Yesterday my colleague Grant Gallicho found a Depression-era Commonweal editorial defending FDR against his many critics (“Recovery & Reformation,” November 17, 1933). The terms of the discussion then are weirdly familiar: the loose talk of “socialism” to describe any program that used the power of the state to relieve human suffering; the fantasy that the economic crisis would come to an end only when the “professors” quite their meddling and let the Wall Street types responsible for the crisis take control again; the insistence that the market would heal itself if only government stopped interfering with “the natural forces of recovery”; the paranoia of rightwing populists, the contempt of that era’s Koch brothers.
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