Today, looking to correct a YouTube comment, I stumbled upon a book that at first was curious to me but when I open a small sample I realised immediately that I had stumbled upon a book as bad as R. Picken’s awful Foot Ball of many years ago.
Written by one Larry Robinson and originally published in 2020, the book is titled “The Myth of the Moderate Democrat: How the Party of Jacksonian Democracy transitioned to Marxist Statist Collectivism”. Its author claims to have been a political junkie for six decades before the publication of The Myth of the Moderate Democrat, and to be a pastor, evangelist and theologian possessing a Doctor of Divinity.
What Robinson said in the section of the book that was accessible is at first familiar Republican propaganda — that FDR governed with a Marxist ideology. Whilst there may have been Communist sympathisers in American government during the New Deal era, the reality is that the New Deal was a series of largely ineffective compromises involving many players not only within the United States. As Ron Rogowski in his Commerce and Coalitions and Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert in American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History demonstrate, the New Deal was a by-product of a series of revolutions and hyperinflations that affected Europe after post-World War I chaos whereby Europe’s working classes supported the Bolshevik Revolution but failed to spread it beyond the Russian Empire. The result of all these processes was a prolonged “deglobalisation” that lasted until the rise of the oil monarchies in the middle 1970s, while the result of deglobalisation in capital- and land-rich nations [North America, continental Oceania] was a pronounced, but historically unique reduction in income inequality.
FDR was never a Marxist. In fact, as Thomas Paul Bonflglio noted in his 2012 The Psychopathology of American Capitalism, the New Deal was accompanied by a dismantling of the left-leaning parties of the first third of the century. Especially in the nonplantation South and some Western states settled therefrom [e.g. Nebraska], ballot laws became so rigid that formerly not insignificant “socialist” parties could never even access the ballot. As Bonfiglio noted, this placed American politics, especially after the war, in a unique position whereby “left” meant what most would consider right-wing, and anything remotely centrist was called “far left”, which has always made me laugh. Also, unlike the social liberalism of the European working classes, who supported legalisation of homosexuality in the 1920s or earlier, the New Deal was socially highly conservative, involving a uniquely strict “Motion Picture Production Code”. Following the collapse of the union base beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats did reverse themselves vis-à-vis the New Deal in order to stay viable. However, this made the 1990 to 2020 Democratic Party one of strong social liberalism combined with — by the standards of the rest of the world — strong economic conservatism. Today, demography and the desire of the global ruling classes to overcome the (high but insufficient) ceiling social liberalism places on corporate profits is, if the World Socialist Web Site’s [originally New York Times’] assessment of declining Democratic membership and registration be accurate, likely to make the Democratic Party less and less viable with time.
Robinson does not understand that Democrats completely abandoned collectivism after the 1980s, and their embrace of social liberalism in the 1960s is evidence they were abandoning it then. By the 1990s the difference between the parties became exclusively social rather than economic, because the hegemony of big business as donors absolutely excludes any party representing the bottom nine-tenth or more of America’s economic distribution. Demography, in this situation, defeats liberalism because the socially liberal tend to have extremely few if any children, which explains the present takeover of the radical right at a global level.
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