The Real Deal

My dad still speaks of FDR with reverence. Not me, other than his conduct of WWII.

The New Deal does not mean a good deal to me, especially the whole ticking time bomb of Social Security, one of FDR's legacies. Amity Shlaes reexamines FDR in her new book, The Forgotten Man. An excerpt from her adaptation:

The second standard understanding is that the Brain Trusters were moderate people who drew from American history when they wrote the New Deal. If their philosophies were left wing, then that aspect ought to be treated parenthetically, the attitude was. But the leftishness of the Brain Trust was not parenthetical. It was central.

In the summer of 1927, a group of future New Dealers, mostly junior professors or minor union officials, were received by Stalin for a full six hours when they traveled on a junket to the Soviet Union. Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously. The Brain Trusters were not, for the most part, fascists or communists. They were thoughtful people who wrote in the New Republic. But their ideas were wrong. Their intense romanticization of the concept of the economy of scale ignored the small man. One of the New Dealers from the old Soviet trip, Rex Tugwell, even created his very own version of Animal Farm in Casa Grande, Ariz. As in the Orwell book, the farmers revolted.

FDR, if not a fellow traveler himself, was responsible for putting this bunch in charge. Maybe this also explains while there has never been much widespread criticism of the evils of Stalin either in this country, even though he was responsible for the deaths of millions more than Hitler.

And FDR's kind of dictatorial and regressive thinking dominates the Democrat party still today. Doesn't this remind us a lot of heartless HillaryCare?

George Will on Shlaes' book:

Before the 1930s, the adjective ''liberal'' denoted policies of individualism and individual rights; since Roosevelt, it has primarily pertained to the politics of group interests. So writes Shlaes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. She says Roosevelt's wager was that, by using legislation and regulations to multiply federally favored groups, and by rhetorically pitting those favored by government against the unfavored, he could create a permanent majority coalition.

That's why liberal is a dirty word these days to those of us who value individual liberty, and why conservatives want government to do less. The Real Deal--the tug between the favored and the unfavored, spawned the permanent campaign of the Clinton era. The question for the future is whether people want to be grouped any more, or want more individual choice in their lives.