The New Democrat

Source:Frank DiStefano talking about the so-called 2nd New Deal.

Source:The New Democrat

“In this episode, we talk about how Franklin Roosevelt pivoted to a Second New Deal to head off the populist challenge of Huey Long.

Roosevelt by 1936 was under assault from a populist backlash to his First New Deal. Many traditional Democrats, mostly working people, had come to believe Roosevelt’s progressive First New Deal program was a sell-out to corporations and national elites that didn’t actually help people like them. They had come to see Roosevelt as another rich man in league with his wealthy friends, and his New Deal program as useless. The found a champion in Louisiana Senator Huey Long.

Long was a strident populist who had overthrown his state’s political and social elites to become Louisiana’s political boss with a ruthless political machine subject only to him. He eagerly used his office to punish perceived opponents and seize wealth from those he despised, where he then showered it on the working people of his state. He created a staggering public works program with hospitals, roads, and schools funded by attacking wealthy elites. Now in the Senate, Long was taking his program national.

A Democrat and originally a New Deal supporter, Long was now attacking Roosevelt at every chance he got with his own relief program he called “Share Our Wealth.” In contrast to the technocratic First New Deal, Long proposed caps on the income to millionaires, a national income, and free tuition. He claimed it would make “Every Man a King.”

Nor was Long alone. Another former New Deal supporter, the popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, was also now attacking Roosevelt on the radio to his millions of listeners with similar complaints. There was also a doctor in California, Francis Townsend, who had become a national celebrity proposing a national old age pension program he called the Townsend Plan. When Roosevelt failed to embrace it, Townsend had turned against him too.

Roosevelt and his New Dealers started to get worried as the next election loomed. They anticipated Long was gearing to challenge Roosevelt for the presidency, and given this national popular backlash to his administration they feared he might actually win. It was time to pivot to a new program, a populist Second New Deal to head off Huey Long.

The First New Deal had been a progressive program to manage the national economy. The Second was a populist one. It included things like a new agency, the Works Progress Administration, putting people directly to work. An old age pension program called Social Security modeled on the Townsend Plan. An order that corporations pay out profits as dividends. A tax bill with a punishing high rate of 79% meant to target just one man, John D. Rockefeller.

It worked. Roosevelt won renomination and another term in the presidency in 1936. But now he presided over a very different Democratic Party, one with a novel party philosophy. It combined the progressive ideals of the First New Deal with the populist ones of the Second, forged into a a new party ideology we call New Deal liberalism. Over Roosevelt’s years in office, this new philosophy settled into a new party ideology where has remained ever since.

We usually just call it liberalism.”

From Frank DiStefano

“During the first 100 days of Roosevelt’s presidency in spring 1933, Long’s attitude toward Roosevelt and the New Deal was tepid.[138] Aware that Roosevelt had no intention of radically redistributing the country’s wealth, Long became one of the few national politicians to oppose Roosevelt’s New Deal policies from the left.[note 11] He considered them inadequate in the face of the escalating economic crisis but still supported some of Roosevelt’s programs in the Senate, explaining: “Whenever this administration has gone to the left I have voted with it, and whenever it has gone to the right I have voted against it.”[140]

Long opposed the National Recovery Act, claiming it favored industrialists.[141] In an attempt to prevent its passage, Long held a lone filibuster, speaking for 15 hours and 30 minutes, the second longest filibuster at the time.[142][143] He also criticized Social Security, calling it inadequate and expressing his concerns that states would administer it in a way discriminatory to blacks.[144] In 1933, he was a leader of a three-week Senate filibuster against the Glass banking bill, which he later supported as the Glass–Steagall Act after provisions extended government deposit insurance to state banks as well as national banks.[145][146]

Roosevelt considered Long a radical demagogue and stated that Long, along with General Douglas MacArthur, “was one of the two most dangerous men in America”.[21][147][148] In June 1933, in an effort to undermine Long’s political dominance, Roosevelt cut him out of consultations on the distribution of federal funds and patronage in Louisiana and placed Long’s opponents in charge of federal programs in the state. Roosevelt supported a Senate inquiry into the election of Long ally John H. Overton to the Senate in 1932. The Long machine was accused of election fraud and voter intimidation, but the inquiry came up empty, and Overton was seated.[149] To discredit Long and damage his support base, Roosevelt had Long’s finances investigated by the Internal Revenue Service in 1934.[150][note 12] Although they failed to link Long to any illegality, some of his lieutenants were charged with income tax evasion.[21][152] Roosevelt’s son, Elliott, would later note that in this instance, his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

From Wikipedia

“In March 1933, Long revealed a series of bills collectively known as “the Long plan” to redistribute wealth. Together, they would cap fortunes at $100 million, limit annual income to $1 million, and cap individual inheritances at $5 million.[163][164]

