The Center for Conservative Women hosts Amity Shlaes with The Heritage Foundation at Conservative Women’s Network luncheon

February 3, 2020

The biggest debates in American politics today—about how to end poverty, improve living standards for the middle class, protect the environment, and provide access to health care and education—are nothing new under the sun. These same issues divided the country in the 1960s. Then, as now, Americans debated socialism versus capitalism and public sector versus private-sector reform. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. The result was the Great Society—a wave of massive reforms, implemented from the top-down by experts and bureaucrats.

In Amity Shlaes new book, Great Society: A New Historythe results of the Great Society era are shown to be far from great, and actually, devastating. In a similar vein, Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, illustrated the policy pitfalls of the Great Society in her book, The Not-So-Great Society. Both experts traced the series of top-down reforms made during the 1960s that are still consequential today.

The Center for Conservative Women partners with The Heritage Foundation to host Conservative Women’s Network luncheons in which women gather to become informed on issues of the day, network with area professionals and hear from conservative leaders. This event was free and open to the public. Lunch was provided.

Watch the event: