July 17, 2023 – by Heather Cox Richardson

Source: July 17, 2023 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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It has taken decades for the modern-day Republican Party to get to a place where it rejects democracy. The roots of that rejection lie all the way back in the 1930s, when Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. That system ushered in a period from 1933 to 1981 that economists call the “Great Compression,” when disparities of income and wealth were significantly reduced, especially after the government also began to protect civil rights. 

Members of both parties embraced this modern government in this period, and Americans still like what it accomplished. But businessmen who hated regulation joined with racists who hated federal protection of civil rights and traditionalists who opposed women’s rights and set out to destroy that government. 

In West Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend, at the Turning Points Action Conference, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs, which invested in “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.” She noted that under Biden, the U.S. has made “the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.” 

Well, yeah.

Greene incorrectly called this program “socialism,” which in fact means government ownership of production, as opposed to the government’s provision of benefits people cannot provide individually, a concept first put into practice in the United States by Abraham Lincoln and later expanded by leadership in both parties. The administration has stood firmly behind the idea—shared by LBJ and FDR, and also by Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others—that investing in programs that enable working people to prosper is the best way to strengthen the economy. 

Certainly, Greene’s speech didn’t seem to be the “gotcha” that she apparently hoped. A March 2023 poll by independent health policy pollster KFF, for example, found that 80% of Americans like Social Security, 81% like Medicare, and 76% like Medicaid, a large majority of members of all political parties.  

The White House Twitter account retweeted a clip of Greene’s speech, writing: “Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.”