Restitutor Orbis

Republicans are desperate to prove FDR's legislation, known as the New Deal, did not work. They are desperate because if it worked, it will work again - for Obama. And they do not want Obama to succeed. So, to discredit his economic plan, they seek to prove the New Deal failed to lift the country out of the Great Depression. It won't work.

Why?

Because the New Deal worked.

From DemocraticUnderground.com:

When Franklyn Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933, our nation was in the midst of the greatest depression in our history. Our annual gross domestic product had been nearly cut in half since the Stock Market Crash of three and a half years previously, and unemployment stood at 25%. Within four years of taking office, GDP rose to about 90% of where it had been prior to the Stock Market Crash. In FDR's first term in office our country experienced a 5.3% increase in jobs, the greatest percent increase in jobs of the past 20 presidential terms, from 1929 to 2009. As a result, the unemployment rate was approximately cut by more than 40% by the end of his first term. By 1941, prior to the onset of World War II, the unemployment rate had declined to below 10%.

And the New Deal was so much more than an economic policy. It was public policy. It was a revolution in thinking. And it changed America. No one questions this latter statement and I think this change is really what is at the heart of conservative hostility. Entrenched interests do not like change. And I think this is what is at the heart of conservative hostility to President Obama. He threatens the status quo. America's white masters were xenophobic, preservationist, and jealous of their position.

As Morton Keller argues ("The New Deal: A New Look," Polity 31 (1999), 657-663) the New Deal "emerged from the Great Depression and felt the need to change a dysfunctional economic order, not from a desire to preserve an older American from new social, political, and economic threats" and that "from the hindsihgt of more than half a century, we can see what emerged from the New Deal...was not renewed xenophobia and standpattism...Rather, the basic New Deal themse of a broad, inclusive, democratic cultural nationalism, and a readiness to use federal programs and deficit financing when necessary to secure prosperity and meet large domestic or international needs."

The New Deal brought positive change. It promoted the end of racism and xenophobia, "eroded anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and even, gradually, the segregation of blacks in American life." The Great Society legislation sponsored by President Lyndon B. Johnson was a continuation of the process, as Keller calls it, "an extension rather than a fresh and different political movement."

It is impossible to call the New Deal a failure unless you are part of the entrenched, xenophobic interests now represented by the Republican Party. Just as it did 60 years or more ago, the small town native-American hostility to the immigrant-filled big cities came to the fore - stoked by xenophobes like McCain and Palin and their talk of a "real" America - which is the rural, backwoods, small-town as opposed to the alien and evil big city. There were even good and bad parts of various states, according to the Republican Party, or "real" and "unreal" parts of America. This attitude is the antithesis of the New Deal.

We can argue the merits of the New Deal backwards and forwards, but we must first understand the issues. And the issue here is that the Republicans of today represent entrenched, largely white interests and the old status quo. Republican attitudes today are a reaction against the New Deal, reaction against the Great Society, and a reaction against Obama as another reformer in the mold of FDR and Johnson.

But Keller points out that the New Deal has not been a "one-party inheritance." We can look at Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, which would have been unthinkable without the New Deal. Does anybody oppose our interstate system? Anyone? Anyone? The Space Program is another child of the New Deal - even the arms buildup of Reagan, so adored by Republicans today. You can claim he defeated the Red Menace but he defeated the Red Menace only because of a paradigm shift put into place by a progressive Democratic leadership. Reagan, too, is unthinkable in pre-New Deal terms.

Keller points out that "American politics and government in the second half of the twentieth century has been dominated not only by a rejected of the New Deal legacy, but rather by a continuing adaption, in its spirit, to the demands of a changing American society."

Of course, we have seen how Republicans even now hearken back to the halcyon days of pre-Depression America, to a yearning for small town values (and vice) over the alien landscape of the immigrant-filled big cities, to the old xenophobia which bread isolationism, and it is no surprise that it appeals mostly to white voters who feel threatened and who sense a loss of control. Opposition to the New Deal is reactionary. It always has been. The alternatives in the 30's were totalitarianism - either left or right. And of course, it is to the totalitarian model that conservatives seem to lean even today. They embraced Bush and his imperial presidency, for example. They reject Obama and accuse him of being the true totalitarian but we all know that the real reason for this is not a rejection of totalitarianism but the fact that Obama is not THEIR totalitarian. This is their chance, they seem to think, to turn back the clock and reclaim America for the white voter, for entrenched interests, and to restore some mythical golden age that never was - the myth of a Christian America with "real" values.

But that was an age when race and religion were prime determinants in whether a person deserved to be part of the community. We see this today in the Republican Party and the appeal to "small town" or "real American" values. Reject alienism, reject what is foreign and that which threatens to overturn the status quo. Is it any surprise that blacks are predominantly Democrats and that Hispanic/Latino voters abandoned the Republican cause en masse in 2008?

The New Deal saved us from this conservative pipe dream - a paradise for them but hell for anyone who fits into the category of the "Other". It was, as Keller says, not an episode but a defining moment like the Revolution "or the establishment of the new nation". It is a moment we should embrace and protect, not reject. And short-sighted conservative opponents today do not realize how much their own policies and have depended upon New Deal legislation and the paradigm shift that went with it. 1920 is gone folks. Good and gone. And good riddance. We have moved on. The world has moved on. We can't go back in time. We can't undo the New Deal - it has become part of American life. And it is so much more than economic policy. So much more.

For Further Reading: Mitch McConnell Is Wrong – The New Deal DID Work, and it Still Does