Can a re-animated New Deal see off Trump Republicanism?

Soundings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (77) ◽  
pp. 76-88
Author(s):  
Matt Seaton
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Electoral College ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Deliberate Strategy ◽  
The New Deal

Because of the quirks of the US constitution, Democrats find it difficult to assemble an electoral coalition capable of delivering working majorities in both chambers of Congress and a Democrat president. In the 2020 elections, Biden's electoral college victory was secured by 44,000 votes, distributed in three states. Republicans currently hold 59 state chambers to the Democrats' 39, and they will use this to further gerrymander boundaries and suppress votes. Trump took Reagan's Republican strategy - small government, populism and mobilising conservatives - to a logical conclusion by seeking to wreck government as a deliberate strategy and mobilising right-wing extremists to support his rule. Repairing Americans' faith in government is a long term task . However, Biden's continuing allegiance to the ideas of the New Deal, and the recognition the party must now give to its grassroots activists, particularly in black communities, may help to energise the Democrat coalition.

Shall These Bones Live? Property, Pluralism, and the Constitution of Evangelical Reform

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (03) ◽  
pp. 742-774
Author(s):  
Kellen Funk
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Us History ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Constitutional Tradition ◽  
The New Deal

The Supreme Court of the New Deal era transformed the US Constitution, making the Constitution's original protection of property rights give way to democratically popular regulations. In The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (2014), John W. Compton argues that twentieth-century progressives turned the Court toward this “living” interpretation of the Constitution by relying on legislative methods and judicial precedents created by nineteenth-century evangelicals. Evangelical reformers accomplished national prohibition of liquor and lotteries, but their regulations destroyed property rights that were legally valid and socially acceptable at the inauguration of the Constitution. Courts ultimately acquiesced in these novel economic proscriptions because of overwhelming majoritarian sentiment driven by evangelical populism. Relying on a recent literature of law and religion, Compton alters conventional accounts of the US constitutional tradition of protecting property. This essay reverses the path of analysis and argues that evangelical concerns with constitutional property rights challenge standard accounts of law and religion in US history. Rather than a simplistic imposition of moralism, evangelical reform was derived from antislavery liberalism. The legal and religious pluralism that had impeded antislavery, however, also hindered prohibition and spurred evangelicals to seek federal remedies to national sins. Thus national prohibition, no less than New Deal constitutionalism, centered on the US dilemma of how to wield illiberal regulations to safeguard liberalism.

The Effect of New Deal Policies Revisited

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yangyang Ji
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Aggregate Demand ◽  
American Economic Review ◽  
Supply Side ◽  
Natural Rate ◽  
Jel Codes ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Us Economy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The New Deal

Abstract Eggertsson (2012, American Economic Review, 102, 524–55) finds that when the nominal interest rate hits the zero lower bound, the aggregate demand (AD) curve becomes upward-sloping and supply-side policies that reduce the natural rate of output, such as the New Deal implemented in the 1930s, are expansionary. His analysis is restricted to a conventional equilibrium where the AD curve is steeper than the aggregate supply (AS) curve. Recent research, however, demonstrates that an alternative equilibrium arises if the AD curve is flatter than the AS curve. In that case, the same policies become contractionary. In this article, I allow for both possibilities, and let data decide which equilibrium the US economy actually resided in during the Great Depression. Following the work of Blanchard and Quah (1989, American Economic Review, 79, 655–73), I find that there is a high probability that New Deal policies were contractionary. (JEL codes: E32, E52, E62, N12).

The Big Truth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Goodall
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
American People ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Conservative Coalition ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter explores how many of the radical and anti-interventionist critics of the New Deal had been silenced by a wave of loyalty campaigns that marked the culmination of more than a decade's worth of antifascist attacks. To the Left, this seemed like a victory. But antifascism had helped to reinvigorate the politics of countersubversion as a whole, and as the Left and center-Left lobbied for campaigns to root out supposedly disloyal right-wing enemies, much of the traditional resistance to countersubversive crusading disappeared. With members of the conservative coalition co-opting the language of antifascism to justify their hostility to communism, the war against Nazi Germany led to a far more tightly restricted realm of political debate and more universal acceptance among the American people that domestic extremists needed to be investigated, monitored, and repressed.

A Brief History of Congress: From First Branch to Second Fiddle

Congress ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 37-77
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ginsberg ◽  
Kathryn Wagner Hill
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
Jacksonian Era ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legislative Branch ◽  
History Of ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter examines the history of the US Congress. It pays particular attention to issues of constituency, congressional organization, and the ways in which Congress and the executive have dealt with their constitutional invitation to struggle. Focusing on political changes outside Congress and institutional changes within Congress, the history of the legislative branch can be divided into six political eras. These are the Federalist and Jeffersonian eras, the Jacksonian era, the Civil War Congress, the Republican era, the “New Deal” and postwar period, and the contemporary period of congressional gridlock and presidential unilateralism. During each of these periods, the chapter highlights examples of congressional successes and achievements, but the overall picture is one of institutional retrocession.

