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What makes Biden's embrace of New Deal-inspired policies is that when he entered national politics in the 1970s, a significant chunk of his Party asserted that the New Deal was no longer a viable or relevant model./1 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/health/covid-biden-pandemic-plan.html?smid=tw-share
Among the Dems profiled in Randall Rothenberg's THE NEOLIBERALS: CREATING A NEW AMERICAN POLITICS, such sentiments were common: “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties. Variations on this theme wave their way through neoliberal dialogue.” /2
Politicians with a national profile like Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, who were young a nd seen as innovative, proclaimed the "end of the New Deal," meaning that it was no longer a viable model. /3
There was lots of talk among Democrats that the New Deal was "tired" or irrelevant a belief that the new politics would not be framed along a left/right access but some new combination./4
Some Democrats rejected this view. When President Carter said “Government cannot solve our problems” in 1978, the historian and New Deal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in disgust: “Can anyone imagine FDR uttering such words?” /5
Rather than viewing the New Deal as an inspiration, many viewed it as a potential strait-jacket and saw the embrace of a New Deal-style vision as evidence that the Party had "no new ideas," as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said./6
The actual New Deal, of course, was a complex and sometimes contradictory melange of policies. But it foregrounded what William Leuchtenberg called "striking ingenuity in meeting the problems of governing." /7
And it also mobilized the federal government as an ally of the people, a necessary, and even an innovative, tool for economic recovery and rebuilding, and, importantly for our own moment, a defender of democracy, as @rauchway has persuasively argued./8
I'm not sure I got it totally right in this @madebyhistory piece from last year but I think it is interesting that it apears that not just the left flank of the Party but a broader cross-section of the Dems are seeing the New Deal as a relevant model./9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/14/left-is-pushing-democrats-embrace-their-greatest-president-why-thats-good-thing/
Of course, as is my habit in almost any thread of mine that gets some retweets, I notice that I left a word out of the first tweet. If I could go back an edit, I would insert the word "interesting" or "potentially significant."/10
