F.D.R. Didn’t Just Fix the Economy
Metadata
Highlights
- “The foundational belief of the New Deal was the conviction that democracy in the United States — limited and flawed through it remained — was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it.”
- That’s why he would direct his administration to build dams in the Tennessee Valley, bridges in California’s Bay Area and a second tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York — to show Americans that the government could do big things and do them well.
- The New Deal libraries and parks and postal offices and other buildings also stand as monuments to collective effort and the public good, to the idea that democracy works best when it works for most of us, and that through this effort, we come closer to the “more perfect union” of our Constitution’s preamble.
- The New Deal brought, in Roosevelt’s phrasing, “the broadening conception of social justice” to American life. And once introduced, it could not be removed.
- Put another way, you can think of the New Deal as a third founding moment in the history of American democracy. And in the same way that we still struggle to live up to the ideals of political equality expressed in our first founding and those of racial equality expressed in our second, we have not yet realized the ideal of economic equality and opportunity put forth in the New Deal.