“It’s too bad things aren’t a whole lot worse in America. Then people would be more eager to allow government to make massive changes.”

Read Jon Meacham‘s latest editor’s column in Newsweek, and I think you’ll find that the quote I invented above would provide a pretty good summary:

On the New Deal, FDR had massive unemployment and the Bonus Army
disaster, and on civil rights, JFK and LBJ had Bull Connor. In trying to
come up with contrary examples to my thesis that we undertake
fundamental reform only in hours of dramatic, widely felt crisis, I
began to think about Johnson’s passage of Medicare and the other
elements of the Great Society. The 1964?65 period was not like the
1930s, and John Lewis and Hosea Williams were not marching from Selma to
Montgomery for Medicare.

… I called my old boss
Charles Peters, who worked in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and has just
finished a new biography of LBJ. He reminded me that, actually, there had been an enveloping sense of crisis in those two years. “No historian
can overestimate the level of the emotion of the Kennedy factor after
the assassination,” Peters said. “People wanted to enact the reform
program that they thought JFK was for, even if he may not have in fact
been as passionate about these issues as Johnson was.” Even Medicare,
then, was at least partly the result of an extraordinary period of pain
in the country.

Meacham’s next sentence asserts “it should not take such convulsions for us to do the right thing,” and he concludes his piece by saying “in staving off disaster we also make it more difficult to do big things.”

And that’s the real source of the problem with this piece. Meacham conflates “big things” with “the right thing.” He never questions the counterproductive unintended consequences associated with the government’s “big things,” which rarely turn out to be “the right thing.” 

Since this isn’t the first time Meacham has proved ignorant of the problems associated with “big things” like the New Deal, I’ll offer him the same advice I’ve offered his colleague Jonathan Alter: please read Amity ShlaesThe Forgotten Man:

Kokai: You don?t paint him as a villain,
but you do point to some of the things that he did that just built upon
other mistakes. You get the sense in reading this book that if he had
just stopped at some point and let his various ?reforms? stand, we would
have been better off.

Shlaes: Politicians have their reasons, that they like reform for
the sake of reform. But as we know here in the marketplace or when we
are citizens that reform for the sake of reform is very costly in terms
of uncertainty. If your child?s school is reformed six times from first
grade to sixth grade, you know he doesn?t have a pleasant experience in
that school and a lot of us know that, right? So we know No Child Left
behind. We know stuff that changes sounds good, but change itself can be
trouble.

And that was the New Deal. Roosevelt would do a reform. One day he loved
big business. The next day he is suing them. Then he loves them again,
breathing spell, then he is back at them. And even Keynes, the famous
U.K. economist who was so important in that period, didn?t like it. He
said to Roosevelt about utilities: either nationalize them or leave them
alone. What?s the use of chasing them around the lot every other week?
That?s the politician, and that?s what Roosevelt did. It?s the dark side
of his famous phrase ?bold, persistent experimentation.? People don?t
like bold, persistent experimentation too much because they can?t get
their bearings, and that?s a little bit of what happened in the ?30s ?
especially the latter half.