Looks like good work, Jim.

However, the changes in the 1930s were not just "brought to us by the Great Depression and FDR" or even "a broad national consensus." They were also brought by organized social and political movements & we have to step up the challenge to organizing and demanding.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

Roosevelt's election in 1932 came 3 years after the stock market collapse of late 1929 met up with a much longer-standing agricultural recession/depression going back into the mid-1920s, when 40% of the population of the country was still rural (under 10% today) to produce a banking crisis that had been going on for perhaps two years by the time Roosevelt was elected.

Progressive forces had been organizing and making demands and fighting back. Communists and other radicals were taking actions like intefering with evictions over foreclosures and rents and putting people back into their homes. 17.000 World War I veterans marched on Washington as "The Bonus Expeditionary Force" a.k.a. Bonus Army in mid-1932, demanding early payment of compensation for war service promised by law in 1924 but not scheduled for payment until 1945. After a period of encampment in shantytowns in D.C. the Bonus Army was viciously and violently attacked first by police, who killed two in the face of resistance, and then by several units the Regular Army under General Douglas MacArthur, including six tanks commanded by George Patton, killing several more, injuring hundreds, and torching the shantytown encampments.

The Norris-LaGuardia act facilitating union organization by outlawing "yellow-dog contracts" that forced agreement not to join a union as a condition of employment in 1932, i.e. before the election; LaGuardia was the liberal Republican sometime Mayor of NY City though in Congress or the Senate at the time. This helped set the stage for the break of John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers and several other AFL unions to form the Committee for Industrial Organization, funding massive new organizing efforts creating organizing committees that became new unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to organize workers in mass-production industries whom AFL craft unionists had regarded as unorganizable. They provided key political backbone for Roosevelt. A great many of the new unionists were second-generation children of immigrant parents who organized within neighborhoods generally close to factories, often using ethnic organizations as well as family networks.

In parts of the upper midwest people formed Farmer-Labor parties to press Democrats. Populist forces gained power within white-oriented southern Democratic parties, while Negroes in the north (to use the contemporary name they preferred) shifted to voting Democratic and influenced officially non-discriminatory policies in the CIO (not always followed). There was widespread intellectual criticism of the crisis, influential radical arguments that capitalism itself was falling that created a great deal of intellectual space for social democratic and liberal proposals. There were popular leaders like General Smedley Butler and Huey Long who encouraged popular demands. These are merely examples and far from exhaustive.

The question of "consensus" can be overstated. Roosevelt won by a landlide in 1932 with 57% of the vote and 472 electoral votes, but 40% still voted Republican (about 3% voted further left). Some of the forces against him like the Liberty League and the National Association of Manufacturers were not just opposed but strenuously to viciously so, and there were proto-fascist forces in play (and some of the populists, like Huey Long, while not reactionary like the racist & anti-semitic radio priest Father Coughlin, had strong-man potential in an age of dictatorships).

On the other hand, conventional wisdom that "free markets" had failed, and always produced instability with deep immiserating depressions, was indeed widespread, and "economic planning" was highly regarded, even in places like Fortune magazine.

The point about consensus though is that in this kind of context it does not mean "universal agreement to compromises acceptable to all stakeholders." It means very broad popular support. A great many of the New Deal programs were objected to strenuously by major "stakeholders," whose wishes were overridden by large majorities.

The situation today is different. Our election is being held much closer to the beginning of the financial crisis. That's good in that the chance to minimize its effects remains. But as the confused politics of the bailout show, while things are shaken up, organized forces and clear demands about what to do are not yet developed. Senator Obama's deep commitment to bipartisanship and compromise remains to be tested when faced with situations in which there will be choices objected to by major stakeholders, whichever way they are made. Will Obama and a Democratic majority, if we get them, indeed pass the Employee Free Choice Act quickly, and will the organized labor movement take it up in a way to rebuild the political power of working people as well as their negotiating power with employers? Is that movement creative enough to move into the large swathes of service sector employment that remain untouched, as the economy has a new shape compared to the 1930s-60s just as that economy did to the 1890s? Will Obama and the Democrats be brought around to facing that the healthcare crisis cannot be solved by compromise that favors the insurance industry? If so, how will prospective job losses to insurance industry workers be handled? And so on.

Another key difference is that in the early 1930s debates over social democratic and liberal policies (and at the other end, conservative ones) were shaped by the existence of power alternative ideas for different types of social orders, including Soviet communism and the fascism of Italy and Spain and the rising Nazi fascism in Germany.

The absence of such seeming alternatives bringing radical challenges, forcing consideration of a wider range of ideas, and posing threats that put other proposals in a different perspective has no counterpart today. This is illustrated by the silly but widespread tendency of Republicans and other conservatives to characterize Barack Obama's positions, which are moderately liberal on some things and center-right on others, as "socialist." The function and to a large extent the point of that rhetoric, at least on the part of the intellectual ideologues who do really know better, is to try to police how far further left proposals may be made and be taken seriously.

Cracking the debates open to go for deeper reforms and build a large majority quasi-consensus around them is going to take more than a crisis -- it is going to take organized movements, vigorous articulation of ideas, and linkage between them.

Interesting post. I'm looking forward to reading the book! Hope you're doing well, Jim.

Jim, thanks for the response

I also agree that out situation today is different than the one the nation confronted in 1932 insofar as we are much closer to the start of the crisis. I'd like to share your optimism that this might give us an opportunity to "minimize its effects," but I suspect that the worst is yet to come in 2009/2010 no matter what we do, and there will be a massive, concerted Republican effort to blame Democrats, even though the past eight years of trickle-down economics made the coming crisis near-inevitable. If I conveyed optimism, I wrote poorly -- it's more like hope against hope, given the state of disorganization. Your suspicion almost certainly is correct. I see now a little better where you're coming from about the dialectic (if you'll forgive the term) between "consensus" on ideas -- a term that means something stronger to me than to you, I guess, so, using it on your terms -- and organizing. Personally I think the two kind of work together -- that unity comes from action, that persuasion about ideas often works best when it's oriented to action. But clearly I should read your book and not presume that you're saying any different. Good stuff.