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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Uhm, he's the one who deployed the social safety net, implemented a regular work schedule and 40-hour work week when we had 80+ regularly, implemented overtime-pay requirements, put forth food stamps, and built up social security when none existed before. Seems pretty leftist to me. So how did he destroy the left when he had the most leftist presidency?
Do you mean Regan?
Def Reagan too, firing striking air traffic controllers and then overseeing and writing off blatant union busting and attacks on workers rights at the dawn of neoliberalism was a disaster for us.
But the answer is in your question. FDR didn't give those things away for nothing, it was a conciliation to workers demands. In 1934 a nationwide strike wave shut down a number of cities from coast to coast, and in 1935 we got our new deal. FDR rescued capitalism from the jaws of socialism with social democracy. But the great depression was long and regular people were tired.
During ww2 he asked the workers movement not to strike, and they didn't under the direction of his political ally Stalin. But without the ability to fight, the unions were bureaucratized and businesses organized against labor. By the end of ww2 the american left was gutted and couldn't even fight against passing Taft-Hartley. That last point can't be laid at the feet of FDR as he was already dead.
But FDR doesn't deserve to be lionized, he played his part, legalized a labor movement that had earned its right to exist through our power, not his blessing. And as soon as he died, the right started scraping back those legal protections, so that Taft-Hartley was an easy nail to hammer in our coffin.
"How is good thing bad," you say? The new deal was a tactical retreat on behalf of the ruling class against the ascendant working class. The state exists to manage the interests of the ruling class. Roosevelt wasn't great, he was a representative of his class using the state to maintain capitalist control over the means of production. Once that was assured our rights began disappearing immediately.
Next time there can be no deal. The international, inclusive working class have to take power and fight to keep it, or we will lose it. The old American communists understood this, so had to be destroyed. The sooner we realize the liberal economic order is what brought us here to these horrible conditions, the sooner we can leave behind old illusions about reforms and private property and start to create something real.
He might have in fact done so, but recognize the culture of the time. Was he actually intending to rescue capitalism? Or were his policies the best that the oligarchs would accept at the time?
right, because there was a war on. What was more important, improving the life of striking workers after they staked a few social reforms/victories? Or, was it rescuing people from the Nazis who used gas chambers? Maybe it was also revenge for the dead sailors from Pearl Harbor.
I mean, we can go back and forth rationalizing our historical perspectives until we are just talking past each other. Ultimately I think I'd like to have a more complete understanding than what I have now. So in time, I'd like to be able to see value in your emphasis.
But almost no-one teaches the labor history that lead up to the new deal. Its something that was given to workers, not something we fought for. It elevates a representative of the ruling class to hero status, while the heroes of the labor movement are all but completely forgotten.
Remember, this is the same guy who put a million Japanese Americans into concentration camps. The excuse he gave was risk of sedition, but what it actually accomplished was liquidating the farms of Japanese farmers and ag workers, to be bought up by American farmers and large producers. Japanese farming practice yielded much higher volume and quality of produce per acre, and US firms couldn't compete.
Also, the New Deal was essentially a deal for whites. BIPOC workers were left out and suffered severe material wretchedness and discrimination.
So I choose not to give any leeway to the man who oversaw this, and I choose to decenter the liberal hero analysis to replace it with one that recognizes and lionizes the working class.
If you have any books or articles you think support your views I'd happily consider them however.