Ideology and the New Deal `fact film' Power and the Land

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald R. Kline
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Rural Electrification ◽  
The Public ◽  
Diffusion Of Knowledge ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The New Deal

This paper examines the making of the US government documentary film, Power and the Land (1940), in terms of how views about science and technology are communicated to the public. The paper argues that the film was shaped by a complex ideology of technical progress shared by the film's maker and sponsors (the Rural Electrification Administration; the short-lived US Film Service, headed by the award-winning director, Pare Lorentz; and Joris Ivens, an internationally acclaimed Dutch director and leftist), tensions between goals of producing a `factual' and `propagandistic' film, and perceptions of the rural audiences' response. This paper thus argues against the view that science and technology communication is simply the mediated diffusion of knowledge from scientists and engineers to the public (in this case, knowledge about the social and economic aspects of rural electrification) and supports an interactive model. The paper also compares Power and the Land with the better known documentaries by Lorentz, The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, and with other `fact films' of the New Deal era that portray a relationship between technology and social change.

GODLESS CAPITALISM: AYN RAND AND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER BURNS
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Ayn Rand ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines the relationship between the novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and the broader conservative movement in the twentieth-century United States. Although Rand was often dismissed as a lightweight popularizer, her works of radical individualism advanced bold arguments about the moral status of capitalism, and thus touched upon a core issue of conservative identity. Because Rand represented such a forthright pro-capitalist position, her career highlights the shifting fortunes of capitalism on the right. In the 1940s, she was an inspiration to those who struggled against the New Deal and hoped to bring about a new, market-friendly political order. As a second generation of conservatives built upon these sentiments and attempted to tie them to a defense of Christian tradition, Rand's status began to erode. Yet by the late 1960s, Rand's once-revolutionary defense of capitalism had become routine, although she herself remained a controversial figure. The essay traces the ways in which Rand's ideas were assimilated and modified by key intellectuals on the right, including William F. Buckley, Jr, Whittaker Chambers, and Gary Wills. It identifies the relationship between capitalism and Christianity as a fundamental dilemma for conservative and right-wing thinkers. By treating Rand as an intellectual and cultural leader of significant import, the essay broadens our understanding of the American right beyond the confines of “mainstream” conservatism, and re-establishes the primacy of the 1930s, and 1940s, to its ideological formation. Responding to a paucity of scholarship on Rand, the essay offers an analysis and summary of Rand's ideas, and argues that despite her outsider status, Rand's work both embodied and shaped fundamental themes of right-wing thought throughout the century.

The Constitution and the New Deal

1983 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 23-23
Author(s):  
William E. Leuchtenburg
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
State Government ◽  
National Government ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Old Men ◽  
Constitutional Revolution ◽  
The New Deal

The year 1937 marks a great division in the history of the Supreme Court. In a period of 18 months in 1935 and 1936, the Court struck down more important social and economic legislation of the national government and of state government than at any time in its history, including such landmarks of the New Deal as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. In the nearly half-century since then, the Court has not invalidated even one piece of significant social legislation. The seminar will explore how this “Constitutional Revolution of 1937” came about. It will examine the changes wrought by the New Deal, the character of the Court in the era of “the nine old men,” controversial rulings such as those in the Schecter and Butler cases, the origins and nature of FDR's “court packing“ plan, and the long term consequences of the Constitutional Revolution.

Americanised and Europeanised: UK Social Policy since 1997

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Annesley
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Labour ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Lone Parents ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The New Deal

A number of recent accounts of UK social policy under New Labour have emphasised the continuing Americanisation of the British welfare state. This article does not deny the influence of the US but rather seeks to balance it with an account of the growing Europeanisation of UK social policy. It argues that Americanisation and Europeanisation are distinct in terms of both content and process. Since these are not mutually exclusive, the UK is currently influenced by both. This situation is illustrated by looking at three social policy issues under New Labour: social exclusion, the New Deal and the treatment of lone parents.

Sharecroppers and Campesinos

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tore C. Olsson
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Agrarian Reform ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
The South ◽  
Farm Security Administration ◽  
Us South ◽  
The Us ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter considers the south–north intellectual exchange of the 1930s. First, it examines how a cadre of left-leaning US reformers, led by the peripatetic academic Frank Tannenbaum, attempted in 1934 and 1935 to translate the blueprint of Mexican agrarian reform into political action for the US South. That campaign ultimately played an essential role in the founding of the Farm Security Administration, one of the most ambitious federal agencies of the New Deal. Second, the chapter looks at the myriad Mexican pilgrimages undertaken by a host of influential US rural reformers during the Cárdenas era. Perhaps no group outside Washington, D.C., was more renowned—or feared—for its agrarian radicalism than the multiracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union whose political legacy has been closely studied.

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