Rooseveltian Lessons for the 21st Century

...First, the nuclear bombs detonated by India and Pakistan (currently a client of China) blew up the premises of its optimistic defense strategy...

...At least intelligent foreign aid would not come with strings, or rather nooses, attached in the form of demands that poor nations further pauperize their paupers as a condition for help...

...Sometimes, when persuasion and intimidation fail, defending that order may require sending soldiers, not merely missiles, into harm's way...

...The predictable result has been a growing anti-American, anti-Western, antiliberal, antidemocratic backlash in those countries, whose ranks now include nuclear-armed Russia...

...New Dealers also disagreed with the Left about culture...

...The McGovern-Reagan synthesis found its expression in the post-Cold War New World Order constructed by Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton...

...These New Deal legacies are relevant again in the wake of the failure of free-market globalism...

...Rooseveltians prided themselves on their tough-minded geopolitical realism...

...Rooseveltian liberals were convinced —and still are—that a strong government answerable to the people is capable of thwarting poverty and prejudice nationally and imperial tyrannies internationally...

...The market is like oxygen...

...When it came to domestic policy, there were few conflicts between the Rooseveltians and their progressive-liberal rivals...

...They also think government-to-government foreign aid, along with capital controls and government allocation of credit, may be the way to help raise global living standards and create more consumers worldwide...

...Remember the Popular Front, Father Coughlin and Huey "Share Our Wealth" Long...

...The New Deal combined programs to promote economic security and social mobility (FDR's Social Security, Truman's GI Bill, Johnson's Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start) with programs for state-sponsored industrialization in backward economic regions of the U.S...

...The most Leftist position acceptable was that of MIT's Paul Krugman, whose "progressivism" consisted of advocating a safety net for those displaced by the free market...

...Sure, foreign aid can end up in Swiss bank accounts, or be vaporized by currency manipulators—but so can IMF bailouts of private outside investors...

...The Rooseveltians were right about communism—and they were right about capitalism, too...

...Another lesson is that industrial capitalism, the indispensable basis of human progress, demands adequate domestic and international regulation...

...Rooseveltians take it for granted that a reasonably representative and honest government is a better judge of a nation's long-term interest than local Mafia capitalists or foreign speculators...

...In the developing countries of Asia and Latin America, the long-ignoredNew Deal approach to industrialization needs to be reconsidered as an alternative to the free-market approach that sacrifices living standards and social justice to the golden calf of private foreign investment...

...The New World Order, propped up by missiles, embargoes and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, was fun while it lasted...

...The difference reflected the two camps' constituencies...

...It is almost certain that the situation will deteriorate further before it improves...

...Many of the anti-interventionists were Protestants from Greater New England, the historic homeland of American isolationism...

...Both the U.S.' present domestic tranquillity and pre-eminent place in the world have in large part resulted from the efforts of the major Rooseveltian Presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt, his Vice President, Harry S. Truman, and his personal protégé, Lyndon B. Johnson...

...into the global struggles against the Axis alliance in World War II and the Communist bloc in the Cold War...

...Next, the Asian economy collapsed for a reason that would not have surprised any New Dealer: There were too many goods, made by too many low-paid sweatshop workers in Asia and Latin America, chasing too few consumers in North America, Europe and Japan...

...But the Golden Age is over...

...entered the Ronald Reagan-George McGovem era...

...presiding as the "hegemon" (Greek for leader) of a world devoted to "market democracy" (to use the phrase of former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake...

...And this was complemented by the triumph of the Reaganite free-market consensus...

...John F. Kennedy was just getting started when he was murdered...

...TVAs for the Nile and Mekong river valleys may be anachronistic...

...Truman, Kennedy and Johnson warred against the Communists in Korea, Cuba and Indochina...

...Humanity was seen coming together in one big festive global mall (the Reaganite contribution), with the U. S. acting as the mall's security guard, but not at any significant risk to American soldiers and diplomats (the McGovem contribution...

...New Deal theory posits no such harmony...

...They devoted themselves to what in retrospect seems the quixotic project of reconciling democratic socialism, Freudian pseudoscience and the mandarin art of the early 20thcentury European avant-garde...

...On foreign issues, however, their disagreement was pronounced...

...Lyndon Johnson, attempting to be FDR at home and Truman in Asia, found himself attacked both from the Left (which liked the Great Society but hated the Vietnam War) and the Right (which hated the Great Society but supported the War...

...The influential New York Intellectuals, as their name suggests, had scant knowledge of or interest in the sections of the country outside the Northeast that inspired the best New Deal art...

