A gun control campaigner, left, is confronted by a member of the National Rifle Association © Reuters
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of our Time by Ira Katznelson (WW Norton, £22)
The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt secured the survival of lightly regulated capitalism and liberal democracy, not just in the United States, but in Western Europe and other parts of the world. In this sense, the New Deal does represent, as the subtitle of Ira Katznelson’s new book proposes, the origins of our time.
But this is a familiar theme, perhaps the most rehearsed in modern American political history. What has this new and lengthy book to add? Katznelson, a distinguished scholar and professor at Columbia, writes elegantly and his book easily repays the reader’s attention despite the familiarity of the basic narrative. But Katznelson’s particular interpretation of these events emphasises the ethical compromises essential to the achievement of Roosevelt’s goals—and makes the claim that these compromises framed the idiosyncratic state of American politics today. The most important ethical compromises were the accommodation with other totalitarian regimes needed to achieve the defeat of the most immediately threatening totalitarianisms, in Germany and Japan, and the willingness of northern liberal economic reformers to make congressional alliance with racist Southern Democrats.
At Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill went beyond any simple alliance of convenience with Stalin. While this is familiar, the story of the Roosevelt administration’s flirtation with Mussolini’s fascism—more benign, often ludicrous, yet also ultimately sinister—makes entertaining reading.
But much of Katznelson’s analy-sis is concerned with the political influence of the south. He drives home again and again the extent to which the passage of New Deal measures through Congress was dependent on the support of representatives and senators from the southern states, many of them virulent racists whose tone and words sound worse than loathsome to modern ears. If the price of the New Deal was the continuation of lynching in Louisiana, then that was the price that was paid.
Perhaps politics is the art of compromise; but should there be limits to compromise? Katznelson postpones that central question for 500 pages, then deals with it fleetingly with a reference to Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit’s distinction between compromises and rotten compromises. Rotten compromises, Margalit argues, are those that create or sustain an inhuman regime: Margalit believes that America’s second world war alliance with Russia was, in these terms, admissible but the population transfers agreed at Yalta were not. This discrimination between these two compromises seems to owe more to utilitarianism and hindsight than a clear moral line, and leaves unanswered the genuine dilemmas faced by Roosevelt and his associates: should they have contemplated the collapse of American society and economy, or allowed Nazi control of Europe, in order to avoid repugnant associations with southern racism and Soviet communism?
There is another distinction which Katznelson acknowledges, although also briefly. Compromise between people who recognise legitimacy in alternative points of view is not the same as compromise which reflects only realities of force and power. A compromise between partners on where to dine out differs from a compromise with a mugger who may be appeased by the contents of your wallet.
Compromises of the first kind are necessary because of different interpretations of a shared goal, and predicated on an underlying belief in a common interest. Compromises of the second kind represent only an accommodation of conflicting individual interests. Roosevelt’s compromises with the south and the Soviet Union were evidently compromises of the latter kind.
And American politics today seems to operate in such a way that compromises between Republicans and Democrats, and between president and Congress, will also represent the accommodation of inconsistent demands rather than an agreement on the means of pursuit of shared objectives. Katznelson is surely right to see the dysfunctionality of modern American politics as the result of the absence of any agreed sense of a common good on domestic issues. America’s debate over abortion pits two groups shouting “right to life” and “right to choose” against each other, while Europe’s mediated politics has mostly reached some messy and ill-theorised consensus. European states easily reach consensus on healthcare and gun control; the United States cannot. And the repeated congressional standoffs over fiscal policy reflect the difficulties of finding compromise when different sides perceive no legitimacy in the position of the other while none enjoys sufficient formal power to enforce its will.
But is this aspect of American exceptionalism really a legacy of the New Deal? Was that era “the origin of our times” in this sense? Tainted compromises with southern interests were hardly new to American politics in the 1930s: the issue had been central to American politics since the time of the founding fathers. The system of checks and balances they put in place required endless compromise and restricted the capacity of the executive to develop, or pursue, any single conception of the common good. Given the debased concept of public interest which characterised the totalitarian regimes America defeated, that may have been no bad thing. But a system of checks and balances in which no concessions are made to the legitimacy of other views may easily end—as today—in gridlock and sequestration. Katznelson’s analysis is another reminder for readers outside the US of how much the special character of American politics reflects the direct and indirect influence of its history of slavery and segregation.
