Wakeup call! FDR’s economic & political fascism is very likely what we can expect from an Obama presidency!
Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man is a careful, even-tempered, and much needed corrective to this sorry history of FDR: “FDR was economically incompetent, as Shlaes demonstrates, but he was politically ingenious. Indeed, as she and others have chronicled, FDR’s economic missteps were part of a larger political ballet. He transformed American politics by creating vast client constituencies who depended on the government—and by extension the Roosevelt Administration—for their livelihood. Such an enterprise stemmed first and foremost from a philosophical vision, not a mere economic one. FDR’s economic policies, like his political maneuvering in general, were means to an end. Recommitting liberalism to the doctrine of a “living constitution” pioneered by Woodrow Wilson, the New Dealers believed that the Constitution could be reinterpreted on the fly, to create a new open-ended constitutionalism that depended not on texts, but on the will of those in charge of interpreting them. “I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”
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