"The American taste for individualism will continue to frustrate the hopes of liberals and their sometime leftist allies. But the classic paradox that political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified during the heyday of the Great Society still holds: Most Americans are 'ideological conservatives but operational liberals.' Americans hate 'big government,' but they adore state and federal spending—as long as it benefits them and anyone else they regard as deserving that aid: particularly senior citizens, children, and veterans."
Michael Kazin at the New Republic reviews Joshua Zeitz's Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House.
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