External video
video icon Long’s “Share the Wealth” speech on YouTube
In a nationwide February 1934 radio broadcast, Long introduced his Share Our Wealth plan.[165][166] The legislation would use the wealth from the Long plan to guarantee every family a basic household grant of $5,000 and a minimum annual income of one-third of the average family homestead value and income. Long supplemented his plan with proposals for free college and vocational training, veterans’ benefits, federal assistance to farmers, public works projects, greater federal economic regulation, a $30 monthly elderly pension, a month’s vacation for every worker, a thirty-hour workweek, a $10 billion land reclamation project to end the Dust Bowl, and free medical service and a “war on disease” led by the Mayo brothers.[167][168] These reforms, Long claimed, would end the Great Depression.[169] The plans were widely criticized and labeled impossible by economists.[170][171]

With the Senate unwilling to support his proposals, in February 1934 Long formed the Share Our Wealth Society, a national network of local clubs that operated in opposition to the Democratic Party and Roosevelt. By 1935, the society had over 7.5 million members in 27,000 clubs.[172] Long’s Senate office received an average of 60,000 letters a week, resulting in Long hiring 48 stenographers to type responses.[5] Of the two trucks that delivered mail to the Senate, one was devoted solely to mail for Long.[173] Long’s newspaper, now renamed American Progress, averaged a circulation of 300,000, some issues reaching over 1.5 million.[144] Long drew international attention: English writer H. G. Wells interviewed Long, noting he was “like a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow. He abounds in promises.”[21]

Some historians believe that pressure from Share Our Wealth contributed to Roosevelt’s “turn to the left” in the Second New Deal (1935), which consisted of the Social Security Act, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, Aid to Dependent Children, and the Wealth Tax Act of 1935.[21][174] Roosevelt reportedly admitted in private to trying to “steal Long’s thunder.”

From Wikipedia

America has never really had what the rest of the developed world calls a welfare state, even today, Since the 1930s, we’ve always had what we call a public safety net, which is an economic insurance system that we all pay into and then take out when we fall on hard times and can’t survive financially any other way, unless we get this public assistance.

During President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1st new term, (1933-37) the Roosevelt Administration and Congress created what would be called the New Deal, which essentially was the creation of the American public safety net. Programs like Unemployment Insurance and Social Security. And even though President Roosevelt was a Progressive on economic policy, he was getting political heat from the left-wing of the Democratic Party on economic policy. Like from people like Senator Huey Long, for not going further left and creating more economic programs for people who were struggling and not going after individual wealth in America.

To put this in modern terms: if you are familiar with President Donald Trump’s presidency, (how could you not be, unless you were vacationing on the moon or living in a coma) especially the last 2 years of the Trump presidency, but even go back to the presidential election of 2016 and the campaign that started in the Democratic Party in 2015, you know that there was a reemergence of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, closeted Socialists who in some cases were no longer closeted with their political ideology and label and if anything were proud to be called Socialists, even though they preferred to be called Democratic Socialists.

Go up to 2019 when the Democratic Party wins back the House of Representatives, now you have Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders in the Senate, as well as closeted Socialist Senator Elizabeth Warren, who both ran for President as Democrats in 2019-20 and you had this growing left-wing in Democratic Party in the House, to go along with the so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus (who in actuality are Democratic Socialists of America in the House) and now you have all these new and in some cases self-described Democratic Socialists in the House, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the so-called left-wing Squad in the House, to go along with the Bernie Sanders in the Senate and you have these left-wing members of Congress who are not just Socialists, but self-described Democratic Socialists.

The agenda that these left-wing members of Congress were pushing in the House in 2019-20, that both Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders ran on for President in that same election cycle, looks very similar to what then Senator Huey Long was pushing in Congress in the 1930s and had hope to run on himself for President in 1936:

A wealth tax to eliminate private wealth in America

A so-called free college plan (that wasn’t free for anyone)

A new government-run pension plan. The Squad in the House and Senators Sanders and Warren were instead talking about doubling Social Security

A government works program to put unemployed workers to work for the government

A guaranteed basic income for every American

The Bernie Bros and Squad in House wanted a government-run national health care plan, to replace private health insurance in America

What the so-called Bernie Bros and the Squad were talking about in Congress and what Senator Sanders ran for President on in 2015-16 and 2019-20, is not new. Senator Huey Long ran on that in the 1930s, when he was in Congress as well. The mainstream media (and perhaps Frank DiStefano is a member of that media as well) can call this economic liberalism all they want, but that’s not what is.

Supporters of this populist economic philosophy go way further than Liberals and Progressives, including Franklin Roosevelt, on economic policy, at least pre-1936 and are no longer talking about opportunity and responsibility for all, which is really what economic liberalism is about and not economic guarantees.

What American leftists back in the 1930s and today are really talking about, is what the rest of the developed world calls social democracy or just socialism. And what out-of-the-closet American leftists call democratic socialism. The idea that everyone in America is entitled to a quality life, simply for just being alive in America, regardless of what they bring, if anything, to the broader economic pie of the country.