Jonah Goldberg: The Next Hoover
[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review.]
...I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover.
The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.
Over the last two years, Obama and his defenders have constantly invoked this story to buttress the case for Obama’s “new foundation” — his version of a new New Deal.
Whatever the problems with this story — and there are many — the simple fact is that history has happened. We live with the consequences of the New Deal. Its institutions — Social Security, the FDIC, etc. —are all around us, as are the progeny from the Great Society, another effort to replay the New Deal as if it were a new idea.
Read entire article at National Review
...I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover.
The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.
Over the last two years, Obama and his defenders have constantly invoked this story to buttress the case for Obama’s “new foundation” — his version of a new New Deal.
Whatever the problems with this story — and there are many — the simple fact is that history has happened. We live with the consequences of the New Deal. Its institutions — Social Security, the FDIC, etc. —are all around us, as are the progeny from the Great Society, another effort to replay the New Deal as if it were a new idea.