Upon Barack Obama entering office, Charles Krauthammer offered up a “warning” to Obama that he should “fix the financial system”, but not attempt to “refashion” the system because in that direction lay “the dustbin of history”.  A sly suggestion of Communism without having to put himself down in fearing Barack as a “Big Red Machine”.  Weeks later, perhaps chastined by Obama’s high approval ratings verus the Republican’s low ratings, Krauthammer offered up a more conciliatory note and framed “8 years of Obamaism” as “putting us on the same level of government as European countries”, notably being downsized as we’re up-sizing.  The final line in that column was something along the lines of “Here’s to a great debate!”  The allusion is downsized to a more manageable fear of Socialism.

But Krauthammer shouldn’t have too much to fear in Obama “refashioning” American society.  There is not a president who has ever stepped out of lines in merely “fixing” the (quote-in-quote) “system” to the benefit of the peculiar elite’s benefit.  This inludes the Franklin Roosevelt, and with him we can roll with that sort of liberal theory of him put in the place of “placating the masses” and damping down their populist uprising — an item which coincides with the old story about him meeting a group of activists (depending on who’s telling the story, either Labor or Black) and telling them he’s with them, but they need to “make me do it” — ie: push for the political space to make it the political expedient thing to do.

Currently we have a situation of mass public outrage over a few hundred million dollars in AIG bonuses — such a drip in the bucket that it means that either the public can’t differentiate between millions and billions OR there’s much more at stake as per attitudes.  The more at stake comes in the tension between the view that these executives have developed a sense of entitlement (versus Labor which have given up concessions for the common good through the current economic upheaval) versus the idea that they must be placated in general and to a deeper degree than this one instance in order to preserve them to wind things through the system and untie the knots.  Skip back to Franklin Roosevelt for a moment, at the very least his persona personified in these lines 1936 campaign speech:

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master. 

The various detractors of Franklin Roosevelt gripe that “Roosevelt kep the Depression humming for a decade”.  It was a bit of a slow slog of not uninterrupted growth (the Recession of 1938), though the answer to the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago” at each of the four year intervals (1936, 1940, and 1944) was “Yes”.  But the working theory goes along the lines of — it had to be in order to loosen a grip of the “Economic Royalists” (personified in 2009 by the “AIG Bonus Army”, I suppose — notably currently emeshed in a “Siege Mentality“), ushering us to and building what Paul Krugman terms the “Great Compression” through the next four decades.  In present conditions, you can sort through that period where a large group of people who’d ordinarily be in charge “Go Galt” on us and come out the other side in better shape.

Maybe that’s what Krauthammer was worried about, maybe not, and to what degree it falls into his two ledgers I can’t quite weigh.

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