04-11-2018, 06:51 PM
(04-11-2018, 12:54 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(04-09-2018, 01:38 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:I have heard that Eisenhower and Jerry Ford both are to the left of most Democrats these days. Do you feel that the latter was the last moderate Republican to get anywhere?(04-08-2018, 11:31 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: FDR would be a Republican today. I'm surprised blues aren't calling for the removal of his monument too like their doing with Jefferson.
No, FDR would be a radical green or democratic socialist today. He would probably be to the left of Bernie Sanders. We have regressed so far backward that FDR would be on the far left today.
It is unwise in the extreme to try to discern what some person from the past would think on contemporary politics or 'issues'. What sort of political figure would Napoleon Bonaparte be today? That is an absurd question in the extreme. He may have been a liberal reformer by the standards of the time, and in a speculative history, the best thing for most of Europe would have been to accept his political reforms while rejecting his personality. We cannot know how Karl Marx would have dealt with technological changes that mandated that the capitalist class make a consumer class out of the theretofore exploited and abused proletariat. Even with someone who could be alive (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), we cannot say how he would stand on same-sex marriage. A man of his time, he probably saw homosexuality as absurd and vile back in the 1960s. But he has been dead for half a century, and we cannot assume that he would have gone along with the idea that same-sex rights are human rights... let alone when.
Of course Donald Trump is so reactionary that he would seem happier in the 1920s than in any subsequent generation. Had he lived in the 1850s would Donald Trump want America to rejoin the British empire? That is an absurd question in the extreme.
Donald Trump is the dictionary definition of a reactionary.The economic reforms of FDR have reshaped America in ways that preclude any return to earlier times. The 1920s were a marvelous time for the economic elites, but not so great for anyone else. Life expectancy was decidedly shorter, especially for laborers. The automobiles and roads were far more dangerous than what we would now tolerate. Race relations were simple: one was a Yankee WASP or one was a lesser person with a rigid hierarchy in tow. Old people in industrial occupations typically worked until they dropped dead of old age (heart attack, stroke) or, worse, got killed in industrial accidents while perhaps taking other along with them to the Great Hereafter. Financial shenanigans were the norm,and bank balances were uninsured. Billowing smoke from factories and vile effluents in waters were alleged signs of progress instead of noxious pollution that we would not tolerate today. Workers of all kinds toiled far longer for much less -- and profits were a bigger share of GNP. The only thing better about that time, so far as I could tell, us that real estate was not then so expensive and commutes were not so long. Of course there were far fewer Americans. Note that I said nothing about technology; medicine (before among other things, antibiotics) was primitive by current standards -- and awful --- but most people today would adapt more readily to 1920s technology (except in medicine) more readily than they would have adjusted to the sixty-to-seventy hour workweeks. The bathtub gin and moonshine available in the areas that the Feds missed during Prohibition were as easily poison as illicit delight.
Neither Eisenhower not Ford really challenged the New Deal. They were not fools. Donald Trump is a fool and a reactionary.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.