Thread by @gerryconway

Once again, a conservative misses the point of government action, equating saving businesses to saving people’s lives, equating GDP with national purpose, and equating the stock market with human values.

If FDR “failed,” why was he reelected three times? washingtonpost.com/opinions/progr…

Ever since the warped Hayek-Friedman theory of economics gave conservatives an excuse to defend greed over empathy and prioritize business efficiency over human life, conservatives have been arguing, basically, the best government is no government.

For conservatives, *any* government action that prioritizes human welfare over the unfettered freedom of business to act purely for profit is inherently immoral and counterproductive. Seriously. That’s their fundamental understanding of government’s role.

This premise was best summed up by Reagan’s famous “Government isn’t the solution to the problem, government is the problem.”

With an attitude like that it’s easy to understand why conservatives, against all the evidence of history, continue to declare the New Deal a “failure.” The fact the Depression didn’t end until WWII is all the evidence they need. Business didn’t recover so the New Deal failed.

But the New Deal was never about business recovery— it was about the recovery of the American people, about providing people with jobs and social assistance and purpose and health care and hope. And in those terms it succeeded spectacularly.

Any measure of the *human* condition during the 1930s— how people felt about their lives, their families, their future, their country— as reflected in the political success of the New Deal, makes this point explicit.

If Americans agreed with conservatives that the New Deal was a “failure” it would have been reflected at the polls— the ultimate expression of our national communal judgment. Yet the New Deal kept winning the popular argument for 40 plus years.

Conservatives still refuse to accept the judgment of the American people, still insist that what matters is a corporate profit and loss spreadsheet, still demand that government be “run like a business.”

The American people have never agreed with this premise, which is why no pure economic conservative has ever won an election without hiding his economic message under dog whistle racism.

The American voter wholeheartedly approved of the New Deal until, under LBJ, the New Deal was extended beyond white Americans to black Americans. *That’s* when voters began rejecting activist government and began accepting conservative economic theory.

White America was fine with the New Deal so long as it applies only to White America. Once black Americans demanded equal treatment all bets were off.

To repeat: the New Deal didn’t fail in its *true* purpose— which was to level the economic and social playing field for average (white) Americans, to provide men with jobs they wouldn’t otherwise have had, to bring hope and relief to a country battered by Republican inaction.

Like America in 1932, in 2020 Americans are faced with a choice between two visions of government: a government that acts to benefit average people, or a government that acts to benefit rich people and corporations. A government for families or a government for the stock market.

Conservatives think the measure of economic health in a nation is a combination of the GDP and a rising DOW. That’s a pathetic and narrow view, one that should have been dismissed after 1929, certainly after 1932, and absolutely after 2020. #VoteBlueToEndThisNightmare