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Does the movement behind Bernie Sanders foreshadow a reincarnation of the New Deal? For many, the answer to this question would seem to be a clear yes. History doesn’t repeat itself, however, and the better answer is no. Spokespeople for Bernie’s campaign, including the candidate himself, make frequent references to the New Deal. Its landmark accomplishments in social welfare, labor rights, public works, and industrial and financial regulation echo through Sanders’s campaign literature and stump speeches. Indeed, a key plank in the Sanders platform, the Green New Deal, memorializes that epoch of deep structural reform. For many, restoring some version of the New Deal is the defining task of the moment, the far horizon of the possible. Images of the “forgotten man” and a third of a nation “ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed” travel well from the United States of the Great Depression to depictions of America after the Great Recession. Likewise, Sanders speaks of the homeless, of the immigrant poor and persecuted, of exploited workers, of the medically deprived and destitute. A moral vocabulary of economic and social justice, one that pits profiteers and predators against the working people of the country, resonates across the decades separating the two periods of upheaval. Sanders welcomes the hatred of billionaires with the same relish that FDR greeted the vitriol directed at him by the “economic royalists” of his day. Sanders and the movement behind him are not a mere repetition of the New Deal coalition, however. Times have changed. The Green New Deal is the most obvious example of a program designed to address a critical problem that didn’t exist a century ago. Other programmatic elements of the campaign tackle issues that the New Deal either avoided (racial justice) or only hinted at (universal health care) or, like climate change, were invisible to the naked eye (precarious labor, mass immigration, childcare, college education). Some of what the Sanders movement proposes is reminiscent of New Deal reforms but goes beyond them, as for example the call for joint labor-management control of industry. Nonetheless, the Sanders movement arguably remains within the horizon of political and economic reform first established by Roosevelt and the New Deal. Both aim at civilizing a barbaric free market capitalism that, left to its own devices, hollows out democracy and scandalizes the nation’s putative commitment to equality. One sometimes encounters personal likenesses drawn between Bernie and FDR. These may be tactical comparisons by Sanders partisans anxious to anesthetize the sting of the senator’s democratic socialism. But they also contain a sentimental truth. In the immemorial battle between wealth and commonwealth, both men, we are persuaded, knew which side they were on.

An Origin Story FDR and Bernie Sanders came from starkly different social circumstances. The Roosevelts, here for centuries, were part of the Anglo-Dutch Knickerbocker aristocracy. FDR was to that manner born, a member in good standing of the Hudson River elite that was landed, wealthy, and influential. The Sanders family were Jews from Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire), victimized, poor, powerless, and then largely exterminated in the Holocaust. Bernie’s father was a paint salesman in Brooklyn. The family struggled through hard times. Bernie depended on his native intelligence as well as New York City’s formerly tuition-free higher education system to move on to college and a modest rise in his social station. So what? It would be the height of simple-mindedness to conclude that social upbringing determines political fate. Many, perhaps most people born into wealth stay on the manor, in body and spirit. Roosevelt was exceptional in that regard, but not unique. Humble origins, on the other hand, are claimed by crowds of politicians whose sole commitment is to the almighty dollar and to those who have it. The reason to even bring up this obvious contrast in family background is to open up a window on just how different these two political break-points really are despite their evident similarities. Roosevelt was an insider. Bernie is an outsider. Roosevelt was a loyal Democrat. He was assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, became the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and New York’s governor later in that decade. His nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1932 was the outcome of backroom wheeling and dealing by political kingmakers at the party’s national convention. Sanders is not, first of all, a loyal Democrat, but an independent who even after ascending to the US Senate has mainly lived his political life on the outskirts. FDR did not come to power at the head of a mass movement. When he took office there was a deep reservoir of disgust with the old regime and hope in the new one and its promise of a “new deal” (Obama’s “yes we can” banalities come to mind). Although there were growing signs of rebellion — demonstrations of the unemployed, farmer insurgencies, the Bonus Army, direct actions to stop evictions, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign, and so on — none of it had any connection to Roosevelt’s candidacy. In its formative days, the Roosevelt administration awarded key positions to members of the old guard. The new president clung to antiquated orthodoxies about the need for balanced budgets. He had no particular affinity for the labor movement and would periodically stand aloof from it when it suited him. While some legislative initiatives did indeed break new ground (bank and stock market regulation or the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example), others were designed to support the country’s largest corporations. History is not a morality play. The point in recording the New Deal’s insider beginnings is not to create a rap sheet to taint its accomplishments. But it must be noted that, unlike