Column: Is Biden the next FDR? That depends on what you think about the New Deal

Then and now: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain posted these paired photos of FDR’s and Biden’s cabinets, making the parallels explicit. Advantages for Biden, because the New Deal remains the repository of cherished Democratic Party values and progressive achievement even today, eight decades after FDR’s inauguration. Another hive of anti-New Deal activity was the Democratic Party’s Wall Street bloc, which continually slandered FDR’s program as “socialism.” After Democrats associated with Du Pont and General Motors formed the American Liberty League to uphold the party’s moneyed interests, Roosevelt offered a withering assessment, describing it as “an organization that only advocates two or three out of the Ten Commandments. But as only the last two had any chance of victory, the journal counseled voters to pull the lever for Roosevelt as an expression of “political opportunism.” Although New Deal relief programs are often portrayed as the first Keynesian deficit-funded anti-poverty programs in American history, that’s not how Roosevelt saw them. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.” Furious about attacks on Social Security by his GOP opponent Alf Landon in the 1936 election and Landon’s big-business backers, Roosevelt thundered: “Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America’s working people.” FDR was building a new coalition and a new progressive tradition from scratch.