Bernie Sanders Voters Helped Trump Win and Here's Proof

[JHan]

203. Thank you for that..

Last edited Tue Aug 28, 2018, 03:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Compare that with the Democratic platform of 2016 and the difference couldn't be more clear.

The mythology is that FDR was a paragon of uncompromising progressivism which couldn't be further from the truth.

FDR came on the heels of an impotent Hoover administration and the Great Depression. He campaigned to clean up Government. The New Deal was full of compromises and triangulations. The word "triangulation" now triggers the usual criticism of the modern Democratic Party, with the usual Third Way critiques peppered in, but there isn't a single politician in the Senate today who hasn't triangulated. It's a fact of politics and always will be.

There's nothing in that 1932 platform about lynching - something which appalled black civil rights leaders at the time. Roosevelt didn't want to drive away Dixiecrats by engaging with race issues head-on because Dixiecrats made up the Democratic Coalition. Interesting to note too that the group which faced an electoral hit during his terms as President were the more liberal-leaning Northern Democrats.

In that 1932 platform included a promise to protect the agricultural sector but a year later the AAA was passed, where Government subsidized landowners in lieu of acreage reduction - where Landowners would deliberately not plant part of their land. The intent was to reduce surpluses and boost agriculture prices. However, this hit blacks the hardest since so many were sharecroppers and tenants - less land to till meant less income, and cut back in production meant less work. Since blacks were not represented on local committees, their concerns were ignored until the Civil Rights Act in the 60's.

generally:

", President Roosevelt and congressional leaders tailored New Deal legislation to southern preferences. They reached an implicit modus vivendi: southern civil society would remain intact and southern representatives would support the key elements of the administration's program. There would be no attempt to build a mass biracial base in the South; nor would even the most heinous aspects of regional repression, such as lynching, be brought under the rule of law. Further, sponsors fashioned key bills to avoid disturbing the region's racial civilization by employing two main policy instruments: the exclusion of agricultural and domestic labor, the principal occupational categories of blacks, from legislation, including the National Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and the Fair Labor Standards Act; and decentralized administration. [Source Note]"

http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/stakeman/the-naacp-and-the-new-deal

but I'm told this was apparently the halcyon age of the Democratic Party.

EDIT: I don't point this stuff out because I hate FDR. The New Deal was an incredible step forward for the country. I just cannot take the mythologizing of an Individual done with the intent to deny that progress has been made post-1965.