This week's nation has a special issue on "The New Deal [Re]Turns 75"
in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of FDR's welfare state.
There's a longish article by Richard Parker, an Oxford-trained
economist who teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of
Government and biographer of John Kenneth Galbraith, titled "Why the
New Deal Matters". There's also a forum Toward a New New Deal (Forum)
that includes contributions by liberals as well as radicals like
Howard Zinn and Adolph Reed.
What's missing in the entire discussion is any recognition why the
New Deal failed to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression. There's
also a rather shocking failure to come to terms with New Deal foreign
policy, which sadly smacks of the same Wilsonian arrogance now on
display in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is no accident that George W.
Bush invoked Harry Truman, FDR's vice president, in a speech
defending his "war on terror". Finally, and most importantly,
there's little understanding of the economic changes since the 1930s
that make a New Deal a utopian fantasy.
Richard Parker's article begins with the startling observation that
"when '60s students began calling themselves the New Left, it may
have distinguished them from the Old Left–but perhaps it also evoked
the keystone of all postwar American politics, the New Deal." I was
so stunned by this amalgam that I could not resist dropping a note to
the Harvard professor:
"Dr. Parker, the Old Left was all about the New Deal. If you read the
CPUSA press in 1965, there was nothing but the same kind of cloying
nostalgia for the New Deal as in your article. Furthermore, New Left
scholarship was very much involved with debunking the New Deal. I
refer you to Gabriel Kolko's work, not to speak of the general
disdain for the Democrats that prevailed in SDS in this period."
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/rooseveltomania/
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