Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Yet both liberal and Fascist commentators identified a number of similarities between the socially oriented policies of the New Deal and Fascist ideas of collective consolidation. The consensus among political scientists and economists of the time was that the United States, under Roosevelt in the spring and summer of 1933, had, in a process of voluntary consolidation, transformed itself into a postliberal state. This synchronicity ended with America’s entry into World War II and the Allies’ victory over Fascism and National Socialism. Memories of the New Deal’s common roots with its enemies were repressed, and postwar America was free to enjoy a myth of immaculate conception when it came to the birth of the liberal-democratic welfare state. Roosevelt, no longer named in the same breath with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, posthumously became the patron saint of liberal democracy in its triumphant struggle against the forces of evil.