Fifty years ago Wednesday, Lyndon B. Johnson announced a War on Poverty in his first State of the Union address. "It will not be a short or easy struggle; no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it." Popular when it was first announced, it quickly became unpopular, fueled by the disapproval of Johnson due to Vietnam, the urban riots of the 1960s and subsequent crime wave, and the coding of the War on Poverty as a pure welfare scheme.

Within a decade it was considered to have gone off the rails, and by the time Ronald Reagan took office liberals had only muffled support for it at best. It now serves as a set of right-wing talking points about the failure of Big Government. However, lately there is new research trying to uncover the positive results of the War on Poverty, as well as greater understanding of why some of it succeeded politically while other parts failed. Such efforts, most notably the Russell Sage Foundation’s Legacies of the War on Poverty edited by Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danzinger, show that the War on Poverty was a more complex, and more successful, series of programs than is commonly understood.

With both parties focusing on poverty in advance of the 2014 midterms, what lessons should liberals take away from the War on Poverty? Three stand out.

Focus on Citizens' Rights, Not Needs

How you judge the War on Poverty's success depends on what you consider a part of it. Nowadays the war is often just a reference to cash support given to unmarried women with children—the Aid to Families with Dependent Children that Bill Clinton “reformed” in the 1990s. But at the time it included Head Start, Medicare, expansion of Social Security, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, federal funding for K-12, and Pell grants for higher education, all programs that enjoy broad public support.

Russell Sage breaks the programs of the War on Poverty into three parts. The first part was designed to boost wages through education and job training. These include programs like Head Start and Pell grants. The second was to provide income support, particularly for single mothers and the elderly. And the third was to bring a system of government health care to the elderly and the poor.