The left is pushing Democrats to embrace their greatest president. Why that's a good thing.
Source: Washington Post
The left is pushing Democrats to embrace their greatest president. Why that’s a good thing.
Democrats should proudly trumpet the New Deal — and extend it.
By Lawrence B. Glickman
January 14 at 6:00 AM
The New Deal is back.
Nearly a century after President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his effort to revive the American economy through government programs, Democrats are once again becoming fans of Roosevelt and his legacy. That should come as no surprise: The nation’s longest-serving leader, Roosevelt presided over the New Deal and waged the successful World War II fight against global fascism. His New Deal laid the groundwork for the economic boom that made the United States the envy of the world in the postwar decades, and it provided the impetus for the civil rights and Great Society reforms of the 1960s. Roosevelt helped forge a coalition that made the Democratic Party dominant for almost half a century and left a lasting legacy, including programs that remain strikingly popular today, such as Social Security.
Yet for the past half a century, leading Democrats have let Republicans dictate the terms of our politics, expressing surprising reluctance to celebrate Roosevelt or the New Deal.
Recently, however, both have returned to American politics with a vengeance. Newly elected Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and dozens of other representatives have proposed a “Green New Deal.” Calling for a return to the progressive system introduced during the New Deal and World War II years, Ocasio-Cortez is also promoting a 70 percent marginal tax rate for the highest earners, a proposal other members of her party and some liberal commentators have endorsed. The call for what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) describes as a “Second New Deal” marks the reversal of decades of Democrats distancing themselves from Roosevelt and, if this new trend continues, promises to reinvigorate the party and its agenda.
The “New Deal order” lasted roughly from Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to Ronald Reagan’s ascendance in 1980. This era presents a paradox. On the one hand, many, including Donald Trump, look back on it as a golden age. Yet beginning in the 1970s, the forces that helped produce a broad middle class and relative income equality have been under assault — from both parties.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/14/left-is-pushing-democrats-embrace-their-greatest-president-why-thats-good-thing/
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Wash. Post. "It is too soon to say whether the Democratic Party as a whole will follow the lead of its left flank.
But growing support for a Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all, progressive taxation and corporate regulation suggests that many members of the Democratic Party are once again embracing the Rooseveltian vision of activist government that promotes freedom, opportunity and justice for ordinary Americans.
> After half a century of consensus that the Age of Roosevelt was history, today’s Democrats are reclaiming the mantle of the party of ideas by reembracing the New Deal as a vision of positive governance."
FDR Memorial (with 'Fala') in Washington, DC, FDR Presidential Library & Museum, National Archives
https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2017/10/12/the-adventures-of-fala-first-dog-the-case-of-the-dog-who-didnt-bark-on-the-boat/
- FDR Memorial with Fala, Washington, DC. Go see this splendid outdoor memorial.
THE FALA SPEECH, ORSON WELLES & H.WOOD, Sept. 23, 1944, Politico. The campaign of his GOP rival, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, had been blasting the Roosevelt administration as corrupt and incompetent. It falsely accused FDR of sending a U.S. Navy destroyer to pick up Fala after purportedly he had been left behind during a presidential visit to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska in 1943, following their recapture from Japanese invaders. In a nationally broadcast speech, the president said: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.
“Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 million — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.
> According to Paul Sparrow, the director of the FDR Library, the idea for turning the Republican attacks on Fala into a campaign issue came from Hollywood’s Orson Welles. Fala, Sparrow wrote, “was a national celebrity, the star of an MGM movie about the White House, featured in a series of popular cartoons and routinely covered by the national press.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/fdr-defends-fala-against-gop-attack-sept-23-1944-228362
