Pre-New Deal

I saw Paul Krugman at an event Friday night in which he spent a lot of time talking about the long-running effort to undo social safety nets created not just by LBJ, but by FDR. Rick Perlstein riffs on a similar melody.

We are progressives. When you use this word, think of what it means. We want progress. We believe in progress.

We know that the vexed record of humanity, and of our own United States of America, proves that progress is possible. That a nation with too many rattletrap tenements and dust-bowl farms without electricity presided over by an elite class of idle and arrogant rich became, with the New Deal, with the unions, with the exertions of a generation of progressive policymakers, a radically more equal nation. That a nation in which worker safety was laughed at by the arrogant rich who exploited those workers expanded its vision of what it meant to be a nation of laws, and extended federal protections to those whose work was most dangerous and despised.

And now they've taken us back. Taken us back to the nineteen twenties.

It's often said that Democrats have no new ideas. That's true, in the sense that progressives ideas have, for the most part, been achieved (civil rights, Medicare, women's rights, gay rights, etc.). Meanwhile, the new ideas conservatives bring to the table are nothing more than the pulling back of those achievements.