A debate has broken out on Daily Kos between two of my favorite "columnists": Teacherken and GrannyDoc. And other posts, such as this one appearing, as they do, on a progressive web site present yet another illustration of how bad things have gotten and how difficult the road back will be even with the best of leaders, the most hopeful and diligent of our citizenry and our history of overcoming worse.

And, yes, things are not as bad today as they were in 1932, but that is not serendipitous. It is because some of what the New Deal left us is still in place, roughly in its original form and is a base from which we can begin this recovery. That's the good news.

The bad news is the need to do something as radical as what President Roosevelt achieved is as great today as it was then, and the "radical" needs to be that much greater to get out of a mess we have made DESPITE what the New Deal has handed down to us. This will not be easy.


There is a revival of interest in our greatest president and for good reason. When Time magazine decided that Einstein, and the atomic bomb he left behind, was the most important person of the twentieth century, it seemed to be yet another relic of Time's anti-Roosevelt past.

But that past is something worth keeping in mind. All of these books, remembrances, essays, and the like, make it appear as if President Roosevelt was elected by acclamation, swept out the bad Hooverites and changed the country with a public cheering him on.

He was elected by an overwhelming margin, far greater than our current President-elect's and he did sweep out the sad Hoover administration, but his New Deal brought on a hatred---yes, that is the word---that, yes, lives on to this very day. Destroying the New Deal was the goal of Ronald Reagan and his minions and, but for Katrina, George W. Bush might have accomplished their most sacred of missions: to destroy the very foundation of the New Deal----Social Security.

They have tried to do this since the famous 100 days begun. They had the Supreme Court on their side for awhile, and they got a lot of Congress on their side when, after President Roosevelt allowed them to scare him into trying to balance the budget, the economy slid back in the wrong direction in time for the Republicans to start their own recovery in 1938.

(Fortunately, they nominated a Democrat, Wendell Wilkie, to run against the President in 1946, and the hopelessly out of touch Landon and Dewey thereafter, which kept the administration and the President Truman in office until January, 1953 when General Eisenhower, no foe of the New Deal, was elected.)

But my parenthetical excursion from the point should not obscure it. The New Deal was a radical undertaking. It placed the federal government in the middle of the economy of the United States, an apostasy to American thought then, and still, in many places, today. What we need to undertake in 2009 must be as radical as the New Deal was, not in comparison to the United States of 1932, but the United States of today.

Should we try to curtail our personal expenditures, making the economy even weaker and threatening the livelihood of our fellow Americans, for the purpose of furthering the radical change we need? Should we try to continue to spend so as that the government can try to effect the change we need without unemployment skyrocketing?

I don't know the answer to that one. I don't need to, because I can barely afford to feed myself and my family. I do not have a ton of choices. My parents, in their 80s, are scared to death watching their life of savings (savings motivated by memories of a childhood in the Depression) get cut in half and my dad wondering if his pension disappears with some corporate death, what kind of a job he can get nowadays. Businesses go bust, people get thrown out of work, whether I spend or not, but I have very little available to me to help.

No, the only answer is government, one as enlightened as the one we got in the nick of time in 1932, and, we can only hope, today. But I mentioned this in commenting on one of the contentious diaries of the day, and feel required to quote liberally from it again, to demonstrate what we are up against.

This is President Roosevelt speaking at Madison Square Garden a few days before he was re-elected in 1936. A month or so earlier, accepting the Democratic Party nomination for re-election, he had explained that

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live....These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

but by the time of the MSG speech, what was at stake had become clearer. It is no less clear today then it was in 1936 when our greatest president explained:

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House‹by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.

Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America's working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.

Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

Tough language from a President of the United States. But this is exactly what we are up against today. Nothing has changed, except the baseline. The struggle is the same one, though, and it requires the same tough talk and action. We have a few more tools than we had then, but they have held the White House for most of the past 28 years, and during the 8 years that they did not, they ran the Congress most of the time, and impeached the president.

The struggle to come is in getting our government back in the game quickly and decisively. It is our only hope, and we will not be saved by how many Christmas presents we buy or don't buy or whether Senator Clinton is too centrist or even whether Lawrence Summers was too devoted to Rubenomics in the days of yore.

Let's stick together on this one. Our fate as a nation is at stake.