Status Updates From Fear Itself: The New Deal a...

“They claimed to be correcting the politics of division - whether between classes, factions, parties - in the public interest… The dictatorships defined superior, nonliberal democracy ‘as the absence of political division and the true representation of popular interests, the creation of a united mass public into a singular people capable of acting to solve society’s most pressing problems.’”

“Southern Democrats, by contrast, made up an essential and permanent part of the New Deal, for they commanded votes required for any of the domestic and international programs advanced by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to become law. The Jim Crow South was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.”

“Of The New Deal’s many achievements, none was more important than the demonstration that liberal democracy - a political system with a legislature at its heart - could govern effectively in the face of great danger.”