Abstract
During the Great Recession, debates concerning Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal have focused on stimulus packages: were the New Deal packages effective and by corollary, given the current economic crisis, what can we learn from the past? While the stimulus programs of the New Deal Era were an important element, more significant were the set of political commitments that forged the basis for a new and more democratic political economy as well as a transformation in the meaning of liberalism. The New Deal regime of political economic commitments, lasting from roughly 1932 until the late 1970s was a democratic interlude compared with the laissez-faire and managerial liberal regimes that prevailed for most of the fifty years before the New Deal and the neoliberal regime of the past thirty years since. Under the New Deal regime there were more labor rights, less Supreme Court intervention in the economy, more public accountability in the structure of financial institutions driving the political economy, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The nature of the institutional response offered by the New Deal and the vision proposed by FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights is important. The greatest crisis of political economy since the 1930s cannot be remedied by mere changes in policy. Institutional change must be addressed.
