Lyndon B Johnson's War On Neo-Conservatism

Following Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide win in the Presidential election of 1964, “Post-New Deal liberalism reached its high-water mark with a flood of federal legislation and a series of Supreme Court decisions that bolstered democratic rights and expanded the role of government in promoting social well-being. ” However, a new form of conservatism was culminating and would eventually put a wedge in the seemingly solid liberal platform. This gave rise to a new way of thinking that Americans grasped onto and dominated the political sphere for years to come. The New Right gained support and discredited the existing liberal agenda by exploiting the frustrations that many Americans had over the continuation of the war in Vietnam and the unrest at home domestically. Lyndon B. Johnson became President after then President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Johnson was then officially elected as President of the United States shortly thereafter in 1964. After his dominating win in the 1964 election, Johnson choose one-LBJ or Johnson instituted ideas of reform that would be the focal point of legislation in American society; this period of reform was coined the “Great Society”. Johnson’s war on poverty

Neo-conservatism, or anti-establishment conservatism, first emerged with William Buckley years prior to its political prominence. It emerged in a time when both the liberal and conservative sides of the political spectrum ran “out of intellectual steam and…a fresh initiative [would] be especially welcome.” Buckley’s main rationale, which came from ideas originating in the Old Right, was that government was too big and thus squandered any chance of individual opportunity. He believed that government should not rule over the people, instead it should be used as a