No, Jonathan Alter, Joseph R. Biden is not the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And whatever he does with his stimulus program, it will not be the Second New Deal.
There has not been a newer New Deal since the one FDR created, partly because there has not been a crisis since then big enough to demand it. Nor has there been a personality nearly as big as his. Given the gifts with which God had endowed FDR, he tamed it and brought that personality to heel.
The Great Depression was a disaster unlike any other in which FDR said that he saw “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed [and] ill-nourished.” He felt forced by necessity, if not by compassion, to step in and come to their aid. The novel Seabiscuit provides an anecdote telling of the era in which jockey Red Pollard is thrown out of the house by his agonized parents while still a teenager. They did it because they found, to their grief, they could no longer feed him.
The growth of the state was given still more steam by the Second World War, which loomed as the Depression was ending. War caused a massive expansion of federal power and lifted FDR into third place in the great national ranking of presidents, just a tick lower than Lincoln and Washington. He is today known for having faced not one but two crises, with the war being the greatest of all.
By all accounts, Roosevelt’s fame came less from the New Deal than from his wartime performance, which washed backward over his earlier actions, and gave them a sense of success and of glamour they had not really possessed on their own. As a result, an aura of greatness tended to shine upon all of his doings.
In the Vietnam War era, liberals turned against war in itself as a species of evil, and so they began to elevate the New Deal in itself as the peak of their hero’s performance. Democrats, with a hunger for greatness, centered their hopes on the expansion of government. They aimed at producing more and newer New Deals. This seldom worked out. The New Deal itself had addressed most of the really big issues, and with no new Great Depression, most people saw little need.
But the liberals felt that if FDR had won four elections by expanding the size and extending the reach of the federal government, they could win two in similar fashion. They seemed puzzled indeed, in the next eight decades, when this didn’t always work out. Nonetheless, they still tried. In 2008, they saw Obama as FDR. Newsweek put him on its cover in an FDR pose in an open convertible, with FDR’s signature cigarette holder jauntily held in his teeth.
But after that story, Newsweek didn’t last long. Neither did the congressional majorities with which Obama had come into office, as his attempt to pass healthcare reform in the face of fierce public resistance led to a quick wipeout in Congress. FDR made his signature expansions of federal power because the state that he found in 1933 was too small for the desperate crises he found himself facing. He had to expand to survive. Such crises aren’t present anymore, but some on the Left still cling to expansion, though the need for it by now is long gone.
