Originally posted by: Jhhnn
Warts and all, FDR was a master politician who left this country in much better shape than he found it, particularly wrt the financial sector.
Deregulation and "innovation" left the policies of the New Deal blown off into the ditch, unfortunately. It really was a remarkably effective set of constraints and incentives, a great compromise that harnessed banking to the needs of the nation.
And, yeh, it's ironic that the only things standing between the financial sector in general and a full blown panic are the remnants of the New Deal...
Too bad that the free marketeers convinced us that we really didn't need it any more, that the banks would be self-regulating, so forth and so on.
It took 70 years to forget the lessons of 1929, maybe it'll take longer to forget the lessons of 2008...
You know who really gets too little credit, is the American left who pushed FDR to enact those policies.
America had a stronger left wing after the great depression probably than at any other time - people who were in favor of socialism. FDR did not become president as a 'great reformer', but as very much a Wall Street-friendly 'moderate'. It was the pressure from the left that repeatedly forced him to put through 'compromise' measures designed to diffuse the public outcry that led to the good reforms he's praised for. But people tend to only know he did it, not who was the real source of the improvements.
FDR to his credit created a 'think tank' of experts to come up with 'experiments', to the great criticism from Republicans.
FDR's compromises were left enough to cause an attempted coup to form among the right - a coup attempt not much taught in history books.
(For an interesting book on the politics of the time, Sinclair Lewis's "It can't happen here" in 1935 was the story of how a charismatic, ignorant right-winger leader could gain power and move the US to fascism - including a figure very analogous to Rupert Murdoch who would supply the adoring media coverage.)
You have to wonder how much good could have been done if the left had gotten more passed.
But the government has always opposed any real left-wing policies as a rule, including its willingness to use force aganst other American nations who put leftists in power.
The demonization of the left has a lot to do with the Republicans, having lost 4 elections to Roosevelt and being in big political trouble, finding that a demon was just what they needed, which led to the domestic hysteria of 'loyalty oaths' and the Red Scare/McCarthy era (and a happily Republican president and Congress again for the first time since the Great Depression), and to no small extent the cold war - which infuriated Winston Churchill who was for more peaceful relations with Russia and felt ignored by the US.
One could argue that the US switch lanes from the 'world leader for freedom' to 'the softer empire' at that time, as the US became a force often against freedom, democracy, and the 'masses' as it developed its covert action abilities and global policies aimed more at ensuring its own wealth and power than any of our principles. Sometimes, our policies have served good principles but others it has been on the wrong side. What is consistent is our always using those principles as an advertising slogan whatever the actual policy.
The divide between those who say the emperor has no clothes, and those who call any telling of those truths 'blame America first', is largely the divide in America today.