The problem for most people is that for them, history starts with the day they were born. To them, the “New Deal” was how the sainted FDR ended the Great Depression. To have lived through that period was traumatic, and people in their 80s and older will carry the memory to their death. But most of us are taught the lies about FDR and how the Depression really ended.
Jonah refers to the cult of personality that surrounded FDR that was the result of deliberate propaganda of the Roosevelt administration in cahoots with Hollywood. If George Bush tried to do half the things that FDR accomplished during that era, he would have not only had all the Left clamoring for his hide, but most of the Right would be ready to string him up.
The Internet is a wonderful instrument and you can now see Hollywood’s version of Soviet, Nazi German and Fascist Italy’s adulation of the “Leader. FDR”
In the final analysis, the Left is determined to make us all the same, make us march in unison, make us like the same things, repeat the same slogans, go to the same state institutions, the same stores, the same doctors all on the name of “unity” and “change” and “hope.”
Evil always comes disguised as good. Who could be against “Peace, land and bread” during a war when people were hungry? It happens to be the slogan that Lenin used to gain the support of the Russian people in 1917. Once in power, those promises were abandoned and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was transformed into the most brutal, murderous dictatorship that that unfortunate country had ever seen.
“Change you can believe in” is the slogan of one presidential candidate. That’s about as empty a promise as anyone has ever made. Winning the lottery is change; getting killed by an axe murderer is change. But that slogan is deliberately vague. It is an invitation for people to fill in the blanks. Imagine what changes you would like to see and now imagine Obama making those changes. So vote for Obama on that basis?
At least “Peace, land and bread” has some substance to it. It may have been a lie, but it was not so transparent a lie. It was not so obvious an appeal to weak minds as “Change you can believe in.”
Back to Jonah:
Since George W. Bush was elected, liberals have been calling for new New Deals more frequently than my daughter asks "are we there yet?" whenever we're in the car. After 9/11, Sen. Charles Schumer argued that the terrorist attack proved the need for a new New Deal, and that "the president can either lead the charge or be run over by it." After Hurricane Katrina, left-wing journalist William Greider spoke for many when he said that the natural disaster required a "new New Deal." Last January, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said the looming recession was all the excuse government needed. The head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rahm Emmanuel, wrote last January that we need "a New Deal for the New Economy" that provides everything from universal health care to sweeping job training, in response to globalization.
Now it's the financial crisis that requires a you-know-what.
It's like liberals are playing a game of "Jeopardy" where the response to every question is, "What is a new New Deal?"
Still, it's worth noting for the record that the New Deal didn't really do what most of these people think it did. It didn't, for example, end the Great Depression. It prolonged it - by years. It didn't really crack down on big business - it gave big business unprecedented power to regulate itself, to the detriment of small businessmen.
But when you point out these facts, the usual response is, "So what?"
Well, if you're going to proclaim that what we need is a new New Deal when you're conceding that the New Deal didn't work, you've got a problem on your hands.
But the problems go deeper than that. Some say what they love about the New Deal was its "bold, persistent experimentation," in FDR's famous words.
"We need our leaders to recapture the urgency of the New Deal era, an enthusiasm for experimentation that attempts to address Americans' core challenges and not just win elections," writes Andrea Batista Schlesinger in the April 7 issue of The Nation.
Others, like Emanuel, suggest that "planning" was the essence of the New Deal. But planning and experimentation are, in fact, opposites. You don't "experiment" when performing an appendectomy or when building a house; you follow a plan.
More important, these New Deal nostalgists don't like experiments in the first place. It's all one-way, about finding new ways to expand government, not new ways to solve problems. Experiments like school vouchers or social security privatization: These are completely taboo to the same people clamoring for a new New Deal.
Others will tell you that what was great about the New Deal was its spirit of "hope" and "unity" - two words we hear a lot these days. But hope for what? Unity about what?
The answer is obvious. The hope for power that comes with unity. "Experimentation" is really just a dishonest word for allowing the would-be Brain Trusters to do whatever they want. And if it fails, well, that's no reason to take away their licenses, because they warned us they were "experimenting."
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