The Long Crisis of American Liberalism between Planning and Governance of Social Movements

Abstract

Analyzing Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society policies, particularly those of the War on Poverty, the essay discusses the transformations that liberalism faces with the emergence of social organizations and movements whose radicalism calls into question the New Deal compromise. Precisely during this crisis, in which it believed it could govern social forces by finally addressing racial divisions, American liberalism chose to free itself from the political burden of the New Deal order and its social planning in order to respond both to the criticism of the movements and to the attacks of the conservatives, but above all to bring back to the center the ethics of the individual against the radical and uncontrolled development of collective forces that had exploited the Community Action Program both to obtain resources and to overturn the social peace that managed and guaranteed racist, patriarchal and class hierarchies.