But here's another important point my mother understood: the appearance of fragility and distance has resulted not from the New Deal's failures, she and I agreed, but from policies advocated by those so-called New Democrats who emerged thirty years ago, when white Southerners fled the Democratic Party. At first desperate to woo them back, and then, when that failed, at least to woo non-Southern independents and moderate Republicans to their cause, the New Dems became Rockefeller Republicans in Democratic drag.

Jimmy Carter's early-stage deregulation of the airlines, telecoms, rail, trucking, energy, banking and Wall Street set the stage for Reagan--and, in certain areas, surpassed him. Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale both championed technocratic efficiency, but that platform lacked the larger vision or community that FDR Democrats had championed for decades. Bill Clinton, confident that "the era of big government is over," pushed NAFTA and the WTO on his resistant party as models of trade deregulation; accelerated telecom, energy, and food and drug deregulation; and, under Robert Rubin's tutelage, rolled back the enormously successful financial market firewalls that Roosevelt had put in place.

What are the achievements of these deregulated markets and government reinventions? Airlines? Cable TV? Banks? Savings and loans? Electricity (remember Enron and California)? Wall Street (take your pick: LBOs in the 1980s, with Boesky and Milken; then in the 1990s the tech-stock bubble, AOL/Time-Warner, analysts-as-stock touts; the Asian, Russian and Latin American crises; the housing bubble-subprime-CDO fiasco today--which is or isn't over)?

How about the decreasing oversight of food and drug safety? Toys from China, anyone? Cooked books at Fannie Mae? The government student loan mess? Blackwater as the model of a deregulated, outsourced military in Iraq? The growth rate of the American economy? The distribution of income and wealth? You get the point.

In 2008 the sudden surging support for Barack Obama's "audacity of hope" politics--especially among the young--seems to arise from the same impulses that set the political stage in 1932, 1960 and 1980: a profound sense of the need to end what has gone before and to try something new.

My mother never much described her then similarly young generation (she was 19 when FDR took office) as committed to any explicit "Rooseveltian" agenda in 1932 or thereafter. What they were committed to was their belief that Roosevelt cared about them and their future--and the nation's future as a just and equitable society. They didn't know the language of economists or of technocrats (Hoover had spoken that dialect); they knew instead the terms of family and neighborhood and community, and Roosevelt used those terms and talked to them in their language. They didn't much care where FDR got his ideas but rather whether they worked and seemed somehow fair and gave people a sense of their worth and dignity.

Few historians today think FDR had a finely tuned policy agenda in the back of his mind at any point during his twelve years in the White House. What he did have, though, was worth far more. Eliot Janeway, looking at FDR's oft-criticized record in preparing the nation for war--and for what became the swiftest, most enormous and most complex expansion of the economy and the government in America's history--named what was essential.

Roosevelt's critics have said--and say--he organized Washington into...a comptroller's hell, into a jungle of confusion.... They are right. He did. And yet this irresponsibility--so disastrous on the face of it--did not result in disaster.... To Roosevelt, the important question was the participation of the nation in its own defense, not the administrative planning for this participation.... So long as the home front was big at the base, Roosevelt was willing to bet he could let it be confused at the top--and he and he alone had the power, the genius, the dramatic instinct, and above all the daring to make it as big outside Washington and as amorphous inside Washington as he pleased.

It's those qualities--his ability to project a sense of trust in people's ability to rise to common needs and dreams, plus his capacity as democratic leader to help them find the means needed to triumph--that defined Roosevelt's genius. And it's crucial for us to recognize why his style of "democratic leadership" was and is more challenging than "leadership of a democracy" or of business leadership or military leadership or most kinds of political leadership touted as "what we need today." Crucial among the gifts of a true democratic leader, as FDR clearly was, is the ability to share not so much policies but stories, parables that incorporate moral and ethical vision, narratives of who we are and where we came from, and why we are together and where we can go, and what we can achieve if we work together.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next  »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.