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the blogs, in the newspapers, in restaurants, there has been so much discussion of the New Deal lately that the chatter could seem like that at a historians’ convention. Conservatives express panic about socialism and argue that the New Deal experience proved government intervention into the economy does not work. Liberals talk of the New Deal as if it had been a panacea. By contrast, in the 1930s the opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came from the Left as well as the Right. A Popular Front of politicized citizens ranging from liberals to communists complained that programs were inadequate both in reach and funding.
Today, by contrast, criticism of the New Deal comes almost exclusively from the Right. Its most trenchant charge is that the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. Only the Second World War did so, by providing a military rationale for massive state spending.
This conclusion is quite correct, and not at all original, but the conse...
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