British Tory Leaders Now Look and Sound Like New Deal Democrats

By Cameron Hilditch

Monday, July 06, 2020

 

Political parties are protean by nature. It’s difficult to say anything about them that holds true over long periods of time. The Republican Party, for instance, has oscillated between pro-tariff isolationism and free-trade internationalism at fairly regular intervals during its history. Sometimes, however, recurring behaviors within parties persist over time, giving them a distinct flavor and identifiable character that remain consistent throughout their history.

 

The British Conservative Party is a case in point. At the end of the 19th century, the leader of the Liberals, William Harcourt, made the astute observation that the Conservatives “never yet took up a cause without betraying it in the end.” Over a hundred subsequent years of the Tories in government and in opposition have done nothing to weaken this claim. The unflinching willingness of the party to divest itself of any previously held principle or policy in order to win a majority in the House of Commons would be impressive if it wasn’t so completely amoral. Apart from a few brief periods of respite when some person of principle has managed to wrestle the reins of power away from agents of the status quo, the Conservative Party has operated with only two guiding principles in mind throughout its history: It is in favor of being in power, and it opposes being out of power.

 

The reply might come that every political party wants to be elected and triangulates its positions on some issue or another with that goal in mind, but a crucial distinction is necessary here. Most parties in Western democracies want to be in power in order to do something; the Tories will do anything simply to be in power. As Peter Hitchens has observed on numerous occasions, the Party’s only genuinely consistent purpose is to obtain office for the sons of gentlemen (“gentlemen” here meaning rich men from the right background, not well-mannered men of sound morals — think Rupert Murdoch, not Jimmy Stewart).

 

This was demonstrated yet again this week when the government announced that it intends to throw the politics of Margaret Thatcher overboard and embrace those of Franklin Roosevelt. More than any other Conservative prime minister in the past hundred years (yes, including Churchill, I maintain), Mrs. Thatcher actually wanted to lead the country during her premiership more than she wanted to be its leader. Her agenda, as Charles Moore has shown in his excellent recent biography, was driven by philosophical convictions and the unwavering execution of national policies that embodied them.

 

For most of her tenure she was regarded with suspicion by the parliamentary Conservative Party. She acceded to its leadership only because of the ingenious maneuvering of her great friend, Airey Neave. Mrs. Thatcher remade British conservatism in the classically liberal image of its American counterpart, and most of the affection that American conservatives have for the Tory Party can be traced to this brief convergence of outlook between Reagan Republicans and Thatcher Conservatives in the ’80s. However, by the early ’90s, Thatcher’s party had grown tired of her and proceeded to remove her from office shortly after her third general-election victory. The patrician paternalism of the ’60s and ’70s reasserted itself at the top of the party, and the Tories began to try on different sets of values in an attempt to coax the British electorate back into its embrace.

 

The 2020 iteration of British conservatism looks and sounds a lot like the left-of-center social-democracy politics of the pre-Sanders Democratic Party. Boris Johnson’s new electoral coalition is made up of a large number of traditionally Labour constituencies, and he has made clear that he intends to turn on the spending taps in an attempt to secure reelection when the time comes. Having modelled himself on Sir Winston Churchill for most of his public career, Johnson is now attempting to imitate FDR. No words of admiration for Stalin yet — but perhaps he can resist the urge to complete the Yalta set when it comes to his political role models.

 

But resisting urges has never been Boris’s strong suit. In an interview with Times Radio last week, Johnson declared,“This is the moment for a Rooseveltian approach to the U.K. The country has gone through a profound shock. But in those moments, you have the opportunity to change, and to do things better.” These sentiments were elaborated upon by the cabinet secretary, Michael Gove, in a speech he gave last week to the Ditchley Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes Anglo-American relations. Gove began by offering his own variation on the now-familiar theme, set forth in recent years by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, of the class malcontent whose furor is driving 21st-century populist politics. Gove then proceeded to advocate the Roosevelt treatment for these social, economic, and political ailments:

 

FDR managed to save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, [and] renovate the reputation of government. He set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades — and enabled America to emerge from a decade of peril with the system, and society, that the free citizens of the rest of the world most envied.

 

According to Gove, this will involve “a change in structure, ambition, and organization” for government in the UK, with a view to enlarging the “ambition in scope” of the state. The section of Gove’s speech most likely to make American conservatives wince is this hymn of praise to “experimentation”:

 

The experience of FDR and his administration was that it was only through big risks, and radical experiments, that progress could be assured. Many of the programs initiated as part of the New Deal failed on their own terms. But, overall, the re-orientation of government to help the Forgotten Man, to restore hope in place of fear, to change government so it worked for all citizens and to be bold and restless in experimentation of new ways of working succeeded.

