Political climate change: Is the New Deal about to be deconstructed?

What was once new now feels quite old, and cumbersome

In a recent email to a friend of ours who probably would accept being called “center-left” I noted that there seems to be a broad political shift in the country. I’m not talking about “winds of change” or political fashions, or individual elections, but a change in overall political climate.

Last month we asked readers in Facebook who the president was that was most responsible for the vast state we are witness to today? Our answer was FDR, but Wilson is/was a strong contender. These two men helped bring government into the lives of everyday people in a big way.

We have long been told that this was a good thing. Since I was a child this is what I have been told. If we don’t have massive government we would all be eating rotten meat and drinking rotten milk, while our old folks died in the street. We have been told over and over and over about the benefits of massive encroachments by the government into our lives, yet we hear nothing of what we have lost as free people. The loss of these liberties is NEVER discussed in (taxpayer funded) schools.

FDR was a man of his time. He, and most of the people running things in the first third of the 20th century, thought that society had turned a corner. FDR, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and other heads of state and wannabe heads of state at the time believed that a massive welfare state (and there is a spectrum here, as interventionist as FDR was he was of course no Stalin or Hitler) was the way forward. Gone were the quaint liberal policies of the past, moving forward the state would take the reigns. That is the state and men like FDR and his cohorts.

After nearly a century of deification many people forget that a large portion of the American population did not like FDR, indeed some even called him a dictator and a usurper of the American experiment. FDR did put American (Japanese-American citizens) citizens into concentration camps during WWII, did try to pack the Supreme Court, consolidated massive power in the executive branch (with which we continue to deal today), and engaged in a host of other sins. But in the end, in the wake of the last World War, the New Deal won out. War, once again, proved to be “the health of the state”.

Manzanar, one of FDR’s detention camps (of US citizens) during WWII

We are not going to continue down this line here as there have been thousands of books written about why FDR was a great man, and a few about why he did the country a profound disservice. We won’t be solving this debate here. But when we talk about crony capitalism, and our current crony capitalist system, we can say that much of it (but by no means all) was birthed under FDR. This is a fact.

But the New Deal feels quite old these days. It is a relic of a time when big everything was considered better. Big business. Big labor. Big government. Always bigger with a centralized node for “coordination”.

We now exist in a very different time from that of FDR and the big government experimenters however. Big is definitely NOT always good. Often, too often, massive organizations crush innovation and good ideas. We know this is true. We’ve all seen this a thousand times in our own lives. Yet we drag the massive administrative state along with us into the future. Why?

There has been quite a lot of fretting of late within some big government circles. The Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court that moved abortion back to the states put the fear of whatever puts fear in them. They see that Constitutional Originalism is clearly arriving on the scene (long feared by some) in Washington as a broadly accepted philosophy. Some fear that the New Deal could become the Old Deal within their lifetimes. This is almost unthinkable for many who came to believe that the New Deal was the forever deal.

So it is understandable that such a preservationist (conservative?) disposition would arise within this group of “progressives”. For nearly 100 years the USA as a quasi-unitary state has been the norm. The big government folks have done well under it. The crony capitalist state is good for the connected, who until recently were the ones who controlled the political and economic discussions. But now there is concern in the establishment circles, as we can see in this article by Noah Rosenblum in The Atlantic, “The Case That Could Destroy the Government”.

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

“Terrifyingly”? OK, terrifying for whom? You? Perhaps. For many other Americans not so much.