Eric Rauchway is a distinguished historian and expert on the Progressive and New Deal eras at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of several acclaimed books on the subject, including The Money Makers, The Great Depression and the New Deal, and Blessed Among Nations, and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Dissent, and The American Prospect.Rauchway's latest book is Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal.
From the author's HuffPost Q&A with Zach Carter:
This is a book about a presidential election and its transition. Do you see overtones for today?Learn more about Winter War and follow Eric Rauchway on Twitter.
There are a number of levels in which the parallels you’re suggesting between the early 1930s and today hold true. The least important one right this second is the practical effect of the New Deal, which is the recovery from the Depression. We’re not currently in a recession, let alone a depression. But why it’s vital for proponents of a Green New Deal to use that phrasing is that it rallies Americans to a sense of shared national purpose that recently has been ceded to the political right.
We’ve forgotten how successful Roosevelt and other politicians of the ’30s and ’40s were at creating a progressive sense of common purpose. And that’s certainly important for people on the left today.
And the other is the history of neoliberalism. There’s a long history within the Democratic Party, beginning at least with Jimmy Carter and going all the way through Barack Obama, which concedes to the right the idea that the market is the best way to organize the resources of society, that the best government can do is fiddle with or adjust the social outcomes created by the free market.
The Roosevelt era dawned with an acknowledgment that the market really screwed up. And that what we were calling “the market” was really a system that Republicans had built up to aid rich people and businesses. It wasn’t a market in any conventional sense. For young people who grew up in the Great Recession, there are...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Winter War.
--Marshal Zeringue