 

Only a few months ago the prime minister stood at the podium of the British Policy Exchange at the launch of Charles Moore’s aforementioned biography and sang the praises of Mrs. Thatcher. At one point in his speech, with the exultant call-and-response fervor of an evangelical preacher, he asked his audience, “What would Maggie do?!”

 

It’s patently obvious that Johnson’s brand of no-principles politics is as far from the Conservative triumphs of the ’80s as the East is from the West, but (the departure from Thatcherism aside) are these sort of New Deal policies even advisable? Jonah Goldberg has written extensively about the unabashedly fascist nature of many New Deal initiatives. FDR’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, felt the need to warn Roosevelt that the public tended “to unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt.” Mussolini himself wrote an admiring essay on America’s 32nd president, in which he extolled the decline in the United States of ideas such as liberalism and democracy:

 

America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an “état majeur.” There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things.

 

FDR’s breathtakingly illiberal domestic measures, which included throwing the owner of a small dry cleaner’s shop in prison for charging 35 cents for his services instead of the government-mandated 40 cents, have been largely passed over because of his wartime leadership. After WWII, it’s difficult to take seriously a list that places him alongside Hitler or Mussolini. When the war was winding down, however, Roosevelt approached the multilateral discussions about its geopolitical end-state with the view that Soviet expansionism would be a lesser evil after the war than Britain’s retention of imperial territories. The USSR offended his democratic sensibilities less than the British Empire did. Needless to say, this was to FDR’s eternal shame and to the (not inconsiderable) consternation of Winston Churchill.

 

Moreover, Roosevelt’s domestic policies did real and lasting damage at home. By the time the war broke out, The United States had still not returned to pre-crash employment levels. After 1932, the year of FDR’s election, other countries that had been badly hit by the crash — such as Japan, Greece, Romania, New Zealand, Chile, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden — all began to see their industrial production levels rise again. The same was not true in the U.S. As the president himself admitted, it was not “Dr. New Deal” but “Dr. Win-the-War” that truly finished off the Great Depression. Many economists believe that some of FDR’s economic policies actually worsened the state of the American economy. The Wagner Act, by raising the minimum wage, made it even more difficult for the poor to find gainful employment at a time when jobs were already scarce. Furthermore, as Amity Shlaes has observed, the volatility of the American stock market in the 1930s was entirely out of hand. Along with the low points brought about by the onset of the Depression, the ’30s also saw seven of the ten biggest “up” days for the Dow Jones in the 20th century.

 

Why this level of erratic behavior? During the Roosevelt administration, Americans lost confidence in themselves as investors. Under FDR, making a good investment in the stock market involved being able to predict what new seismic piece of economic regulation was currently being dreamed up in the mind of  Rexford Tugwell or another of Roosevelt’s apparatchiks. Expecting a stable stock market and a healthy economy at a time when the success of investors and of businesses depends on their ability to correctly predict the actions of a small group of commissars in Washington is nothing but wish-casting. People might as well consult the Oracle at Delphi or bird entrails for all the economic good it would do them.

 

Nevertheless, there are worrying signs in Michael Gove’s speech that the British government might be tempted to engage in this kind of central planning of the British economy. Gove laments the dearth of bureaucrats “who have qualifications or expertise in mathematical, statistical, and probability questions.” He further expresses the need “to ensure more policymakers and decision makers feel comfortable discussing the Monte Carlo method or Bayesian statistics,” and he would like to see “more of those in Government … equipped to read a balance sheet and discuss what constitutes an appropriate return on investment.”

 

This sounds like nothing so much as the deification of mathematical approaches to political issues championed by the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Cummings approaches politics with the wrong theory of knowledge. He believes that the granular particularities of human life and action kind can be boiled down to a manipulable set of numbers that a group of quant-geeks in a government office can move around to make things better for everyone. The way that he and the prime minister, who depends on him to an unhealthy degree, approach the economy is very much according to Leon Trotsky’s means in pursuit of Oren Cass’s ends. British citizens will have to get used to being Cummings’s guinea pigs for the next few years, at least.

 

The upshot of all this is that Americans should be grateful for a conservative tradition that is anchored in a written constitution with a set of clearly defined political commitments. Lacking the principles of 1776 or any broadly shared sense of Christian duty, conservatism in Great Britain often conserves little apart from the power of the privileged few to practice their experiments on the rest of us.

There Is No New Deal

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

In his piece “There Is No Green New Deal,” Charlie writes:

What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrust upon our national conversation is not, in any sense, a “Green New Deal.” It does not resemble a Green New Deal. It does not approximate a Green New Deal. It does not so much as represent the shadows or the framework or the embryo of a Green New Deal. It is, instead, the inchoate shopping list of a political novice who has managed to get herself elected to Congress and believes that this has turned her into a visionary.

