Some Thoughts on the Three New Deals

Plus: How malleable is the clay?, David Phelps' best Db, and marginal beliefs.

Dec 26, 2024

grey concrete building during daytime — Photo by wisconsinpictures on Unsplash

They knew it; we have forgotten it.

Few in modern America think much about — or even know of — the consanguinity that binds Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Italian fascism and German Nazism. At the time, however, commentators and newspapermen on both sides of the Atlantic saw it clearly.

So, too, did the politicians.

“These moral demands which the President [FDR] places before every individual citizen of the Unites States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy,” Herr Hitler stated.

Wrote il Duce, in a review of FDR’s Looking Forward: “The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.”

Authoritarian-friendly Europeans’ fondness for — and perceived brotherhood with — the New Deal’s new-made command-and-control economy and politics of propaganda and vigor did not wane until geopolitical tensions intervened.

Disbelieve the continentals, if you must, but stateside, similar perceptions obtained. Indeed, the Progressives saw in Germany and Italy — even in Russia — a blueprint from which to institute a “modern” government in America — albeit of a nicer, more democratic, more liberal variety than the violent, ugly regimes of a Mussolini or a Hitler. The casualty of this campaign was the American system of liberal republicanism, as I wrote last year:

To dodge the restraints of the Constitution’s plain meaning, [Woodrow] Wilson fathered the notion of the “living Constitution,” defacing the handiwork of Madison. Nor did Thomas Jefferson’s legacy appeal to the 28th president. “No doubt,” Wilson wrote, “a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”
Wilson labeled public opinion “a clumsy nuisance” that interfered with his cherished rule by experts. In the same essay, the future president gushed over the administrative successes of European autocrats, lamenting democratic America’s corresponding administrative failures. He warned that “popular sovereignty” constituted a principal obstacle to the institution of an expert-driven administrative state. “An individual sovereign … will embody that one opinion in one command,” Wilson wrote. “But this other sovereign, the people, will have a score of differing opinions.”
Wilson, like many other Progressives, admired the efficacy with which “modern” European rulers — e.g., Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini — managed their nations. “I have seen the future and it works,” declared Lincoln Steffens after touring Lenin’s infant Soviet Union. H.G. Wells in 1932 went so far as to exhort the Oxford Young Liberals to become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” A century on, the technocratic left still daydreams about becoming “China for a Day.”
As Wells’ adjectives suggest, these Progressive intellectuals did not yearn for the bloodiness of fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or Red China. They rather envied those regimes’ perceived ability to impose a totalistic policy agenda without the political and procedural fetters of a liberal, democratic republic. “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” inquired Stuart Chase, in his 1932 book, The New Deal.

World War II justly made Hitler and Mussolini world-historical villains. However, the war also made Americans loath to admit any fraternity between ourselves generally — or FDR, the heroic wartime leader, specifically — and the vanquished tyrannies. In consequence, a profoundly important chapter of intellectual history — and of American constitutional evolution — was erased.

“Memories of the New Deal’s common roots with its enemies were repressed, and postwar America was free to enjoy a myth of immaculate conception when it came to the birth of the liberal-democratic welfare state,” writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals. “Roosevelt, no longer named in the same breath with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, posthumously became the patron saint of liberal democracy in its triumphant struggle against the forces of evil.”

As rational animals and fully functioning adults (well, mostly), modern Americans ought to have no difficulty holding two notions in their heads simultaneously — FDR and his adminstration stood valiantly in the West’s finest hour, its most heroic stand, and its greatest triumph; but he also tore down the framework of government prescribed by the Constitution and erected in its place the machinery of a centralized, administratively led government — a government that to an uncomfortable degree shared common character traits with the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler.

As might be apparent, this edition of this “news”letter is the product of mental gears set spinning by Schivelbusch. His book traces the kinship — intellectual, economic, emotional, spiritual, etc. — of the movements to broaden, deepen, and tighten the state’s authority in America, Germany, and Italy. It’s the holidays, which means a mad rush to mow down some of the my Tower of Babel–tall stack of unread books (it may be the best time of year). I’ve yet to finish Three New Deals, but thus far, it is on course to be the best history book I’ve read in 2024.

Some Wisdom

I’d submit that John Adams never wrote anything more significant than this: “They are all of the same clay.”

Monarchs, aristocrats, democrats, plutocrats, timocrats, kakistocrats, kleptocrats, and all the other -crats share a common nature: human nature. They love themselves, their own, and their interests more than the common good, and their choices spring as often from a yearning for self-advancement and the approbation of their fellows as from devotion to the common good. “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales,” stated Adams.

All governments must have checks and balances, setting the interests and powers of the various factions and branches of government against one another. Democracy is as liable to chaos, tyranny, and violence as absolute kingship.

As Abigail wrote John, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”

And so it always shall be.