When British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn unveiled his country’s most expensive and radical political manifesto, with plans for a huge program of taxation and spending, he did it by invoking the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In so doing, he joins a raft of left-wing politicians in the United States who have made the architect of the New Deal and his ideas the keystone of their 2020 presidential ambitions.
From the Green New Deal to rural internet access and appeals to the working class, politicians including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have promised to finish the work that FDR began in the 1930s with government jobs, Wall Street regulation, and infrastructure.
Lawrence Glickman, Stephen and Evalyn Milman professor of American studies in the department of history at Cornell University, said some Democrats had distanced themselves from New Deal rhetoric as they reacted to criticism they supported big government and high taxation. That started to change after the Great Recession of 2008.
“There’s a renewed faith in regulating corporations that are widely seen as becoming dangerously powerful, a faith in public spending, which for a long time Democrats as well as Republicans were reluctant to support, and a new faith in unions,” he said.
FDR was namechecked across the Atlantic when Corbyn unveiled on Thursday a radical plan to hike taxation and borrowing to fund a massive program of public spending, coupled with the nationalization of the railways, water companies, and energy providers.
He compared himself with Roosevelt as he tried to head off criticism that his proposals would cripple the British economy and return the country to disastrous 1970s experiments in socialism.
“The U.S. president who led his country out of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt, had to take on the rich and powerful in America to do it. That’s why he said: ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred,’” he said, quoting the president’s famous speech at Madison Square Garden during the 1936 U.S. election.
“He knew that when you’re serious about real change, those who profit from a rigged system, who squirrel away the wealth created by millions of people, won’t give up without a fight,” Corbyn said. “So I accept that the opposition and hostility of the rich and powerful is inevitable.”
Sanders quoted the same speech in June — “I must say, it does sound a little contemporary doesn’t it?”— during an address to supporters in Washington, where he defended his vision of socialism.
Corbyn’s manifesto even includes a section entitled a “Green New Deal,” which aims to reduce the United Kingdom’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2030.
However, Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said Corbyn’s radical program had little in common with America’s longest-serving president.
“It’s an insult to the true history of the New Deal for him to try to make this comparison. Sanders claiming FDR is ridiculous, too, because Sanders isn’t even a Democrat,” he said.
“When asked his political philosophy, FDR said, ‘I’m a Christian and a Democrat. That’s all.’”
“He was a very pragmatic leader. But he did believe in big structural change like Social Security, so Elizabeth Warren has more justification in invoking him.”
Warren has compared her program to improve internet access with Roosevelt’s rural electrification program. And in a Wall Street Journal piece last year outlined her ideas for a second new deal that would change the way big business operated.
“For the past 30 years, we have put the American stamp of approval on giant corporations, even as they have ignored the interests of all but a tiny slice of Americans,” she wrote. “We should insist on a new deal.”
Glickman added that as well as policy, there had been a shift in style for 2020. Candidates had become more comfortable in appealing directly to working-class voters, he said, where previous generations had offered a more aspirational tone.
“When Bill Clinton ran for president in 92, I rarely heard him talk about the working class, I heard him talk about the middle class all the time,” he said.
“The rhetoric mattered, and it’s really noticeable when you watch the Democratic debates, you are hearing a lot more about people who aren’t yet in the middle class.”
