Okay, Kevie D. is not stupid, but he seems to be straying very far from the reservation as staked out by William F. Buckley—generally known as “Saint Bill” around the NR water cooler. As anyone who read Buckley and his Merry Band back in the 1960s knows, the National Review regarded Franklin Roosevelt and his entire New Deal as “Communism Light”, the utter betrayal of the Founding Fathers’ handiwork, something that, in the fullness of time, true conservatives would rip up by the roots and consign to the flames. In light of that intellectual heritage, it is “interesting” to read Kevie Boy’s recent plug for Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, for here is how Ira sets the scene of his history:
A gloom of incomparable force was setting in when the New Deal began. In July 1932, Benito Mussolini celebrated, if prematurely, how “the liberal state is destined to perish.” Reporting how “worn out” constitutional democracies had been “deserted by the peoples who feel [it will] lead the world to ruin,” he boasted, in prose ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, that “all the political experiments of our day are antiliberal.” The New Deal’s rearrangement of values and institutions, and its support for the Western liberal political tradition, answered this challenge. Its battles were fought on many fronts, from the effort to revive capitalism to the struggle to incorporate the working class and contain the dangerous features of a mass society. Its international objectives were no less weighty, from the mission to defeat Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan to the desire to keep Soviet Communism in check, while maintaining internal solidarity and security in the process. These achievements are especially impressive when one realizes that they had to be accomplished virtually all at once, like a galloping Thoroughbred carrying not one rider but four.
Yes, that’s right; FDR saved western civilization. Drop mike.
Of course, that’s not quite what Kevin was going for when he called the book “very interesting” and linked to the Amazon site for the book. Rather, says Kevie, “The chapter on the New Deal Democrats’ Jim Crow Congress is illuminating.”
In fact, Katznelson does say, in his introduction, that he will demonstrate how southern Democrats used their power in Congress to make sure that New Deal programs did nothing to upset the social dominance of whites in the south—territory that Katznelson has, in fact, already covered, in his earlier, also “very interesting,” work, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-century America, a book that I have read, and discussed on occasion, though Kevin, it seems, has not.
But, in any event, St. Bill’s beef with the New Deal was not that it didn’t help everyone, but that it helped anyone at all. Because it is wrong for the government to help people! People are supposed to suffer! Particularly poor ones! That’s how God keeps them in line!
It’s quite possible that Kevie Boy isn’t even aware of his apostasy. I mean, he’s criticizing FDR, isn’t he? That’s the point, right? But I think St. Bill would say that there’s a difference between saying that FDR was too socialistic and saying that he wasn’t socialistic enough. The devil, after all, is in the details.
Afterwords
St. Bill was also notoriously racist himself. Sometimes the folks at NR are aware of this, sort of, and sometimes they aren’t.
