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The gap between liberal aims and achievement has inevitably widened. A most instructive (and destructive) example, according to Lowi, is urban renewal, one of the most important domestic programs of the last quarter-century. Intended to create a renaissance of urban life, it was warmly supported by liberals. Yet it quickly fell into the hands of profit-minded developers and inadequate local authorities who turned urban renewal into the bad joke often referred to as "Negro removal." Public funds were used to demolish black homes and herd the residents in ever greater numbers into ghettos. Another creation of liberal thought, the Federal Housing Administration, also came under the control of real estate interests that made mortgages available to whites escaping to the suburbs but not to the poor in the cities. Thus a federal policy, conceived and supported by liberals, contributed to what Lowi bluntly calls apartheid in the U.S.
Many liberals, says Lowi, do not seem to have learned from experience. In company with conservatives, they are now making community control of projects the fashionable panacea and are busy trying to take even more power from the inefficient central government. In the process, they are simply encouraging further control by vested interests whose primary concern is to perpetuate themselves. Lyndon Johnson's ill-fated poverty program, Lowi thinks, is the worst example. It invites assorted, untested private organizations to compete for federal funds and then spend them with scant guidelines. The result: confusion, disillusion and corruption.
Declining Standards. This steady erosion of federal power, in conjunction with the general belief that the Federal Government has license to control everything, thinks Lowi, is one of the main causes of the dramatic loss of public confidence in government itself. It explains why some of the people who stand to gain most from government —the minorities, the poor, the aged —are among the most hostile to it. The people, writes Lowi, want more than just a "piece of the action." They want justice. They want standards they can live up to—or at least try to. Democracy reaches its lowest ebb when government tries to create consensus by buying people off, as, for example, many programs have quietly tried to buy off black militants in order to keep them quiet. Marx felt that man first became alienated from his work when he was paid for it; Lowi feels that Americans have become alienated from their government for much the same reason: it tries to buy their allegiance.