OCT 01, 2019
During her
speech at Washington Square Park in New York last week, which drew a
massive crowd of both supporters and curious bystanders, Massachusetts Sen.
Elizabeth Warren evoked the legacy of Frances Perkins, the longest-serving
secretary of labor and first female member of the presidential Cabinet.
The Warren campaign’s decision
to stage a speech at the famous park in lower Manhattan was inspired partly by
the fact that it is a block away from the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,
where 146 garment workers—most of them young immigrant women—died in a fire in
1911. The disaster, as Warren told her audience, prompted major reforms, which
Perkins was instrumental in pushing. As the presidential candidate put it in
her speech, “With Frances working the system from the inside, the women workers
organizing and applying pressure from the outside, they rewrote New York state’s
labor laws from top to bottom to protect workers.”
Twenty years later, Franklin
D. Roosevelt selected Perkins as his labor secretary (a position she would hold
during his entire presidency), and the administration passed everything from
Social Security and unemployment insurance to minimum wage and the Wagner Act,
which guaranteed labor’s right to organize. One “very persistent woman,” Warren
declared, “backed up by millions of people across [the] country,” achieved
major structural reforms that had a transformative effect on the country.
Warren isn’t the first 2020
Democratic candidate to give a major speech on the legacy of the New Deal. In
June, in his widely discussed speech
on democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders repeatedly invoked FDR and his
“bold and visionary leadership” as an example for what we need today.
Though some commentators (including
me) questioned the Vermont senator’s decision to make FDR and New Deal
liberalism the focal point of a speech about democratic socialism, which
presumably goes beyond Roosevelt’s brand of social democracy (a program
designed to preserve and stabilize American capitalism, not
replace it), from a strategic standpoint, it makes perfect sense to employ
Roosevelt as a model for the kind of leadership needed in the 21st century.
Roosevelt, along with members of
his administration like Perkins, fought for transformative change that was, in
Sanders’ words, “opposed by big business, Wall Street, the political
establishment, by the Republican Party and by the conservative wing of FDR’s
own Democratic Party.” At the time, Roosevelt was called everything from a
fascist to a communist, and he had to deal with smears from members of his own
party, such as 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, who founded a
group called the Liberty League to oppose the New Deal. At a 1936 Liberty
League rally, Smith gave a then-27-year-old Joseph McCarthy a template for his
future tactics, painting Roosevelt as a Bolshevik in disguise: “There can be
only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only … the clear, pure fresh
air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia. There can be
only one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the flag of the godless union of the
Soviets.”
Roosevelt and his
administration didn’t just face ad hominem political attacks, but institutional
barriers that threatened to make real structural reform impossible. With a
conservative majority, the Supreme Court ruled numerous New Deal policies
unconstitutional, and stood in the way of any kind of economic reform. At one
point, historian Jeff Shesol tell us in his 2010 book, “Supreme Power: Franklin
Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court,” FDR thought that the court would “nullify
virtually everything of significance that the administration had done.” This
thought didn’t lead Roosevelt to despair, however, as he believed that after
the “nine old men” overruled his popular reforms, it wouldn’t be long before
“the nation’s streets were filled with marching farmers, marching miners, and
marching factory workers.” In other words, Roosevelt was prepared for a fight,
and counted on popular support against the so-called “economic royalists.”
There would always be those who cried “unconstitutional” at “every effort to
better the condition of our people,” Roosevelt observed
in 1937. “Such cries have always been with us; and, ultimately, they have
always been overruled.”
Roosevelt’s struggle with the
Supreme Court culminated with his plan to add more justices to the court, which
ultimately failed, but not before the court—Justice Owen Roberts in
particular—shifted its tune on New Deal legislation.
Both Warren and Sanders have
invoked Roosevelt and the New Deal not just because of policies, but because of
the aggressive style of politics that Roosevelt and his team employed to
achieve such transformative change. Roosevelt wasn’t afraid of being denounced
as a communist or a dictator by right-wing detractors, and he eagerly embraced
conflict with the wealthy business leaders who funded such groups as the
Liberty League. Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to push his progressive agenda
and famously welcomed the hatred of his opponents, who stood against economic
and political reform widely supported by the American people—just as many
progressive reforms are today.
One of the most frequent
criticisms leveled at progressive candidates, often from centrists who claim to
sympathize with their agenda, is that their plans are unrealistic and will
never make it past Congress, let alone the Supreme Court. Reporting on Warren’s
speech at Washington Square Park, The Atlantic’s Russell
Berman observed that while Warren’s policy plans are “detailed and
specific, her strategy for achieving them is less so.” Like Sanders, Warren
calls for a sustained grassroots movement to pressure Washington, but,
according to Berman, “that was also Obama’s plea, and while the former
president was able to enact the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms, and a
large economic-stimulus package early in his tenure, his entreaties for outside
help did not succeed in pressuring Republicans to support his plans.”
This is the conventional
wisdom one often hears today about the Obama years, and while it is certainly
true that President Obama faced unprecedented Republican obstructionism, it is
simply false to claim that the 44th president fought aggressively for a
progressive agenda and did everything he could to push for radical change. Even
before he entered office, Obama had settled on a “pragmatic” response to the
financial crisis, hiring centrists and neoliberal ideologues like Timothy
Geithner, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, while desperately working to achieve
a “post-partisan” consensus (which was far more naive than the progressive
approach toward movement-building).
One notable example of the
Obama administration’s timid response was its failure to push for legislation
that would have allowed judges to modify the terms of home mortgages,
colloquially known as “cram down.” As David Dayen reported in
2015, it was within Obama’s power to prevent millions of people from losing
their homes (just as it was within the administration’s power to criminally
prosecute bank executives for their fraudulent behavior). “The administration’s
eventual program, HAMP, grew out of the banking industry’s preferred
alternative to [cram down], one where the industry, rather than bankruptcy judges,
would control loan restructuring,” Dayen writes. “Unfortunately, the program
has been a success for bankers and a failure for most hard-pressed homeowners.”
The idea that Obama was once a
populist, and that a Warren or Sanders administration would end up just like
the Obama administration did, is simply wrong. The two leading progressive
candidates have already expressed a willingness to adopt the Rooseveltian style
of politics that Obama was never willing to adopt, and the 44th president never
favored the structural changes that the former do. “I am prepared to go to
every state in this union and rally the American people around [a progressive]
agenda to put pressure on their representatives, whether they are Democratic or
Republican,” Sanders recently remarked in an
interview, saying that he would also support primary challenges to
Democrats who are not supportive of progressive policies like “Medicare for
All.” This is an aggressive strategy in the tradition of Roosevelt, and it is
the only strategy that could potentially lead to his progressive agenda
becoming a reality in the future.
It is completely legitimate to
ask how progressives would pass major legislation without a supermajority in
Congress, and the fact is that Roosevelt had much more favorable circumstances
in 1933 than any Democratic president is likely to have in the foreseeable
future. There are certain measures that could give Democratic presidents some
wiggle room. Warren has advocated
eliminating the filibuster, for example, while Sanders has, curiously,
rejected this approach, favoring the complicated budget reconciliation process
instead.
None of this will matter,
however, if progressive Democrats don’t manage to create a wave of popular
enthusiasm for their agenda. It is important for progressive leaders to be
honest and forthright about this to their supporters. None of their proposals
stands a chance without a popular movement that goes well beyond the election cycle.
Roosevelt understood the power of popular will; perhaps it is time for
Democrats to refresh their memory.
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