In These Times: Old War on New Deal

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Old War on New Deal
The new book Invisible Hands reveals how quickly conservatives organized to challenge New Deal liberalism.

By Alexander Gourse


Academic historians tend to write about modern U.S. political history as a “great unraveling.” The Great Depression, the story goes, created opportunities for proponents of social democracy in the United States. FDR’s New Deal—which grassroots social movements pushed to the left—established the basic contours of a national welfare and regulatory state, and in the process solidified a political coalition around the “security” for working- and middle-class Americans.

Yet this program contained the seeds of its own demise. Pervasive racism and anti-communist paranoia among the Democratic Party’s core constituency allowed Republicans to lure white working-class voters—gradually at first, then rapidly after 1964—away from the so-called liberal consensus of the postwar era.

This narrative has enjoyed remarkable staying power. Where conservatives enter the story, it is usually as race-baiting opportunists who exploited pre-existing racial tensions for their own electoral benefit. Yet American conservatism has always been more than simply a politics of backlash.

In her new book Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Norton, January), New York University historian Kim Phillips-Fein offers a counter-narrative that focuses on “those determined few”—businessmen and libertarian intellectuals—who dreamed about repealing New Deal liberalism from its conception.

Rather than an “unraveling,” hers is a timely account of the triumph of a movement that never disappeared from American politics. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4356/old_war_on_new_deal