Both the New Deal and Obamacare are examples of corporate liberalism. Neither were socialist nor radical. Both were opposed by both the left and right wings. Both were attempts to prevent truly radical reform. Both faced many problems at the start but ultimately did help many people, though not as much as if they had been true reforms.

1. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Compared to Obamacare
The New Deal committed the federal government to intervening for average people for
the first time, not just wealthy elites. It led to measurably better lives for all Americans. Social
Security is the most successful anti poverty program in US history, and poverty is the biggest
cause and most reliable predictor of early deaths. Recognition of unions, unemployment
insurance, a 40 hour work week, and child labor laws all are successful anti poverty practices
that led to longer, healthier lives. Roosevelt's New Deal for Indians also brought self
determination for Native tribes, leading to their economic success and longer life spans.
Almost 80 years later, the New Deal remains controversial. Many conservatives despise
it, understandably since its success contradicts much of their philosophy. Some wealthy elites
hated Roosevelt so much they plotted to overthrow him and put in a fascist dictatorship, the
American Liberty League’s “business plot.”
In his own time, Roosevelt was often falsely accused of being a socialist by those on the
right. In fact, Roosevelt was from one of the wealthiest and most elite families in US history. No
other president had so many ancestors on the Mayflower, or a family fortune so large.
Actual socialists opposed Roosevelt almost as strongly as those on the right. Huey Long,
for example, was a Socialist Party member as a young man. Under his proposed Share the
Wealth program every family was to have a guaranteed minimum income of $5000. No family
fortune could be over $50 million while no person could make over $5 million per year. (In
today’s terms, multiply by five.) Long’s Share the Wealth Clubs had over 8 million members.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was corporate liberalism, not socialism. Corporate liberalism,
like the name implies, benefits large business as much as the public and has as its goal just

2. enough reform to satisfy the public and avoid truly radical solutions. Roosevelt bailed out the
banks and had the government insure them. A socialist would seize the banks. Roosevelt
regulated Wall Street to make it safer for investors. A socialist would take over Wall Street or
shut it down.
Roosevelt also passed the Wagner Act, recognizing union rights for the first time. But
where a socialist would bring unions into the government, Roosevelt sought government control
over unions. Unions now had to apply to the federal government to be certified. The federal
government today routinely de certifies and strips of recognition over 400 union locals each
year. Imagine how hard a time any other lobbyists would have, from gun rights to abortion to
feminists to religious groups, were the government to shut down 400 of their chapters every year.
The New Deal also turned to using the federal government to boost the economy by
creating demand. The government bought up crops and meat, or paid farmers to grow less to
raise the price. Again, a socialist would buy or seize farms to make them government run, not
buy farmers’ goods to make farmers more money.
The government hired over 9 million workers for public works projects, building roads,
dams, bridges, bringing electric power to rural America for the first time, and creating 800 new
national parks. In terms of building infrastructure and providing relief, public works were a
double success. These government created jobs were the closest the New Deal ever came to
partial socialism. But broader measures of the New Deal called the National Recovery Act were
shut down by the courts.
What infuriates conservatives the most is that the New Deal worked, and that
conservative economic practices obviously both created and worsened the Depression. What
much of the public does not realize is that there were actually two waves to the Great

3. Depression, the better known one starting in 1929, another in FDR’s second term. What created
the first was over reliance on wealthy elites' spending, in other words, inequality.
Libertarian economists like Milton Friedman claimed the opposite, that the government
caused the Depression by failing to expand the money supply. It is more than a little ironic, a
libertarian complaining of not enough government intervention. The bigger criticism of
Libertarianism generally is that there has never been a nation or society where it is shown to
have existed, let alone worked. For all their claims of loving, wanting, and promoting freedom,
Libertarian policies have been tried exactly twice, first under the military dictatorship of Chile,
where they worsened the lives of most Chileans, enriching elites while others were worse off.
Friedman's disciples in the dictatorship gave Chile higher unemployment, more debt, more
bankruptcies, a sharp drop in wages, and almost destroyed Chilean public education.
After military dictators, Friedman’s second best known disciple was Alan Greenspan,
longtime Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His reliance on Friedman’s ideas was one the biggest
causes of the Great Recession in 2007. Greenspan publicly apologized before Congress for his
failures, admitting his mistakes, including that he did not even fully understand what happened.
What caused the second economic slump in the Great Depression was cuts in government
spending. Much like many of today’s conservatives, elites in the 1930s worried about a growing
federal deficit. So to lower that deficit, New Deal programs were cut during FDR's second term.
Predictably, cutting back on demand led to another economic slump. When World War II began,
high wartime demand led to greater prosperity, for once shared by the majority. The destruction
of World War II removed most economic competition, continuing American boom times.
Unions helped spread that prosperity. Unions plus FDR plus World War II turned the
US from a mostly poor nation to a mostly middle class nation, both in incomes and

