By 1910... In a speech that year at Troy in New York State, FDR announced a ‘new theory’ of politics, one that would enhance ‘the liberty of the community’ rather than simply protect the liberty of the individual. The anodyne language concealed his growing distrust of free market mythology...
Like many of his contemporaries in the 1910s, FDR slowly came to accept the Progressive view that government could restrain private gain in the service of public good.
His New Deal created an American version of the welfare state – a remarkable achievement in a country committed (at least rhetorically) to rugged individualism. Yet congressional opposition ... war also created the foundations of the national security state, and the Cold War accelerated its growth into a behemoth that all FDR’s successors had to learn to live with.
The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired.
... Still, he was a working-class hero – ‘the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch’, as one respondent told a pollster.
FDR’s attacks on the bosses peaked in the 1936 presidential campaign. In Madison Square Garden on 31 October, he inveighed against ‘economic royalists’.
..The postwar world may well have been a better place had FDR lived.
The New Deal’s welfare state survived without him, despite constant challenges from the right; Truman tried to extend it and Johnson succeeded in doing so. New Deal assumptions even became part of the Washington consensus for several decades, until the resurgence of austerity in the 1970s and since.
... Unrestrained by FDR’s diplomacy, Cold War hysteria accelerated the growth of the national security state into a mammoth institutional presence that no successful politician has been able to challenge.
Even Trump, sworn enemy of the Washington consensus, remains its captive. FDR’s capacious style of leadership has vanished from the scene. In the shadow of the Pentagon, no one dares to reassert a sceptical perspective.
This is a major loss. Despite his attraction to missionary diplomacy,
FDR remained committed to a traditional notion of international law, which allowed nations to respond militarily only if their own or others’ territorial boundaries had been violated. Not even his most expansive formulations included ‘regime change’. How he would have responded to the militarist posturing that passes for foreign policy debate in Washington today, who can say? I imagine he would be appalled
Re: Deteriorating Situation in Venezuela
Originally Posted by Vanoi
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