FDR R.I.P.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

New Dealism no more

IT HARDLY REGISTERED ON THE BODY politic when the Clinton administration--less than a month after the loss of their friends and associates on Capitol Hill--announced the closure of 1,000 Agriculture Department offices around the country, including those in places like Manhattan (New York, not Kansas), where the only contact the citizens maintain with agriculture is as hungry diners. Congress, corrupted by hypnotic vapors of absolute authority and emboldened by a curious lack of press oversight, had gleefully launched such evil raids upon the treasury with regularity. A more competitive electoral era could well improve the taxpayers' position.

Adjusting the margins of welfarism and pork--to the extent that Republican patronage is scrutinized more intensely and punished more harshly by the voters--represents only a relatively minor social repositioning. The continental shift in our geopolitical world will hopefully occur at the moral/ethical level. No matter the degree of intellectualism in philosophical debate, there is always a superior air attached to the arguments of the one who seems--as a practical matter--to be winning. Each bidder for the political attentions of his fellow man inevitably bases the argument not only on grounds that his scheme is morally upstanding and all competitors are loathsome, but on the additional selling point that its adherents can hop aboard the engine of history.

So it has been during our entire lifetimes, during the adult consciousness of all those currently working, thinking, and writing, that the powers of the American state were deployed to the New Dealers or their offspring. Presidents and governors could come and go. The Supreme Court could meander through its various phases. But the underlying structure of government was beyond the debate, immune to external forces, owned by the heirs of FDR. Even a president of the popularity of Ronald Reagan would see his budgets received with routine contempt; "Dead on Arrival" was the gleeful pronouncement of the relevant House committee chair. New realities, both fiscal and political, could constrain the actions of the legislature, but nothing this side of the Divine could impinge on its philosophy of governance.

That peculiar perspective, shared honestly by a very small slice of the world's population, assumed a de facto respectability by virtue of its stranglehold on the lawmaking branch of state. Via the aura of inevitability, New Dealism...