Suddenly, Franklin D. Roosevelt is all the rage. But many Democrats don’t understand what his legacy means.
Suddenly [...] Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to revive Roosevelt. Before we allow anyone to assume his mantle, let’s separate candidates merely seeking inspiration for big ideas from those misappropriating his legacy.
Bernie Sanders, the most explicit of the Roosevelt wannabes, is in the latter category. He has repurposed the “Second Bill of Rights” address on his website to report that Roosevelt was constantly attacked as a socialist, so he must have actually been one — just like the independent senator from Vermont. He’s betting that a younger post-Cold War generation won’t conflate his brand of democratic socialism with communism, as many of their elders wrongly do.
But Roosevelt was an improvisational pragmatist — a “juggler,” he called himself — not a socialist. While his idea for Social Security contained socialistic elements (as did George W. Bush’s 2008 bank bailout), he understood that in a nation of strivers, the concept is a political loser.
When asked his political philosophy, he replied: “I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.”
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Running for re-election in 1936, Roosevelt said of his big-money critics: “They are unanimous in their hate of me and I welcome their hatred.”
But when Mr. Sanders quotes that line in his stump speech, he doesn’t mention that Roosevelt soon tacked to the center. He rebuffed calls for national health insurance as impractical, backed a balanced budget, insisted that most welfare be connected to work and supported free trade.
As World War II approached, he abandoned the New Deal entirely and invited the corporate titans who loathed him to help him win it. With the end of the war in sight, he renewed his liberal domestic agenda with the landmark G.I. Bill, which inspired today’s Democratic focus on affordable education.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/opinion/fdr-democrats-2020.html
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