Jonah Goldberg briefly summarizes the origins and political legacy of the The New Deal in The Old Deal:
There are few topics I’ve written more about than the cargo cult idolatry progressives have for the New Deal. I’ll very briefly summarize my view. During World War I, big business and the federal government got in bed together to mobilize a war economy and enforce compliance to Woodrow Wilson’s political aims. It was a time of outrageous violations of civil liberties and economic command-and-control. When the war ended, Republicans vowed a “return to normalcy,” released the political prisoners, and dismantled the political controls of the economy. And progressives hated it. They spent the 1920s pounding the table that “we planned in war” and we should plan the peacetime economy, too. Seizing the political opportunity of a depression—which was not yet “Great”—FDR, a Wilson administration retread, vowed to use Wilson’s wartime techniques to fight the economic crisis. And he did. Nearly all of the early New Deal/NRA agencies were modeled on WWI precursors. Broadly speaking, the New Deal itself was conceived, framed, and defended as the ultimate expression of William James’ idea of reorienting American politics and life as a “moral equivalent of war” and the fulfillment of John Dewey’s “social possibilities of war.”
Some New Deal policies were good, or at least defensible, and others were outrageously stupid, economically counterproductive, and despotic. That’s in part because there was no ideologically and politically coherent thing called the New Deal. It was a mishmash of policies, some considered entirely ad hoc. All of which were justified by the idea that the government should have a free hand to preempt a free economy. That’s what FDR meant by “bold, persistent, experimentation.”
But one thing is generally agreed-upon by most economic historians—none of these policies actually ended the Great Depression. Even Paul Krugman eventually had to concede that World War II is what did it. In other words, only when FDR abandoned the New Deal did the Depression end (or as FDR put it, when he stopped being “Dr. New Deal” and became “Dr. Win-the-War”). But even here, Krugman’s analysis is … debatable. He argues WWII was just another giant government program and that the deficit spending of the war pulled America out. But the more plausible argument was that the aforementioned conditions in the global economy after the war—combined with the massive pent-up demand of millions of soldiers and families after the war—is what ushered in the long American boom.
Regardless, measured against the intended point of the New Deal—getting us out of the Great Depression—the New Deal was a failure. Indeed, many people—I’m one of them—would argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. But while the New Deal was a policy failure, it was a huge political success. It made FDR president-for-life (a fact that generated a bipartisan consensus to amend the Constitution to keep that from happening again). It made the Democrats the majority party for generations. And the Democratic Party has been obsessed with getting the New Deal band back together ever since. Liberal intellectuals, likewise, have been convinced that re-creating the New Deal is the best way to achieve the kind of socialist or social democratic system they’ve always dreamed of. “There seems no inherent obstacle,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”
Now, I don’t for a moment dispute that the desire for economic planning is sincerely held by those who propose such new New Deals. But I can’t help but think that the primary attraction isn’t creating better job-training programs or a richer mix of entitlements or onshoring manufacturing jobs. It’s power. When Trump wanted his infrastructure week, Democrats got in the way. When Biden proposed his, a good number of Republicans did sign on, but the Trump wing of the party was furious at them for agreeing to one of their policy priorities. The natcons have all sorts of elaborate ideas about how to direct the economy and reward certain industries and constituencies, but they routinely condemn Biden’s elaborate ideas about how to direct the economy and reward certain industries and constituencies. Obviously, some of that is just the nature of politics. But I struggle to see what the limiting principle is.
As a small government conservative, I’m against picking winners and losers. The prog and trad New Dealers aren’t, they just disagree over who should do the picking and who should benefit from it. They’re not offended by the use and abuse of state power, they’re offended that they’re not the ones in power.
The moon in daylight 