A New Great Society?

Qualitative solutions to questions of civil and social rights tend to drift from principal political discourse to the margins, and with the domain of progressive politics increasingly characterized by the quantitative Green New Deal, propositions beyond its scope fall out of core deliberations. Gender pay gaps, intersectional and weight discrimination, artificial intelligence, affirmative action, reproductive healthcare, and rising hate are all critical issues facing our era, yet what doesn’t reduce to the policy architecture of the Green New Deal ultimately becomes peripheral.

While the Green New Deal builds off the economic and infrastructural New Deal to address the twin crises of climate change and inequality, the New Great Society should construct upon the foundations of the Great Society to resolve issues of racism, sexism, and other forms of civil rights transgressions, in addition to dilemmas of criminal justice and union rights. This essay argues that the New Great Society would provide admittance and a political strategy for qualitative policy to advance a society that protects all, including and especially the most vulnerable.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society involved a “commitment to qualitative, rather than quantitative,” policy to address issues of discrimination, poverty, education, and political power. The New Great Society (NGS) should similarly tackle social issues as a social program. Aggregated with the economic Green New Deal (GND), both would holistically resolve the many pressing issues of the contemporary moment.

The dual approach of the inside-outside strategy (IOS) maps the potential procedure for achieving the NGS from both within and without the Democratic Party structure. The inside strategy should involve operating within the established political apparatus via lobbying, advocacy, running for office, voting for particular candidates, and building congressional coalitions. Beyond legislators, linking with state agencies provides another avenue for reform implementation.

The outside strategy would involve grassroots mobilization to build the NGS movement from below, via protests, rallies, art, journalism, research, and other forms of advocacy. Similar to the linkage between the Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress with the GND, NGS proponents could build coalitions with organizations. Through public awareness and broad mobilization, the outside can apply pressure to the inside.

The IOS for the NGS would require ground-level efforts coupled with establishment politics to advance a bold social agenda that demands a more progressive political apparatus.

The NGS, as outlined in this essay, includes various ideas for strengthening civil rights in the United States, such as the Equal Rights Amendment, the Intersectional Civil Rights Act, affirmative action codification, and the War on Hate.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would guarantee equal rights for all Americans regardless of sex and, according to legal scholars, would extend equal rights to issues of sexuality and gender. ERA advocacy centers on issues of reproductive healthcare, pay gaps between men and women, as well as the gendered nature of property, divorce, and employment law. While President Biden and feminist organizations contend that the ERA is the 28th Amendment, it is not officially registered as part of the U.S. Constitution.

The Intersectional Civil Rights Act (ICRA) would modify civil rights frameworks to allow the combination of protected classes and permit intersectional claims to advance in court. Building off of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory, this law would recognize how Black women, queer people of color, and others experience compound discrimination wherein two or more identities are aggregated to produce a distinct class.

What the ICRA would do is establish compound protected characteristics to account for the forms of discrimination that tend to fall through the cracks of the justice system and its traditional litigation. Some progress has been made on this matter, such as with California’s ICRA, Senate Bill 1137 (SB 1137), which Governor Newsom signed into law in 2024. However, all Americans across the country deserve intersectional protections, highlighting the need for a broader NGS movement.

The Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act (AICRA) would protect Americans from (a) biased algorithms in contexts not limited to healthcare, criminal justice, housing, and employment; (b) facial identity appropriation; and (c) artwork appropriation for generative AI. Senator Ed Markey introduced S.5152, titled the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act of 2024, to manage the issues AI poses for modern society. Comprised in the AICRA are algorithm regulations, bans on discriminatory algorithms, and requirements for independent audits. The AICRA, as part of the NGS, should additionally include bans on generative AI appropriating artists’ works and people’s facial identities.