...It is absolutely certain that American policymakers of both parties, guided by the cheery conventional wisdom of the '80s and '90s, would then have no clue how to respond...

...They were fiercer enemies of the Communists than many Republican conservatives...

...Before long the U.S...

...Free-market global economic development assumes a harmony of interests between the majorities in poor countries, rich foreign private investors, and their local partners...

...In contrast to Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists and Mensheviks worked with them...

...Hostile both to communism and fascism, members of this school were attacked by Stalinists and fellow travelers (who accused them of idealizing their subjects), and by such "Trotskyites" as Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg (who viciously lumped them together with Popular Front social realists and fascist artists...

...troop commitments to combat situations that might result in "another Vietnam...

...Communist Party, Earl Browder, into prison...

...At home, the three defused the class and the race bombs by creating the New Deal/Great Society safety net and presiding over the Civil Rights Revolution...

...interests is neither natural nor automatic nor cost-free...

...In the 1960s the great power-big government formula began to fall apart...

...McGovern liberals succeeded in vetoing the very idea of large-scale U.S...

...A bad situation was made worse by a system of international finance that must have delighted the vengeful ghost of Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon...

...intervention against Hitler for fear of corrupting the republic...

...But the attempt to avoid folly by avoiding dangerous yet necessary battles is itself folly...

...The only threats to market democracy, it was felt, were the small, weak "rogue states" like Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan, or terrorist gangs like Osama bin Laden's...

...The U. S. and other advanced capitalist nations told the developing countries that they would have to punish their working populations with draconian austerity measures in return for IMF bailouts...

...These ardent supporters of FDR, most of whom were well-traveled sophisticates, found the artistic equivalent of the New Deal in American historical subjects rendered in accessible styles...

...They need to learn a few lessons from the Rooseveltian liberals of the New Deal, World War II and early Cold War eras...

...Anyone who did not believe a self-regulating global market would magically bring prosperity to the entire universe was derided as a "Socialist," "Luddite," "Know-Nothing," or "Buchananite protectionist...

...Abroad, despite the bitter objections of isolationists and Leftist radicals, they threw the weight of the U.S...

...The artists and writers they favored tended to be cultural nationalists or regionalists like Stephen Vincent Benét, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Bernard De Voto...

...But the idea of New Deal capitalism tailored to Third World conditions is not...

...Today the United States is suffering from the kind of mental lapse Bagehot diagnosed...

...India and China, not to mention Russia, are hardly pesky little rogue states, nor are they by any means reconciled to the subservient roles assigned to them by Washington...

...There is the risk of debacles, such as the near-disaster of the Korean War and the complete disaster of the Vietnam War...

...In the 1980s and '90s the post-Rooseveltian stalemate produced a peculiar synthesis...

...Robert M. La Follette Sr., and later Jr., opposed U.S...

...One lesson is that a world order friendly to U.S...

...Henry A. Wallace and George S. McGovem opposed the Cold War treatment of the Soviet Union...

...all sought pretty much the same social reforms...

...If the United States does not soon recognize the enduring validity of these lessons, it will be forced to learn them again in the 21 st century—the hard way...

...An occasional missile or two was considered sufficient to deter them...

...a minimum amount is necessary for life, but too much is poison...

...Rooseveltians were mostly Southern and Western Protestants, or Northern antiCommunist unionists and Catholics...

...At the end of the day, though, the Democratic Socialists believed in socialism, whereas the Rooseveltian liberals believed in private property and a system of free enterprise regulated, but not smothered, by government...

...The Reagan Republicans combined Rooseveltian support for a strong military and foreign alliances with free-market capitalism...

...FDR tossed the head of the U.S...

...Thinking Aloud ROOSEVELTIAN LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY By Michael Lind "The CHARACTERISTIC danger of great nations, like the Romans, or the English," observed the 19th-century English writer Walter Bagehot, "is that they may at last fall from not comprehending the great institutions they have created...

...The McGovern Democrats combined a Rooseveltian domestic agenda with a minimalist foreign policy...

...This had the U.S...

...the Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA], and the Lower Colorado River Authority...

...In the developed world—North America, Western Europe, Japan—the challenge is to prevent economic inequality from undermining the legitimacy of liberal democracy, as it did in the 1930s and '40s—even in the United States...

...The Rooseveltians of the 20th century, for all their mistakes and illusions, knew two things that America's bipartisan elite has forgotten: governments must police markets, and great powers must police the world...

...From the 1930s until the '70s, Rooseveltians believed that the best hope for humanity lay in the worldwide adoption of the New Deal's alternative to socialism and laissez-faire capitalism...