New Deal - Legacy and Historiography

Legacy and Historiography

Analysts agree the New Deal produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics for more than a generation after its own end.

However there is disagreement about whether it marked a permanent change in values. Cowie and Salvatore in 2008 argued that it was a response to depression and did not mark a commitment to a welfare state because America has always been too individualistic. MacLean rejected the idea of a definitive political culture. She says they overemphasized individualism and ignored the enormous power of big capital wields, the Constitutional restraints on radicalism, and the role of racism, antifeminism, and homophobia. She warns that accepting Cowie and Salvatore's argument that conservatism's ascendancy is inevitable would dismay and discourage activists on the left. Klein responds that the New Deal did not die a natural death; it was killed off in the 1970s by a business coalition mobilized by such groups as the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, trade organizations, conservative think tanks, and decades of sustained legal and political attacks.

Historians generally agree that during Roosevelt's 12 years in office, there was a dramatic increase in the power of the federal government as a whole. Roosevelt also established the presidency as the prominent center of authority within the federal government. Roosevelt created a large array of agencies protecting various groups of citizens—workers, farmers, and others—who suffered from the crisis, and thus enabled them to challenge the powers of the corporations. In this way, the Roosevelt Administration generated a set of political ideas—known as New Deal liberalism—that remained a source of inspiration and controversy for decades. New Deal liberalism lay the foundation of a new consensus. Between 1940 and 1980 there was the liberal consensus about the prospects for the widespread distribution of prosperity within an expanding capitalist economy. Especially Harry S. Trumans Fair Deal and in the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society used the New Deal as inspiration for a dramatic expansion of liberal programs.

The New Deals enduring appeal on voters fostered its acceptance by moderate and liberal Republicans.

As the first Republican president elected after FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61) build on the New Deal in a manner that embodied his thoughts on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. He sanctioned a major expansion of Social Security by a self-financed program. He supported such New Deal programs as the minimum wage and public housing; he greatly expanded federal aid to education and built the Interstate Highway system primarily as defense programs (rather than jobs program). In a private letter Eisenhower wrote:

Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course, that believes you can do these things ... Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

In 1964 libertarian Barry Goldwater, an unreconstructed anti-New Dealer, was the Republican presidential candidate. The Democrats won the election with the largest share of the popular vote in history but the supporters of Goldwater formed the New Right which helped to bring Ronald Reagan into the White House in the 1980 presidential election. This marked the end of the liberal consensus. Since the 1980s there is a political discourse about supply-side economics and a strict rejection of Keynesian economic policy.