Calling Lyndon Johnson - Great Society program as cause of today's urban violence

IT WAS 25 years ago that Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for "The Great Society." Today the phrase refersonly to a bundle of welfare programs that have helped make the federal budget a chronic problem.

Nobody in his right mind supposes that America has become a "Great Society." It hasn't even remained a safe society.

Washington, D.C., will have far more murders this year than last, when the all-time record was set. Most of the killings involve drugs. Most of the victims are black.

Urban blacks were the intended beneficiaries of the Great Society programs. Today most of them live in a state of constant fear unimaginable in 1964. Liberals are reduced to pleading that the Great Society can't be convicted as an accomplice in the new reign of violence.

What seems hard to doubt, looking back, is that the Federal Government was trying to help poor blacks with narrowly targeted programs while neglecting the fundamental conditions of civil existence: moral order and physical safety. As the Swiss political writer Felix Somary observed, there is a sort of inverse ratio in governing: the more the state concentrates on inessential functions, the worse it will perform its most basic duties. You may be mugged on your way to the government-subsidized opera house.

Poverty causes crime, we were told over and over, back when there was much less crime and much more poverty. What have disappeared are the social underpinnings that used to encourage good behavior in the morally precarious sectors of the population. In particular, the "new morality" has hit the big cities like an atomic bomb. Fatherless children in huge numbers have now grown big enough to fight in drug wars and/or die of AIDS, though not before begetting children of their own who will haunt the cities later.

Liberals used to imagine the new morality in an ideal context: consenting (white, middle-class) adults in the privacy of their (suburban) homes. Hedonism presupposed character, providence, sophistication, and state-of-the-art contraceptives. The liberals did not foresee that "victimless crimes," in the ghetto, would not be victimless long.

At risk of sounding utopian, we submit that a worthy agenda for all levels of government would be to make the streets of America as safe as they were on the day Lyndon Johnson announced the Great Society.