DISCLAIMER: Casting about during a cash short period, I volunteered ($450) to have a PET scan as a control for an experiment involving serotonin receptor efficiency as it varies with depressive susceptibility.  Turns out that I am pathologically optimistic (150% of normal number of receptors).

I share this bit of personal data so you will know that my analyses are profoundly tainted by the same sort of strategic defects that led Napoleon to invade Russia and Alexander to try and conquer Afghanistan.

That said, let us turn to the headlong unravelling of the New Deal that is in train, (conductor in chief, one Barack Obama .)

Recall the field of play in 1932, and for several years thereafter.  From no less a bastion of conservative commentary than Stanford's Hoover Institution, (and in the debut product of its digest.)

With the coming of the Great Depression in the 1930s, a sharp increase in protest and anticapitalist sentiment threatened to undermine the existing political system and create new political parties. The findings of diverse opinion polls, as well as the electoral support given to local radical, progressive, and prolabor candidates, indicate that a large minority of Americans were ready to back social democratic proposals. It is significant, then, that even with the growth of class consciousness in America, no national third party was able to break the duopoly of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Radicals who operated within the two-party system were often able to achieve local victories, but these accomplishments never culminated in the creation of a sustainable third party or left-wing ideological movement. The thirties dramatically demonstrated not only the power of America’s coalitional two-party system to dissuade a national third party but also the deeply antistatist, individualistic character of its electorate.

Powerful leftist third-party movements emerged in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York. In other states, radicals successfully advanced alternative political movements by pursuing a strategy of running in major-party primaries. In California, Upton Sinclair, who had run as a Socialist for governor in 1932 and received 50,000 votes, organized the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, which won a majority in the 1934 Democratic gubernatorial primaries. He was defeated after a bitter business-financed campaign in the general election, though he secured more than 900,000 votes (37 percent of the total). By 1938, former EPIC leaders had captured the California governorship and a U.S. Senate seat.

In Washington and Oregon, the Commonwealth Federations, patterning themselves after the social democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation of Canada, won a number of state and congressional posts and controlled the state Democratic Parties for several years. In North Dakota, the revived radical Nonpartisan League, still operating within the Republican Party, won the governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, and both congressional seats in 1932 and continued to win other elections throughout the decade. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party captured the governorship and five house seats. Wisconsin, too, witnessed an electorally powerful Progressive Party backed by the Socialists.

The Socialist and Communist Parties grew substantially as well. In 1932 the Socialist Party had 15,000 members. Its electoral support, however, was much broader, as indicated by the 1932 presidential election, in which Norman Thomas received close to 900,000 votes, up from 267,000 in 1928. The Socialist Party’s membership had increased to 25,000 by 1935. As a result of leftist enthusiasm for President Roosevelt, however, its presidential vote declined to 188,000 in 1936, fewer votes than the party had attained in any presidential contest since 1900. The Communist Party, on the other hand, backed President Roosevelt from 1936 on, and its membership grew steadily, numbering between 80,000 and 90,000 at its high point in 1939. Communists played a role in “left center,” winning electoral coalitions in several states, notably California, Minnesota, New York, and Washington.The Socialist and Communist Parties grew substantially as well.

Co-opting the Left

If the Great Depression, with all its attendant effects, shifted national attitudes to the left, why was it that no strong radical movement committed itself to a third party during these years? A key part of the explanation was that President Roosevelt succeeded in including left-wing protest in his New Deal coalition. He used two basic tactics. First, he responded to the various outgroups by incorporating in his own rhetoric many of their demands. Second, he absorbed the leaders of these groups into his following. These reflected conscious efforts to undercut left-wing radicals and thus to preserve capitalism.

The authors go on to discuss the many ways in which the ameliorative impact of the New Deal defused the seething alienation inevitably wrought by staggering income inequality and grinding political oppression (eg, MacArthur's march on the bonus marchers...).

Now we have come to a turning point in that amelioration, and it appears the ruling class has decided it was a bunch of chumps to permit the few vagrant crumbs of social justice to tumble from their plate.

So it is that from my diseased, overamped and excessively serotonin stimulated forebrain, I offer a bit of progressive optimism.

The Revolution is not dead--it was merely sedated--an intentional coma, if you will.

The doctors have apparently gone off on some sort of drunken frolic, perhaps an orgy with the nurses, perhaps fun and games with the enema bags, who knows?

Bottom line--They have decided to undo the New Deal.

To quote the best line ever from Wyatt Earp:  "You tell'em I'm coming, and hell's coming with me."

CLASS WAR, Y'ALL!