Another issue relates to weight prejudice and the lack of rights for the fat community and others facing size bias. From 2000 to 2010, weight discrimination in the U.S. increased by 66%. Anti-fat bias remains prevalent and pervasive, with Michigan as the only state to ban discrimination based on weight or size. The NGS should ban weight and size discrimination to extend civil rights to a population largely unprotected.

Affirmative action is another issue at hand. Following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, universities such as UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard saw decreases in Black enrollment to the tune of 25% and 22%, respectively. Other measures of race and ethnicity declined as well, indicating that the removal of race-conscious admissions translates to a loss in student body diversity. What students and academic institutions require is the codification of affirmative action, safeguarding the practice so that universities may correct centuries of structural racism and their contemporary systemic legacies.

As Black people continue to face discrimination, lower education outcomes, rising hate, curricular censorship, higher poverty rates, and other markers of ongoing structural anti-Blackness, the issue of reparations is enduring. The NGS should include reparations, not merely as direct checks, but also as community investments in public schools, public health, research, as well as efforts to combat hate and academic censorship. Reparations and a counter-movement against banning Black history and theory from schools could be part of a broader War on Hate. As far-right extremism grows in the U.S. in the form of antisemitism, anti-Blackness, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, white supremacy shifts from fringe to core, and the urgency of a War on Hate is all the more real.

Union rights are an additional point of contention for civil rights advocates. With declining union membership over the last several decades and a lack of protections for unionization, the NGS should involve expanded union rights to protect workers seeking fair deals with employing enterprises, such as the right to continued pay while striking. Collective bargaining should be a guaranteed right, right-to-work laws should be repealed, paying union dues should be more straightforward, and binding arbitration should be ensured.

When it comes to policing and prisons, the criminal justice system should move in the direction of restorative and rehabilitative justice and forms of community policing. The NGS should take on the criminal (in)justice system by removing minimum sentencing, abolishing the death penalty, limiting life without parole sentences, investing in drug treatment and mental health services, ending money bail, and decarcerating youth. Policing, with its roots in enslavement, should be rethought, shifted away from retribution, and scaled back in favor of community-led policing systems.

Another contemporary political dilemma is the lack of access to healthcare. Established during LBJ’s Great Society, Medicare should be extended to all Americans, allowing the U.S. to join the rest of the developed world in offering healthcare as a right. This particular policy position overlaps with the GND, stressing the urgency of universal healthcare in the U.S. as both quantitative and qualitative.

The Great Society involved the Model Cities Program, which aimed to conduct five-year Model Cities experiments to reduce poverty and expand local democracy in U.S. cities. The urban aid program led to an increase in local government participation, especially among Black communities, and addressed urban poverty with social services. A New Model Cities Program would address issues of poverty in modern cities, encourage local government participation, inspire people to run for local office, implement public projects like urban gardens, city-owned grocery stores, and food forests, and establish community policing systems.

While this essay has discussed social policy thus far, civil rights shouldn’t be limited to people, but extend to nature via environmental personhood, which would grant certain environmental entities such as lakes, forests, animals, and rivers the legal rights of a person. In the age of Anthropocene, climate change, late-stage capitalism, and ongoing settler-colonialism, restoring juridic personhood to nature would combat issues of exploitation and spearhead the return of land to Indigenous communities.

This essay briefly explored a list of policy proposals for the New Great Society as qualitative policy to advance a country where civil and social rights are expanded and better protected. While the Green New Deal offers the quantitative economic and infrastructural overhauls to address the twin crises of climate change and inequality, the New Great Society offers a home to the many qualitative policies beyond the scope of the GND, allowing activists, lawmakers, and advocates the capacity to articulate a cohesive and robust policy agenda that would expand on civil rights for the twenty-first century context.

"[O]rdinary people have immense power to set their own goals and take collective action to help perfect the union. This can only be accomplished through an organized movement that generates sustained pressure for social justice, economic equity, educational access and a better way of life. The time has come for a New Great Society in the United States of America." –Marcus Bright, Ph.D. It is Time for a New Great Society