Notes From A Historian

Found on Facebook- Notes from a Historian-

"This is going to be a longer note from your friendly U.S. historian, because I think lately we’re watching the final crumbling of the New Deal Order and I’m afraid non-historians may not know what that means. Remember how your high school history class talked boringly about tariffs? That’s partly because, before the 20th century, tariffs and post offices were most of what our federal government did. Grassroots groups pushed for more – repeatedly, veterans marched on Washington to ask for better veterans’ benefits – but from the 1870s-1932, a reactionary supreme court made it hard to pass even basics like a minimum wage.

That changed in 1932 when we faced a fundamental realignment of who voted for each of our two major parties. The emergency of the Great Depression led to an expansion of the government’s role that has lasted for almost a century now. FDR shifted the supreme court by threatening to expand it, but what FDR actually expanded was our ideas of what government should do.

Make sure that the elderly don’t end up begging on the streets, create a structured mortgage market, regulate banking, provide cash relief to the unemployed, invest in infrastructure, regulate business monopolies, support unionization and support American farmers: these are the new ideas of the New Deal Order. FDR’s critics called it an “alphabet soup” of programs that seemed socialist to them, but what the New Deal drew on was economist John Maynard Keynes, who pointed out that although hard times may lead governments to try to trim costs (that’s what Hoover had tried), a government isn’t a household. A government is actually the one entity that can “prime the pump” of a faltering economy. Government employment leads to money circulating throughout the economy.

Think about the town you know best and I’ll bet the post office, bridges, perhaps parks, and probably hiking trails were built in the 1930s. These were make-work projects of the New Deal because our government recognized that paying someone to build a hiking trail meant that same person would then pay someone else to cook a hamburger or sew clothes or build an automobile, so the whole economy would improve. The government paid writers to create regional guidebooks, and paid artists like Dorothea Lange to create pictures of the new programs.

It only worked partly in the 1930s, because the government still hesitated to spend money, but by the 1940s, wartime government investments led to widespread prosperity. Then we kept up a wartime economy through the Cold War. We also figured out, in the Marshall Plan of 1947, that sending aid to other countries to stabilize them is a lot cheaper than warring with other countries: aid is not only morally superior, it’s an economically superior way of dealing with instability & refugees & extremism.

The New Deal Order was extremely popular. Social security, the VA, federally insured bank deposits: the programs that were made available to everyone (not just the extreme poor) were the most popular, and often paradoxically the most efficient because you don’t have to pay a lot of administrators to check who deserves them. Before the 1930s, most beggars on the streets of American cities were the elderly. After social security, our streets looked different. It’s that fundamental a change.

There were limits to the New Deal, though. To get his policies through Congress, FDR compromised with those who wanted to limit the new advantages to jobs held by white men, not women or people of color. That’s why waitressing is not subject to minimum wage laws and it’s why farmwork is less protected than other work.

When people of color started successfully demanding a fair share, by the late 1960s and especially the 70s, those opposed to these government programs all along started complaining. They invented the bogeyman of “the welfare queen,” scaring people with apocryphal tales of a few people misusing the system. They also distracted voters with moralized identity politics: homophobia and anti-abortion messages got Americans turning out to vote. In American Babylon, Robert Self wrote “the hinge of history” of the 20th century “is the moment when liberalism came to seem to many millions of ordinary Americans more like a moral threat than a helping hand.”

The New Deal Order started to crumble with the presidencies of Reagan and Clinton, who ushered in what historians (somewhat unhelpfully) call neoliberalism, a slippery term that attempts to name a conservative faith in markets and hyper-individualism.

Can you hear the way all this echoes in today’s news? Trump is obsessed with tariffs because they’re his limited view of what government does. Elon is dismantling USAID, CFPB, and more not only because he resents their investigations of his own companies or is a possible agent of an enemy power, but fundamentally because he distrusts the New Deal Order.

Encouraging more than 2 million federal employees to quit means withdrawing from the Keynesianism that brought our country its last century of prosperity, ignoring the ripple effects in the economy that every federal wage brings. Distractions about the morals of trans athletes or DEI are just that, distractions. There are more millionaires in Trump’s cabinet than trans athletes in college sports. The New Deal order wasn’t perfect – I know plenty of folks ready to tell you all that is wrong with USAID, including historical atrocities – but it was better than what preceded it. We should know the name of what we’re losing."