4. attitudes. Today the US is the only nation where most working class people from janitors to
secretaries think of themselves as middle class. Many well off professionals such as lawyers and
upper management pose as middle class as well.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment the New Deal could point to was Social Security.
The elderly, who had been the poorest age group in the US, are now the wealthiest. Like many
other Roosevelt accomplishments, he was pushed from farther to the left but then altered the idea
in line with corporate liberalism.
Huey Long and Francis Townsend first proposed and popularized Social Security. Long
was both a US Senator and Governor of Louisiana. Townsend was a doctor and elderly activist.
Together with Reverend Charles Coughlin, they formed the Union of Social Justice Party, a
leftist coalition opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal as not going far enough. Coughlin is often
falsely portrayed as a fascist because of his later anti Antisemitism, but had not made his hatred
of Jews public at the time the Union Party was formed.
Roosevelt's advisers, often called the Brain Trust, especially Frances Perkins, Louis
Brandeis, Harry Hopkins, Felix Frankfurter, and Harold Ickes, formulated the New Deal.
FDR himself was very non-dogmatic, willing to try one idea after another and discard any part of
the New Deal that either did not work or faced too much opposition.
Social Security in the beginning was not only less generous than Long and Townsend
wanted. It was limited to only about half of all workers. Farmers, farm workers, servants,
merchant marines, and manual laborers were left out, which meant that a much higher number of
American Indians, Asians, Blacks, and Latinos were not eligible. Most women could not get SS
either, except through their husbands. Some scholars have misinterpreted early SS to be
deliberately racist. This is false. In part FDR agreed to these exclusions to please southern

5. racists. In part these exclusions were because the program was at first partly under the control of
state governments, and their leaders were often racist.
It is also worth noting, given all the resistance to Obamacare and complaints about its
slowness, that SS was passed in 1935. No one received an SS check until five years later, in
1940. And just like with Obamacare, there was enormous resistance, with many of the people it
would help the most trying to avoid signing up. One of my grandfathers, a sawmill worker
during the Great Depression, thought the worst about SS for decades and believed every
falsehood put out by opponents. But when he was finally old enough to need it, he accepted it
and was glad for the help.
The more important and often overlooked point about SS is how it was passed and why it
has remained so long. The SS tax is regressive, meaning that the wealthy pay less than
everyone else. By law, one only pays SS tax on the first $110,000 of income. So someone
making $110,000 a year pays the same as Bill Gates, who is worth over $60 billion. Even noted
liberals like Ted Kennedy never tried to challenge this reverse Robin Hood tax. SS supporters
fear that if the wealthy have to pay more than the middle and working class, or even the same,
elites will try to overturn the law.
Fear of losing elite support is also the reason that SS is paid to the wealthy who do not
need it. In a fairer system, the wealthy would pay a progressive SS tax much like on income tax,
and only the working class (including the many who imagine themselves to be middle class)
would get Social Security. Such a fairer system would also not be facing funding problems.
Seemingly the only way to permanently protect SS would be either to break the power of
wealthy elites or, more realistically, protect SS by passing a constitutional amendment.
One final accomplishment of Roosevelt’s was the New Deal for Indians. John

6. Collier, Director of the Indian Bureau, formulated it. This ended the utter control that white
government agents had on reservations and returned self rule to Native tribes. The New Deal for
Indians also ended forced assimilation in boarding schools that killed thousands of Native
children and destroyed cultures and languages. In its place came bilingual and bi cultural
education that preserved Native cultures and taught self sufficiency on Native terms.
Allotment, the breakup of tribal land bases, also came to an end. Tribal councils
unfortunately today often resemble boards of directors for corporations more than traditional
councils. Collier's laws set up councils based on majority rule, where most tribes traditionally
ruled by consensus or by councils of respected elders. Some tribes like the Navajo chose to
create tribal governments outside of the new rules and closer to their traditions, and they are far
closer to traditional councils and more responsive to their people’s needs.