What were the successes and failures of American liberalism in the 1960’s?

The greatest successes of American liberalism in the 1960s have to do with civil rights and with anti-poverty programs.  The greatest failures of American liberalism during that time are connected to the Vietnam War and to the fact that liberalism was unable to prevent the country from splitting on cultural lines.

In some ways, the 1960s were the greatest decade for American liberalism since the New Deal.  The most important thing that liberals accomplished was the increase in racial justice during this decade.  At the beginning of the decade, segregation was legal and prevalent throughout the South.  By 1964, the US Congress passed a law banning racial discrimination in public accommodations in all parts of the country.  The next year, Congress passed another law making it harder for Southern governments to suppress the black vote.  These were monumental accomplishments that most people would credit to liberalism.

President Lyndon Johnson helped push those two civil rights laws through Congress and he is also mainly responsible for the other major accomplishment of American liberalism during this time.  This was the “Great Society” that Johnson pushed for.  Johnson wanted to create a set of government programs that would rid American society of poverty and which would (he thought) improve American society by doing things like guaranteeing medical care to seniors (Medicare) and protecting the environment (many laws, including the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966).

However, American liberalism would not continue to thrive through the end of the decade.  Instead, it foundered, partly from its own successes and partly because of the Vietnam War.  The Vietnam War cost a great deal of money, making it harder for the government to afford Great Society programs.  The war, along with liberal successes, also split the country.  Many conservatives were very unhappy with the changes in American society that they blamed on liberalism.  The anti-war movement and the Counterculture in general appalled traditional Americans, leading them to turn against liberalism.  Because of this, the US started to split by the end of the 1960s.  Those splits are still with us today.  The inability to prevent them from happening is perhaps the greatest failure of American liberalism in the 1960s.