I agree with that, but it’s worth reminding folks that there was never any single coherent thing called “the New Deal.” From the beginning, FDR was clear that he was winging it. At Oglethorpe University, he famously set the tone for what they were up to: “bold, persistent experimentation.” He added, “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Roosevelt fans on the left — and of late on the right — have lionized FDR’s “pragmatism” ever since. But this is a terrible credo for a nation committed to the idea that we live under the rule of law, not of men. Some avenues are supposed to be closed off from “experimentation.” Let’s try getting rid of the Bill of Rights for a bit and see if we can’t get great things done! Let’s be — as Tom Friedman puts it — “China for a Day.” Implicit in the idea of experimentation from Washington is the idea that planners should not be constrained. Implicit in the idea of a constitutional republic is that they should be. As we put it in our editorial on the Green New Deal, “The Left really has only one idea: control” — and that is the idea implicit in New Deal–style “experimentation.”

But there’s something else implicit in the idea of such experimentation: a total lack of policy coherence.

The New Deal cargo-cultists have a vexing habit of pointing at the things they like or liked about the New Deal and saying, “That’s the New Deal.” So they like Social Security but are silent — usually from ignorance — about the policies that caused blacks to protest the NRA (National Recovery Administration) as the “Negro Run Around” and “Negroes Ruined Again.” They like all the government makework for artists and writers but don’t talk about the little things, like Jacob Maged or the scuttling of the London Economic Conference, that helped deepen the Depression.

The simple fact, as I argued here, is there was no single New Deal (which is one reason why historians talk about the second New Deal, which produced most of the stuff people associate with the good New Deal). It was the steady pursuit of control and constantly updated wish lists. As FDR told Congress in 1936:

We have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.

In other words, so long as we have the power, whatever we want to do is “wholesome and proper.” But if our political opponents get power, look out!

“I want to assure you,” FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”

The New Deal wasn’t a program, it was the by-product of ad hoc experimentation by people who thought their own power was self-justifying. And to look back on it as somehow more coherent than the would-be Green New Deal is to give it too much credit.

“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of his rule, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940 — whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

It was control. And wish lists. And it was ever thus.

The First Nationalist

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Professor Samuel H. Beer of Harvard, once a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, lived nearly a century, from 1911 to 2007. If he’d lived a bit longer, he might have made a good speechwriter for Donald Trump.

In 1979 (about the time of my first political memories: inflation and gasoline rationing), Professor Beer took to the pages of The New Republic to advise a struggling President Jimmy Carter, offering him a way forward: nationalism. Nationalism, he wrote, was the real theme of FDR’s administration and of the New Deal. What Roosevelt was after wasn’t a socialist-style redistribution of income but a redistribution of power: among competing economic and social groups, to be sure, but, most important, to Washington, with the national government guiding the nation in an unprecedentedly direct manner toward the national ends defined by the president. Professor Beer wrote:

Franklin Roosevelt’s nationalism was, first, a doctrine of federal centralization. The principle of federal activism, which some have seen as the principal dividing line in American politics since the 1930s, was introduced by the New Deal. But Roosevelt called not only for the centralization of government, but also for the nationalization of politics.

Those masochists familiar with the grotesque thing currently calling itself The New Republic will be surprised to learn that, in the view of one of its most distinguished contributors, the great hope for progressive victories was to be found in nationalism, and that the great obstacle to progressive achievement was identity politics — “pluralism,” in the language of the time. As I have said on too many occasions, more Beer:

In recent years American politics has been distracted by a new and destructive pluralism. This new pluralism disorganizes public policy and sets group against group. Its paralyzing and disorienting effects challenge citizens, leaders and above all the president to elicit and affirm a new nationalism that will again put us in mind of what makes us a people and again give direction to our public affairs.

It is significant that my National Review colleague Conrad Black has in these pages and elsewhere made original and eloquent defenses of two American presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Donald J. Trump. Black’s biography Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom is one of the finest things ever written about Roosevelt, who emerges in Black’s telling not as a lefty antecedent to Bernie Sanders but as a thoroughgoing nationalist, one committed to that “principle of federal activism” that Professor Beer wrote about, whose purpose was to bend the fractious political, regional, and economic blocs to a unified national purpose: recovering from the Depression, first, and then beating back savagery abroad.

