In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson hoped to expand the New Deal to cover nonwhite Americans. He had some successes — not least civil rights legislation and the war on poverty. But he also fatally undermined the fragile political consensus between Southern and liberal Democrats that had defined the New Deal consensus.

Medicare and Medicaid, which became law in 1965, were the last major programs inspired by the New Deal. Since then, America has turned against welfare in favor of another, different tool of social management: prison. The same year Medicare and Medicaid passed, Johnson declared a war on crime; his successor, Richard Nixon, made crime fighting a central plank in his platform. In 1971 he declared a corollary war on drugs.

Race was at the heart of Nixon’s vision. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” he declared in 1969, according to notes in the diary of his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was slashing government spending and asserting that taxpayers were being defrauded by undeserving black “welfare queens.” In 1996 Bill Clinton, who began his presidency with a bold promise to deliver universal health insurance, instead ended “welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the federal government’s primary social-welfare program, with a block grant to states, which could withhold aid as they saw fit.

In the 1960s, the American government was roughly the same size as that of other rich nations: In 1965, federal, state and municipal taxes added up to just under 24 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, about 1 percentage point less than the average among industrialized nations in the O.E.C.D.

The other rich countries have become richer since then, and they have expanded and improved the health care, education and child care they provide — such services claim about 10 percentage points more of their G.D.P. than they did in the 1960s. In the United States, that proportion has barely budged. But imprisonment grew: By 2016, 679 out of every 100,000 Americans languished in prison or jail, almost four times the share in 1960.

Though the cold shoulder is grounded in the image of black and brown moochers living in the imagination of white Americans, the suffering caused by its miserly understanding of society is not limited to communities of color. Much of white America, the part addled by opioids, ravaged by suicide, despairing of a future, is also a victim of a nation that refuses to care.