal government with his Great Society War on Poverty, and massive job retraining efforts, coupled to great and long-delayed advances in civil rights. Kennedy and Johnson favored civil rights more actively than had their predecessors, and backed conservatives into pious humbug about the Constitution not allowing for federal imposition of voting rights and official social equality for African Americans. Johnson overcame that opposition and it was one of liberalism's finest hours. But the long Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower consensus frayed badly when Johnson, who had been a congressman during the New Deal years, determined to take it a long step further and proposed a policy extravaganza that promised to buy the end of poverty through social investment. As all the world knows, it was a disaster that destroyed the African American family and severely aggravated the welfare and entitlements crises.
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