Conservative Fiction: The New Deal Sucked!

By Bill Scher

Created 10/29/2008 - 9:12am

As we are facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression as a result of conservative deregulation, it's only logical that we would look to how we successfully dealt with the last major economic crisis -- the progressive principles that shaped President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal."

The conservative response? Pretend that the New Deal sucked.

Last month Jonah Goldberg wrote on the National Review blog The Corner [1] that the New Deal is to blame for making it a "Great" depression:

...we shouldn't let invocation of the Great Depression — and our fear of it — justify all of this New Deal talk. Say it with me: The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, if anything it was the New Deal itself that made the Great Depression "Great." By 1938 one in six Americans were still without jobs. It wasn't until WWII, when FDR started describing himself as "Dr. Win the War" instead of "Dr. New Deal" that America finally started to lift itself out of its state-imposed economic stupor.

Yesterday, the Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll claimed [2] that the New Deal created a wholly separate Depression:

One of the great untold stories about the Depression is that there were really two of them. By the mid-1930’s the U.S. economy was well along the road to recovery with the number of unemployed dropping from 13 million in 1933 to 7.6 million in 1936. The the Supreme Court, bowing to the court packing pressure of FDR, approved the Wagner Act and the economy tanked again.

The Wagner Act [3] is that awful, awful law that gave workers the right to join unions [4], which in ConservativeWorld, ruined everything.