Part 1 | Part 2
A conservative opinion outlet recently ran an op-ed entitled “Conserving the New Deal,” which asserted that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies were “great,” as in something good that conservatives should emulate. The New Deal was indeed “great,” but in the same sense as the Great War and the Great Depression were — a big costly and destructive mess.
In fact, the New Deal constituted a “Great Reset,” a period of rapid institutional and policy change directly away from the small-government founding principles of the Republic and directly toward big-government collectivism. How, then, can conservatives look upon FDR’s reign with anything but revulsion?
For starters, many, if not most, conservatives have become inveterate statists. They like big government when they control it. FDR’s dictator-like tactics appeal to them so long as Uncle Sam’s power is turned toward conservative goals, like increasing defense spending, bolstering tariff protections for their buddies, and quashing the civil liberties of political adversaries.
More fundamentally, though, conservatives fall prey to distorted views of reality because they remain almost as poorly educated as their so-called progressive adversaries. As the hearty howls of Jacob Howland, the magnificent ruminations of Phil Magness, and the evergreen insights of George Leef have shown, American higher education failed its mission of creating enough independent analytical thinkers to maintain a robust, empirically rooted civil discourse. Much too frequently, politicos on the Left and Right know not of what they speak, and glibness too often trumps substance in American public discourse.
And it’s all FDR’s fault! I jest, of course, but FDR did begin a process, still unfolding today, of replacing empirically based with ideologically based curricula. “That man in the White House” came to exert curricular control of many colleges in exchange for a mess of pottage. Some colleges, like the Seven Sisters of Massachusetts, stood firm, at least at first, preferring their newly won independence from male-run colleges over federal aid. Today, though, most institutions of higher education, even “private” ones, relinquish curricular control in exchange for government money. “Po Mo,” the postmodernist belief in truthlessness and the mantra of the academic left, has got to go, lest the level of civil discourse falls irretrievably into the muck and idiocracy of modern progressivism.
Little is more idiotic or clownish than admiring the New Deal. When conservatives challenge others “to discover the greatness of the New Deal,” the heavens must echo with the lamentations of Garet Garrett, Cathrine Curtis, Al Smith, and thousands of other New Deal rebels, the bravest souls of both major political parties who resisted business and social ostracization (“cancel culture” in today’s word pablum) and government repression to point out the cruel absurdities unleashed by FDR.
Granted, broad labels like “conservative” and “progressive” tend to obfuscate more than illuminate. So instead of playing with definitions, why not empirically examine what the New Deal did to America, and Americans, and then ask readers if they think it worthy of emulation today?
Prior to their radicalization during the Trump administration, even progressives should have been highly skeptical of U.S. government policies in the 1930s and 1940s.
Consider, for example, the New Deal’s abysmal environmental record. FDR implemented policies that were unnecessary in the long run, like forcibly displacing “submarginal” farmers from their grassland farms, which government policies had rendered too small to thrive during periodic dry spells.
Simultaneously, he privileged the short-run political gains from projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority over their long-run environmental impacts. “Is it reasonable,” New Deal doyen William Leuchtenburg once asked, “to criticize the New Dealers for not grasping the nuances of the environmentalist theories that did not emerge until a generation later?”
Of course not. They should be criticized for brashly implementing policies the effects of which they did not know. Instead of repeating the mistaken notion that environmental outcomes can be centrally planned, policymakers on both sides of the aisle should concede that most things are better left alone because they remain too little understood to be managed from on high.
As David Beito details in The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, FDR and his many minions also ran roughshod on the First Amendment. His first appointee to the Supreme Court, Alabama’s Senator Hugo Black, illegally accessed millions of private telegrams, the 1930s equivalent of social media direct messages. Sherman Minton, another U.S. senator in FDR’s pocket, tried to heavily censor the Philadelphia Inquirer by turning Treasury tax officials against its owner, Moses Annenberg. FDR also largely controlled the nation’s radio stations by weaponizing their regulator, the FCC. Such examples are so numerous and compelling that Beito didn’t have space to cover FDR’s attacks on the rest of the Bill of Rights, including the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, or Tenth amendments.
The 1934 National Firearms Act was especially egregious and unnecessary. It imposed high transfer taxes ($200, which at the time was a lot of money) and labyrinth regulations on the ownership and transport of automatic weapons and various other “destructive devices,” including cannon shells. The point was to increase the cost of ownership and sow confusion without sparking a fight over the Second Amendment. Americans, after all, had always owned cannon to protect their property (especially at sea but sometimes on land, too) or to arm private militia units; the same went for machine guns after their development during and after the Civil War. Use of cannons to commit crimes was almost unknown, and machine gun use increased largely due to Prohibition, the termination of which was the one major liberal accomplishment of the New Deal. If state governments had wanted to regulate such arms, they could have done so — and some did do so — so there was no reason, other than to increase its relative power, for the federal government to add another layer of cost and complexity.
This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
