With all the scholastic gnashing of teeth about Bernie—no, he's not a socialist, he's just a New Dealer!—we forget how standard it is in the historiography that one of the things anticommunists were battling against in the New Deal (not fancifully but in reality) was an ascendant
social democratic (and quite feminist!) politics located within the executive branch of government, which got traction not simply in the 1930s but during the war itself. press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
Again, this was pretty conventional wisdom in the historiography of McCarthyism (not the man, but the wider anticommunist purging phenomenon) before Bernie came along. (It probably still is; haven't kept up). But somehow it's been forgotten, like so much else.