FDR, if Bernie Sanders becomes president, he will do so not only as an outsider but as the leader of a mass movement. Sanders’s outlier status would not have much to do with an “alien” or “radical” ideology. He may wear the label of “democratic socialist” proudly, but very little of what he proposes to do as president has much to do with socialism, at least not as it is conventionally understood. Sanders is the candidate of the invisible America. That’s what alarms the establishment and inspires his supporters. His election to the presidency would be a stunning new departure in the American political landscape. People like Sanders simply don’t ever make it to the White House. Still, the characterization of the Sanders insurgency as a mass movement may yet be wishful thinking, or an optical illusion. It is occurring entirely within the electoral arena and has little to no organizational base outside of that arena. Sanders invokes the need for a mass movement to get him elected and to push through his agenda once he’s in office. Still, there’s no “there” there except for the campaign organization itself. There are a number of organizations that support his candidacy: local union affiliates, immigrant rights groups, environmental activists, racial justice movements, and so on. They function as vital auxiliaries, but it would be a stretch to consider them part of a coherent mass movement. William Jennings Bryan and the People’s (Populist) Party come to mind when thinking about the Sanders phenomenon. The Populists were outsiders, yet they operated within the Democratic and Republican parties as well as independently. It was a mass movement spanning the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, and parts of the West Coast. Populists often gave voice to anticapitalist ideas and sentiments, more explicitly and frequently than the Sanders upheaval. Even so, anticapitalism lies just beneath the surface of what the senator and his legions decry. Populism was the culmination of more than a decade of mass organizing and institution building, the fruit of a farmer-labor movement that embraced millions before deciding to form a party of its own. Much the same might be said about the Knights of Labor, which was already a formidable labor movement before it entered the political arena. In the Populist case, mass organization and resistance came first, and the electoral expression followed. The sequence seems to be reversed today. Can electoral politics really give rise to an enduring mass movement? Should we conceive of the Sanders phenomenon as a kind of political mass strike against the prevailing order of things? Is it the incubator of a mass movement, its beneficiary, or both? Dozens of ground-level mobilizations zero in on some aspect of the profound disaffection with the way things are, with the serial injustices and inequalities, the imperial callousness and bloodletting, the social ostracism and elite contempt that disfigure American life. They converge in the Sanders campaign, turning it into a movement of a new sort. We are, perhaps, entering uncharted territory. The Sanders campaign is unlike any of its rivals. This has much more to do with its poetry in motion, its elan, the way it summons the enthusiasm of millions living in domestic exile, its electrifying appeal to the solidarity of strangers, than its programmatic specifics (foundational as they most certainly are). This is what gives the campaign the feel of a mass movement. Other campaigns have their enthusiasts, gather large crowds, compile vast mailing lists, and on rare occasions helicopter into “bad neighborhoods,” places campaigns typically fear to tread. But they bear the imprint of the conventional. None would dream of describing themselves as a mass movement. The notion that they might need to invoke one to achieve their goals is unthinkable for political creatures bred within the prevailing order — in a word, to insiders. If Bernie Sanders wins the presidency, he will do so not despite the fact that he is an outsider, but because he is one. Contrast that with FDR, who won the White House in 1932 because he was, after all, an acceptable insider.

Not All Capitalisms Are Alike The New Deal and the Sanders insurgency reflect two very different historical crises. Their respective social composition and momentum call up political responses that may seem alike, but their structural logics travel down different roads. The New Deal consolidated mass-consumption capitalism as the solution to the Great Depression. Nearly every essential New Deal reform was, in one way or another, aimed at righting the ship by refurbishing it. Bank and stock market regulation would rein in the self-destructive speculation that had precipitated the 1929 crash. Public works would employ people, making them into active if modest consumers, and provide an outlet for idled pools of investment capital. State development projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (and smaller facsimiles elsewhere) would bring electricity to impoverished regions and pull them into the orbit of modern capitalism, turning them into new markets for consumer durables and sites of new business enterprises. A wealth tax would redistribute income to support the capacity of ordinary people to buy things. New federal agencies provided the financial wherewithal for people to hold onto their homes and farms, and in doing so reinvigorated a comatose business in private mortgages. Deficit spending, then still a heretical practice, was nonetheless pursued as a way to restart the economic engine, providing work and thereby spendable income. Above all, Social Security (especially unemployment insurance and pensions), minimum wage laws, and the legalization of unions were all designed, in part and explicitly, to rectify the gross decline in the social wage. Without these measures American capitalism faced a bleak and barbaric future. Fast forward to today, and one might imagine all this programmatic ingenuity getting dreamed up