By Dan Williams

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More likely than not, you have heard or will hear calls for a “return to the party of FDR” from liberals desperately trying to recover their party’s dignity from the humiliating results of November 2016. Unfortunately, whatever remains of old-fashioned Rooseveltism was rejected when they elected Tom Perez over Keith Ellison as the Democratic National Committee’s chairman.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (the most dictatorial president in American history, let us not forget) was the arch-Keynesian of the day. The idea was to use big government to create jobs through public-works projects, thus stimulating growth and lowering unemployment; welfare programs were created, designed to function as a safety net for those who had fallen on hard times. This, and a fortuitous war, eventually pulled America out of the Great Depression and into 25 years of spectacular economic growth.

The Keynesian style lay virtually untouched through the 1950s and 1960s, and with it came economic growth and prosperity almost unimaginable during the 1930s. Of course, some got a bigger slice of the pie than others, and there is certainly a story to be told about “the other America” during this period. Nevertheless, economically, things were pretty good. This led Richard Nixon, a conservative, to proclaim “We’re all Keynesians now.”

As tends to happen, the words were hardly out of his mouth when the economy started tanking. By the mid-1970s high inflation, high unemployment, an oil embargo, and an expensive war all contributed to a sick economy and a loss in confidence over Keynesian economics.

Moreover, people became more suspicious than ever of “big government.” The strangeness of the Kennedy assassination, where such basic facts as “How many bullets were fired?” and “How many gunmen were there?” could not be ascertained; Lyndon Johnson’s deceiving the public about Vietnam; Nixon’s involvement in the burglary of the Democratic headquarters; all these led to a deep distrust about what, exactly, was going on in Washington.

Then came Ronald Reagan, with his “big government is the problem not the solution” slogan and a paradigm shift in economic policy now known loosely as neoliberalism. Lower corporate taxes, fewer regulations, all in the hope of encouraging spending and a general flow of capital.

This more or less led to the prosperity of the Bill Clinton years, which, however rosy they may appear in the liberal memory, was essentially a continuation, if not an expansion, of neoliberal economics. Clinton, through a strategy known as triangulation, was basically able to do everything that the Republicans wanted to do — such as defund welfare with his ill-executed “from welfare to work” legislation — thus co-opting parts of the Republican platform and gaining access to traditionally Republican campaign donors while pleasing the gullible liberal herd by proposing legislation on Big Important Issues one week before dropping it the next. When people talk about the Democratic Party no longer having a soul, this is what they are referring to.

We’re almost to the current millennium. But is there anything much to add to the story? Another costly war, more ill-executed domestic policy (“No Child Left Behind,” or “The Standardization of Ignorance”); another recession caused by an unregulated Wall Street, followed by the biggest “redo” the playground kids have ever witnessed; health-care reform that began as “Romneycare.” Needless to say, we’re all neoliberals, not Keynesians, now.

Except, that is, for our current president. With a staff of self-proclaimed “economic nationalists,” it seems far more likely that any real shift in economic policy is going to happen from the Trump administration than whatever the Democrats decide to be next.