A ridiculous meme has emerged since the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. It goes as follows: many of the newly-elected Democrats are trying to impose a radical form of Socialism upon the country.
But this supposed extreme leftward drift is nonsense. If anything, it is a healthy sign that the Democratic Party is actually coming home, recalling an era in the middle-20th century when such thought was far from radical, but was actually mainstream American political thought. In a nutshell, it is the Party of the People is starting to putting aside its flirtation with neo-liberalism and once again embracing the legacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, today’s Democrats would do well to openly embrace the 32nd president and his legacy as a means of answering this false charge.
It is now almost impossible to follow the news without hearing some pundit complain that the Democrats in the House of Representatives as well as potential presidential candidates are “overreaching.” Over at Axios, we read of silly accusations of a “socialist surge” by Democrats that will enhance Trump’s reelection. When you turn on Morning Joe on MSNBC, we hear the former Republican Congressman also claim that when Democrats actually start acting like Democrats, they are driving up the president’s poll numbers.
This “going too far left” chant is not only coming from the right but even some “centrist” Democrats. We hear billionaire would-be presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz were especially vocal in decrying the seventy percent marginal tax rate put forwardly Ocasio-Cortez and the two percent wealth tax proposed by Senator Warren. They mindlessly claim that this is a march towards socialism, as if these Democrats are hell-bent on turning the United States into a modern-day U.S.S.R.To that end, they cite the example of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro— conveniently ignoring the fact that Chavez nationalized many private companies in a manner that would be impossible to do in the United States while maintaining power through fraudulent elections – all the time while running a klepto-bureaucratic government.
Of course, this is all nonsense. Let’s put aside the slur being made against American Democratic Socialists that Venezuela is their economic model (their actual model is Norway or Denmark, countries where both private property rights and personal profit are well secured). What these upand coming Democrats are actually doing is nothing radical at all. If anything, they are attempting to return the United States back to the days of a saner form of capitalism. But more to the point, they are not embracing Marx nor Stalin nor Maduro, but reviving the economic legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And not just FDR’s legacy, but that of Harry Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ and even Richard Nixon — by any objective definition, hardly a group of Marxist revolutionaries. Far from being radical, what many of today’s newly-elected Democrats are proposing is what was considered mainstream political thought from 1933 through the Reagan era; a time when the United States enjoyed its lowest levels of economic inequality as well as its greatest period of economic prosperity.
All of these presidents, whether Democratic or Republican, shared the simple understanding that any form of capitalism that is stridently anchored to laissez-faire principles is a brittle form of capitalism; one that leaves itself open to decay and self-destruction. Beyond that, they also understood hat in order to preserve capitalism, you borrow certain ideas from socialism and co-opt them into preserving capitalism to make it stronger, more durable and healthier. And by applyingthose simple concepts into economic policy, these presidents created a goldenera of American economics.
A little historical perspective is necessary.
Let us start with FDR. He gave us Social Security; established the necessity of the federal government to be actively engaged for economic development. He was an ardent environmentalist responsible for saving endangered species railing against the clear cutting for forests and strip mining. It is safe to say he would be proud to have the Democratic Party’s call for environmentalism to be called the Green New Deal.
And the there is Harry Truman, the President who stared down Stalin with the Berlin airlift, helped found NATO, implemented the Marshall Plan to prevent the spread of the Soviet Empire and standing up to North Korean aggression in 1950. While those were great foreign policy successes, he came within a single vote in Congress in giving the United States a government-backed universal health care system; one only defeated by the conservative American Medical Association and their Republican allies in 1946.
Of course, there is LBJ, who understood the need of government to be involved in a war on poverty, one that fell short unfortunately because of the Vietnam War. Still, Johnson gave us Medicare, an extension of Harry Truman’s dream for health care coverage — and one that survived the hysterical claims by conservatives that the program was the dawn of socialism in America.
These Democrats are doing nothing more revolutionary than proposing economic policies that express an outlook of common human decency and a basic sense of fairness.
But there was a time when such “radical” policies were hardly limited to Democrats. Indeed, the fact that higher marginal tax rates are considered by many to be a lurch towards Marxism actually demonstrates how radically far-right mainstream economic thought has lurched.
President Eisenhower used a ninety percent top tax bracket to help fund the interstate highway system. There is no record of Ike ever attempting to cut the top tax rate one cent.
And then there is Richard Nixon, well known for his anti-Communist crusades of the late 1940s onward.
On economics Nixon was actually further left than either Presidents Clinton or Obama. He actually imposed wage and price controls in an attempt to stem inflation. He is also the president who gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, Food Stamps and even a negative income tax payment -- giving poor and working people a yearly check from the government designed to stimulate economic activity. In today’s world,Eisenhower and Nixon would be denounced as Marxist fellow travelers. Indeed,many of their policies are well to the left of the last three Democratic presidents.
Gone are the days of conservative mantras of deliberative thought. Instead, they propose economic policies that only of live for themoment. When they address the environment, there is no talk of what Theodore Roosevelt’s Chief of the United States Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, described as “the patriotism of conservation.” In its place is only denial of scientific truths.
What does this tell us? Well, very simple: the issue is not that these new young Democrats are too far left, but that over the past forty years the Republican Party has gone too far to the right.
Embracing FDR’s Legacy
But FDR did not shirk from these charges. Instead, he welcomed them as a call to battle; as a chance to explain how his policies weren't the harbinger of some Red Wave but the very means of saving capitalism. Roosevelt understood that the answer to solving modern economic injustice was not are treat into strident laissez-faire conservatism, but to meet head on the causes of economic injustice.
On September 29,1936, in the midst of his first reelection campaign, FDR spoke before the New York State Democratic Party’s convention in Syracuse, New York. Without pulling any punches, he laid out the issue:
“Why did that crisis of 1929 to 1933 pass without disaster?
The answer is found in the recordof what we did. Early in the campaign of 1932 I said: "To meet by reactant hat danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical, it is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands." We met the emergency with emergency action. But far more important than that, we went to the roots of the problem, and attacked the cause of the crisis. We were against revolution. Therefore, we waged war against those conditions which make revolutions—against the inequalities and resentments which breed them.”
FDR was courageous enough to answer and
refute the myths of laissez-faire. And he often turned their own charges against them, explaining that it was their policies that would actually undermine the foundations of American Capitalism.
It would serve the Democratic Party well to consistently invoke FDR and his legacy against allegations of economic overreach. It is time to turn the tables on those who make this charge. Let us remind them that with similar policies the modern American middle class was created – it has been since 1981 when Reagan effectively declared war on both the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society (and to a large extent, several of Nixon’s economic and environmental reforms) that same middle class has been in decline.
Perhaps the answer in recapturing the White House and the U.S. Senate is to make many of these Trump Republicans run against FDR. We should remember history has treated our 32nd President very kindly. He led our nation through The Great Depression and onto victory in the Second World War. For this many Americans still define him as an economic savior and a great patriot. Let us cleave to his legacy, cite his accomplishments while using his powerful words and wisdom to our benefit.
As FDR himself once frustratingly remarked about businessmen who opposed his policies, “Don’t they realize we saved Capitalism?” The sad fact is that many of today’s Trump-approving businessmen still don’t understand how New Deal liberalism both democratized and preserved Capitalism.
It is time a new generation of Democrats remind them — and to use FDR in doing so.