“The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Donald Trump's senior advisor, Steve Bannon, recently told the Hollywood Reporter about his grand plans for a massive new spending program. “I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. … It's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Although, as a conservative, I find the description of the 1930s as an “exciting” time to be a bit odd, Bannon's sneak preview should be somewhat reassuring to those liberals who see Trump as a stark repudiation of Barack Obama. When Obama came into office eight years ago, Time magazine depicted the new president as FDR with the headline “The New New Deal.”

For years, MSNBC ran ads calling for more New Deal-style spending on big projects. Host Rachel Maddow was constantly demanding more Hoover Dams. “People tell us no, no, no, we're not going to build it,” she said to the camera. “Other countries have great things in their future. China can afford it. We can't.”

She then replied to these unnamed naysayers: “You're wrong, and it doesn't feel right to us, and it doesn't sound right to us because that's not what America is.”