Theodore Hamm is editor of Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. He writes about New York City politics and culture for The Indypendent and Jacobin. Hamm is chair of journalism and new media studies at St. Joseph's College in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

From the Introduction

The contempt shared by the party's elite for Bernie's democratic socialist vision is further illustration of how far the Democrats have moved from FDR and the New Deal. Like many key figures in his administration, Roosevelt was a Keynesian capitalist, not a socialist. Neither were the coterie of middle-class reformers FDR brought to Washington from New York City's settlement house movement of the Progressive Era. But the New Deal's policies were not simply the handiwork of far-sighted technocrats. Instead, FDR's team responded to pressure exerted from below. The Great Depression had spawned both labor militance, leading to a strike wave that shut down the West Coast waterfront in 1934; and social movements, including the retirement pension campaign led by Dr. Francis Townsend that had launched a year earlier. In 1935, both efforts helped create two of the New Deal's most enduring legacies: the right for unions to organize and strike (as stipulated by the Wagner Act) and the Social Security system. Yet when FDR and prominent allies such as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia spoke of the president's "social security program", the lowercase term referred to far more than simply pensions. As FDR outlined in his "Economic Bill of Rights" (1944) and other speeches, he viewed it as the federal government's responsibility to provide jobs, health care, and secure housing for the American people. Rather than democratic socialism, FDR created a blueprint for social democracy akin to what exists in many European countries today.

Many fundamental elements of Bernie's 2020 agenda-including free college tuition, rent control and massive federal investment in housing, and vast public works projects that provide public-sector jobs (now the Green New Deal)-were realities in the Brooklyn where he grew up. Although FDR viewed health care as a right, and his successor Harry Truman began to push for national health insurance soon after he took office in 1945, no universal medical care system was implemented. But New York City had a vast, low-cost healthcare network that was accessible to both union members and non-union households such as the Sanders family. While Bernie's proposal for Medicare for All is thus an extension of a landmark initiative of the Great Society, LBJ's administration essentially continued to enact FDR's domestic blueprint. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein demonstrates in Fear City (2017), the Wall Street-led response to New York's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s helped launch the neoliberal agenda of privatization within the Democratic Party. The same Clinton crowd that championed neoliberal "Third Way" rollbacks of New Deal policies not coincidentally loathes a candidate that adheres to FDR's principles. As Bernie, who was born in 1941, stated in a November 2015 campaign speech at Georgetown University about democratic socialism, FDR stressed in his Second Bill of Rights speech that "real freedom must include economic security". "That was Roosevelt's vision seventy years ago", he declared. "It is my vision today". During that same campaign Bernie's older brother, Larry (b.1935), explained that the siblings and their peers grew up "in an environment where New Deal politics were quite normal. It was widely understood that the government could do good things". With post-Reagan Republicans deriding all social spending, and post-Clinton Democrats fetishizing private sector solutions to public problems, the origins of the Sanders brother's view of government's positive potential is well worth exploring.

Theodore Hamm is editor of Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. He writes about New York City politics and culture for The Indypendent and Jacobin. Hamm is chair of journalism and new media studies at St. Joseph's College in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

From the Introduction

The contempt shared by the party's elite for Bernie's democratic socialist vision is further illustration of how far the Democrats have moved from FDR and the New Deal. Like many key figures in his administration, Roosevelt was a Keynesian capitalist, not a socialist. Neither were the coterie of middle-class reformers FDR brought to Washington from New York City's settlement house movement of the Progressive Era. But the New Deal's policies were not simply the handiwork of far-sighted technocrats. Instead, FDR's team responded to pressure exerted from below. The Great Depression had spawned both labor militance, leading to a strike wave that shut down the West Coast waterfront in 1934; and social movements, including the retirement pension campaign led by Dr. Francis Townsend that had launched a year earlier. In 1935, both efforts helped create two of the New Deal's most enduring legacies: the right for unions to organize and strike (as stipulated by the Wagner Act) and the Social Security system. Yet when FDR and prominent allies such as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia spoke of the president's "social security program", the lowercase term referred to far more than simply pensions. As FDR outlined in his "Economic Bill of Rights" (1944) and other speeches, he viewed it as the federal government's responsibility to provide jobs, health care, and secure housing for the American people. Rather than democratic socialism, FDR created a blueprint for social democracy akin to what exists in many European countries today.

Many fundamental elements of Bernie's 2020 agenda-including free college tuition, rent control and massive federal investment in housing, and vast public works projects that provide public-sector jobs (now the Green New Deal)-were realities in the Brooklyn where he grew up. Although FDR viewed health care as a right, and his successor Harry Truman began to push for national health insurance soon after he took office in 1945, no universal medical care system was implemented. But New York City had a vast, low-cost healthcare network that was accessible to both union members and non-union households such as the Sanders family. While Bernie's proposal for Medicare for All is thus an extension of a landmark initiative of the Great Society, LBJ's administration essentially continued to enact FDR's domestic blueprint. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein demonstrates in Fear City (2017), the Wall Street-led response to New York's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s helped launch the neoliberal agenda of privatization within the Democratic Party. The same Clinton crowd that championed neoliberal "Third Way" rollbacks of New Deal policies not coincidentally loathes a candidate that adheres to FDR's principles. As Bernie, who was born in 1941, stated in a November 2015 campaign speech at Georgetown University about democratic socialism, FDR stressed in his Second Bill of Rights speech that "real freedom must include economic security". "That was Roosevelt's vision seventy years ago", he declared. "It is my vision today". During that same campaign Bernie's older brother, Larry (b.1935), explained that the siblings and their peers grew up "in an environment where New Deal politics were quite normal. It was widely understood that the government could do good things". With post-Reagan Republicans deriding all social spending, and post-Clinton Democrats fetishizing private sector solutions to public problems, the origins of the Sanders brother's view of government's positive potential is well worth exploring.