all at once in a policy atelier run by Elizabeth Warren. In real life, it happened in fits and starts. There were many false beginnings, aborted plans, contradictory impulses. Naturally, there was opposition. Banks and Wall Street firms balked. Sectors of heavy industry were at first coy and then hostile. So too were regional business and political elites as in the South. Mandarins and machine bosses in both political parties worried about their tenure. Orthodox intellectuals and mythologists of America as the homeland of the self-reliant were scandalized. Dramatic and romanticized renderings of what happened tend to depict this as a secular Armageddon: the People vs. the Interests, the Many vs. the Few, the Masses vs. the Classes, Democracy vs. Plutocracy. Yet it is important to observe that not all elements of the business and finance worlds were opposed to the New Deal. Mass consumption–oriented firms and banks as well as high-technology enterprises favored reform, even in the workplace. So too did circles of management-minded social scientists and engineers. Wall Street offered a good deal of opposition, but there were newer firms or firms operating outside the orbit of the long-established white-shoe investment and insurance houses that knew the old regime was kaput. Some of the biggest banks, like Bank of America, which were more oriented to the mass market, also favored New Deal reform. Still, there is an underlying truth to the romance that appeals to many even now. Millions swore by the New Deal and its wholesale reconfiguration of the economic order because they saw it as the royal road to social justice and equality, a way of righting the balance between wealth and commonwealth, a moral experiment in making capitalism democratic, a kind of emancipation from the absolutism of big business. Nor were they delusional. Whatever one might say about the putrescence of the National Labor Relations Act today, when it was passed and for years afterwards it invited a real, if limited, form of industrial democracy and dignity at the workplace where there had been none. Poverty with a safety net may still be poverty, but the social-welfare achievements of the New Deal were lifesaving for millions of the elderly, the unemployed, and single mothers. Socializing services like power generation, mass transit, and housing, however restricted in reach, created a palpable sense of the commons, a recognition that the community as a whole should take responsibility for the well-being and flourishing of everyone. Public support of the arts spiritualized that commitment. Legions of working people who for all practical intents and purposes had lived outside and excluded from the political system could now legitimately feel they had a voice. Mass-consumption capitalism was not merely a prescription for economic recovery. It entailed a remaking of the social order, a political program that sought to reconcile capitalism with democracy and update the “Rights of Man” to account for the advent of industrialization and concentrated capital. It was the product of a convergence of business and policy elites with a mass insurgency to form a coherent solution to a profound historical crisis. That is not what is happening now. As an economic order, neoliberal capitalism has stayed afloat by force-feeding the credit markets and outlets for speculative investment. This has made it precariously top-heavy in its distribution of income and wealth, debt-ridden, austere for all but the privileged, and crisis prone. As a political order it has become less and less legitimate, impatient with democracy, more open to demagogic authoritarianism. As it bleeds popular support to the right and the left, it may be holding out for a hero to regather the scattering remnants of the center. Joe Biden, however, is woefully miscast in that role. In the teeth of this dilemma, there is no discernible alternative on offer from sectors of the business and financial world as there was during the New Deal era. While the Roosevelt administration did indeed go off in all directions at once, thinking about the basic lineaments of mass-consumption capitalism had gone on for years before the Great Depression. Everything from Social Security and industrial democracy to proto-Keynesian fiscal policy, from innovative analyses of managerial capitalism to under-consumptionist rethinking of the business cycle, had circulated widely among public intellectuals, social scientists, social-welfare reformers, progressive politicians, some trade union leaders, foundation bureaucrats, heterodox financiers, production managers, and corporate innovators. They inhabited what might be called the waiting room to the New Deal and became major elite players when, finally, their time arrived. Today there is no analogous elite grouping, especially in the ranks of business and finance. There is a current which replicates New Deal approaches to financial reform, social welfare, and what used to be called the “labor question.” But this mainly excites middle-class reformers and what’s left of the national-level trade union bureaucracy. The Democratic Party establishment finds itself compelled by the threat of the Sanders insurgency to mouth this rhetoric for public consumption. Indeed, as an ideological-rhetorical platform, the Democratic Party has been dragged to the left by the power and threat of the mass movement, pledging to do things about labor reform, health care, and climate change that were unthinkable before the specter of Sanders spooked the system. But there is little doubt that after Obama’s “yes we can” disappointments, this will all become a thin gruel even if they get the chance to dole it out. These kinds of revived New Deal measures, however worth fighting for, will find little support from those centers of wealth and power that helped make those breakthroughs possible nearly a century ago. The business and financial world has moved on, sitting atop a system that can no longer afford the social wage that made it run.