Charlie Kirk

For all who think Trump is a facist, why not compare him to the left’s preferred president, FDR. President Biden trumped himself as a latter day FDR – hoping to be transformative in his own right.

Nearly 20 years ago, David Boaz reviewed a study by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, published by Metropolitan Books, titled: “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s Ameria, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany 1933 – 1939. That is, Hitler and Mussolini thought fondly of FDR, and considered him a fellow facist.

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote ”The Roosevelt administration envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”

That article isn’t quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler.

In the 1930s, everyone agreed that capitalism had failed. It wasn’t hard to find common themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to mention Moscow.

That isn’t a historical curiosity. Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn’s warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the ’30s.

Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, style, and programs of the disparate regimes — even their architecture. For example, “Think of the “Man Controlling Trade” sculptures in front of the Federal Trade Commission, with a muscular man restraining an enormous horse. They would have been right at home in Il Duce’s Italy.

“To compare,” Schivelbusch stresses, “is not the same as to equate. America during Roosevelt’s New Deal did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished.” But throughout the ’30s, intellectuals and journalists noted “areas of convergence among the New Deal, Fascism, and National Socialism.” All three were seen as transcending “classic Anglo-French liberalism” — individualism, free markets, decentralized power.

Jack note – consider:

• The US Supreme Court decision, enforcing federal legislation, which limited what you could grow in your own backyard for personal consumption – predating WWII. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/317/111/
• The US Supreme Court decision, enforcing FDRs decision to inter japanese americans – after Pearl Harbor. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214

As early as 1912, FDR himself praised the Prussian-German model: “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people.” American Progressives studied at German universities, Schivelbusch writes, and “came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles.”

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” … At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”

Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”

In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of Columbia University, created a stir with his article “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression.” Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but couldn’t help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, “were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.’

To compare is not to equate, as Schivelbusch says. It’s sobering to note the real parallels among these systems. But it’s even more important to remember that the U.S. did not succumb to dictatorship. Roosevelt may have stretched the Constitution beyond recognition, and he had a taste for planning and power previously unknown in the White House. But he was not a murderous thug.

A nation whose fundamental ideology is, in the words of the recently deceased sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism” will be far more resistant to illiberal ideologies.

Jack note: I’m confident America will survive the idiot ass Trump, as it did from 2017 – 2021, and as we survived folks like Presidents Carter, Obama, Biden, Andrew Johnson (after the Civil War), and James Buchanan (before the Civil War leaving office only a month or so before the start of the Civil War).

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I cited two from FDR -jailing families of minority Americans and intentionally controlling farming production. Others suggest CCC, and confirmed FDR stretched the Constitution far, far beyond its intent – threatening to pack the court, cowing them into agreement with his abuses.

“A nation whose fundamental ideology is, in the words of the recently deceased sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism” will be far more resistant to illiberal ideologies.”

that’s where I am

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