FDR and Fascism
Blipping on the screen the other day, which I left unread, was the title to an article at lewrockwell.com entitled “FDR: Our First Fascist President”. I thought nothing of it — (#1:) Hadn’t they already declared Lincoln that? (#2) The CCC has widely been declared fascist.
The latest issue of Reason, behind the cover that posits the “4 Biases of Stupid Voters” toward an article that tend to tell us more of their particular brand of libertarian bias than anything else – (“Anti Market bias”. Really?) — is a review of a book on “3 New Deals” — them being Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Roosevelt’s. Careful to note, of course, that to compare is not to equate — ie: oppositional democratic forces held. Perhaps because… FDR was not a fascist?
My basic reading of the Great Depression period always leads to a certain starkness, and randomness of options. I believe the writers at lewrockwell and Reason would have had the US head down a model set down by the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge to handle the hardships of the Depression — ie: nothing, let the Free Market work itself out, which is to say that whatever his faults — and there were any number of cynical lessons to be gleaned from Roosevelt (ie: the meaning gleaned from when the economy turned sour again in 1937 when Roosevelt tapered down federal spending), and whatever items from the New Deal we would be wise to never replicate — we’re better off than if we were in the hands of the contemporanious ideological idols of the lewrockwell or Reason staff.
It has been a long time since Economic Depressions have been considered a part of the natural economic cycle in the United States, and anywhere else in the industrialized (or post-industrialized) world, and I am weary of what would become of us if it did. Just cite it as The age of Demagoguery, and move on.