As Jonah Goldberg and others have noted, the rhetoric, imagery, and iconography of the New Deal were frankly nationalistic: all those Roman eagles and heroic bas-reliefs. Goldberg has covered this at length, but it is worth remembering that all that fascist-style architecture in Washington memorializes a phenomenon that went well beyond building style. Eugene Kontorovich writes in City Journal:

Today, it might seem improbable that American government projects would decorate themselves with symbols of European fascism, whatever the enthusiasms of architects. But at the time, Mussolini was widely admired by Americans for getting Italy back on its feet. . . . American leaders reflected this benign view of Il Duce. Then in charge of federal building programs, the Treasury Department directed the Federal Triangle office-construction project. Andrew Mellon, who served as Treasury secretary until 1932, personally oversaw much of the planning and design for it. He was an early and durable Mussolini fan, who, among other things, helped the Italian regime secure favorable terms for its World War I debt. Mellon urged that Italian economic policies be imported into the New Deal.

FDR sent aides to Italy to study Mussolini’s social-insurance policies and housing programs. As New Dealers including FDR himself would later acknowledge, Mussolini’s radical economic nationalism seemed benign, even salutary, when Il Duce was still maintaining some semblance of parliamentary democracy, before he entered into his subordinate alliance with Adolf Hitler. The Depression seemed at the time to represent a failure of global capitalism, and Mussolini seemed to have discovered a way to press economic resources into the service of the public good — the national interest — in a way that free markets did not.

That idea remains very much with us: Barack Obama’s spoke of “economic patriotism,” an idea dear to President Trump, and he self-consciously imitated Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” even going so far as to deliver a speech on the theme at the site of TR’s original “New Nationalism” speech. “I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own,” he said, which was if anything anodyne compared to TR’s version, which calls to mind the rhetorical excesses of Elizabeth Warren: “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well-used. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

The words “permit it” speak to the divide between traditional conservatives on the classical-liberal model and the (New) New Nationalists on the Roosevelt-Obama-Trump model. This permission mentality touches every aspect of nationalist economic thinking, which is how such meaningless bookkeeping exercises as the calculation of trade deficits and income inequality come to be understood as pressing national concerns. Putting markets under economic discipline is where progressivism, socialism, fascism, and nationalism all intersect, each of those ideas being based on the superstition that the nation has interests distinct from those of the people who compose the nation.

Goldberg’s argument in Liberal Fascism was scorned by progressives (many of whom obviously had not actually read the book) who took his connection of progressivism to fascism as serving a merely pejorative purpose rather than a substantive one. But as Professor Beer wrote a generation ago, the question of federal activism is central to our politics, and nationalism is the spiritual energy of such activism. President Trump understands the federal government not as a guarantor of liberty but as an activist champion for American business interests, and nationalist hocus-pocus is deployed to prevent such inconvenient questions as why the interests of Americans who sell steel should trump the interests of Americans who buy steel, or why we should encourage automobile manufacturing rather than software engineering, commercial space exploration, or medical research.

The question of nationalism and its consequences for the federal government goes back to the beginning of our history. And while FDR’s rural-electrification and public-works projects have more than a little in common with Abraham Lincoln’s “improvements” — the canals and railroads he understood as national projects — it is Franklin Roosevelt (and not his cousin) who holds the best claim to being the father of modern American nationalism.

The family tree of American political ideas is complex. President Trump may have as his antecedents such figures as George Wallace and Ross Perot (both populists and economic nationalists), but he also owes something to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The New Deal’s most lasting and popular legacy is Social Security, the most significant defender of which is, at this moment, Trump.

Like FDR, Trump came to power during a period of isolationist sentiment, and, like FDR, his administration has honored that sentiment more in rhetoric than in fact. American nationalism is not in the main isolationist, isolationism having its American home among government-wary libertarians rather than among national-greatness men with a taste for federal activism. Nationalism in domestic matters paired with internationalism abroad is the American mode. Trump is faulted for rupturing multinational relationships, but consider William Leuctenberg’s account of FDR spurning the internationalist approach to ending the Depression:

FDR essentially embraced a form of economic nationalism and committed the United States to solving the Depression on its own. He scuttled the London Economic Conference in the summer of 1933 and devalued the dollar by removing the United States from the international gold standard. With this latter maneuver, Roosevelt sought to artificially inflate the value of the American dollar in the hope of putting more currency into the hands of cash-poor Americans. Unfortunately, this measure further destabilized the world economy.

Conservatives have a conflicted view of government. Many who revile FDR as the root of all welfare-statist evil revere Ronald Reagan, who insisted all his life that he was an FDR Democrat whose former party had simply gone insane. But if you won’t have what the rest of the world knows as “liberalism” — which is the nemesis of nationalism — then you will pay your respects to FDR, and to the welfare state with which his nationalism was inseparably connected. That conservatives in pursuit of “American greatness” have found hope and comfort in President Trump’s strong-arm economic nationalism testifies that the Right has finally made its peace with the New Deal after all, under the most unlikely of circumstances.