FDR Is Just Republican Lite; Sorry, Flappers, But I'm Still Voting for Norman Thomas

As many of you have noticed, Salon has an ongoing series called Millennials Are the Fucking Worst¹. Yastreblyansky had an excellent post on this ("take-my-ball-and-go-homism", as Martin Longman calls it) yesterday.

At the risk of giving these boy-children more attention than they deserve, I just want to single out one bit from the latest entry in the series:

If the New Deal taught us anything it’s that unprecedented sweeping government action can happen quickly. FDR achieved significant reforms within the first hundred days of his presidency....Now, we must show courage and not settle for anything less than a New Deal-style overhaul.

Of course, the real FDR--not the FDR who resides in the lefty imagination--faced bitter criticism from the left for what they considered the inadequacy of his efforts. But that's not until after he's inaugurated. More relevant, I think, is how he campaigned. Here's a bit of his nomination speech:

Just one word or two on taxes, the taxes that all of us pay toward the cost of Government of all kinds.

I know something of taxes. For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that Government--Federal and State and local--costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of Government--functions, in fact, that are not definitely essential to the continuance of Government. We must merge, we must consolidate subdivisions of Government, and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.

By our example at Washington itself, we shall have the opportunity of pointing the way of economy to local government, for let us remember well that out of every tax dollar in the average State in this Nation, 40 cents enter the treasury in Washington, D. C., 10 or 12 cents only go to the State capitals, and 48 cents are consumed by the costs of local government in counties and cities and towns.

I propose to you, my friends, and through you, that Government of all kinds, big and little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his Cabinet.

Oh, and did someone say "free trade"?

[T]here emerges one great, simple, crystal-pure fact that during the past ten years a Nation of 120,000,000 people has been led by the Republican leaders to erect an impregnable barbed wire entanglement around its borders through the instrumentality of tariffs which have isolated us from all the other human beings in all the rest of the round world....By our acts of the past we have invited and received the retaliation of other Nations. I propose an invitation to them to forget the past, to sit at the table with us, as friends, and to plan with us for the restoration of the trade of the world.

Go into the home of the business man. He knows what the tariff has done for him. Go into the home of the factory worker. He knows why goods do not move. Go into the home of the farmer. He knows how the tariff has helped to ruin him.

Does that sound like someone the 1932 edition of Walker Bragman would have voted for?


¹Not the actual title, though it is apparently designed to demonstrate this proposition.