A Democratic president’s economic agenda is a failure, lost to business class acquiescence, the embrace of austerity, and an overall lack of vision.

This was the conclusion of The New Republic, summarizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal in May 1940. Though there were “extraordinary accomplishments” to acknowledge, the magazine understood that the New Deal was a “failure in the central problem.” That central problem was the economic question, and there, the Roosevelt administration had “fail[ed] to discover or apply a genuine remedy for the stagnation of our economy and for unemployment.” Beyond the failure of vision, it “heeded business advice, at least in part, by trying to cut recovery expenditures” and engage in other forms of austerity.

Though the magazine believed the New Deal did more for the general welfare than any other administration, and even helped shift the ideological space against laissez-faire conservatism, they weren’t sure whether they could say they supported it. “If the New Deal is to deserve our support in the future, it must not rest on what it has already done, great as that is, but tell us how it is going to finish the task.”

In other words, being disappointed in Democratic presidents is what opinion editors refer to as “evergreen” content. It’s always ready to go, and always applicable with a built-in audience. With this in mind, political scientist Adolph Reed has a cover story in the latest Harper’s, Nothing Left, making the case against President Obama and for the idea that liberalism is currently exhausted.

Much of the text is focused on the well-rehearsed argument that President Obama is much more conservative than people understand, and that the Clinton years were nothing to get nostalgic over. There’s nothing particularly new there to dislodge people’s feelings on those matters one way or the other. And most of the responses have been focused on “electoral nihilism” of the piece, and the various other implications about electoral strategy and grassroots energy.