>When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was.
This isn't true. I cannot recommend Robert Caro's works on LBJ enough. Johnson had plenty of flaws, but he cared deeply about people, especially the poor. He taught immigrant schoolchildren and saw their plight. He grew up before the Hill Country had electricity and saw the reality of true poverty, and when he had power he used every bit of his skills and connections to get things like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, and Medicaid - and so many more.
You can't (and shouldn't) separate LBJ and his administration from atrocities in Vietnam, but if he had been able and willing to extract America from Vietnam, he would be without dispute the greatest president in history and it's not close.
And we're back to framing. LBJ didn't teach. He was immediately assigned as principal, with no relevant experience at all, as a gig to earn some cash for school. In other words - connections. And he was so moved that he quit after his first year never to return to anything education related ever again.
There's been a large effort to reimagine LBJ because having an exploitative racist as the progenitor of many of these things (which you mentioned) is kind of awkward, but reality is always so much more interesting than fiction, precisely because of such things.
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In the future you'll see something similar with the Amish. There's about 400k Amish in America growing at about 2.5% per year, thanks to healthy fertility rates. And they do, when they see it as necessary, vote (as they did for Trump). As their population continues to swell, and election margins continue to narrow, they're going to be capable of deciding elections in the US in the foreseeable future.
And so you're going to see a Republican suddenly become a hero for everything the Amish care about. Is it because he cares about the Amish? No, but that's certainly how it'll be framed. As an aside, I find the idea of the Amish as kingmakers hilariously appropriate. I guess the meek truly will inherit the Earth!