Obama: An FDR progressive, whether hard-lining progressives believe it or not

A few days ago, in this space, I referenced, in partial defense of Barack Obama's economic policies, for which he's often taken a sound drubbing from the left, FDR's similarly cautious progressivism as perceived conservatism (and referenced again in this morning's column).

Indeed, some of Roosevelt's policies, notably the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the much-criticized and Supreme Court-outlawed National Recovery Administration, were unabashedly "corporatist."

For this effort I received, via email, considerable grief. FDR, I read more than once, was a man of the people, he fought for the little guy, he was a true progressive in finest form and I'm an idiot, and so on and so on.

There was a disconnect: I never denied FDR's progressivism or his historical place among "the people"; I was only pointing out that he approached it with ingenious caution -- at the time, the intellectual left labeled it insufferable "conservatism" -- much as Obama is doing today.

The New Deal, as radical 1960s historians rediscovered but disapproved of rather unenchantingly, was indeed strategically conservative in its progressivism. Because to move quickly, FDR was forced to rely on the (hoped-for) good intentions of those being regulated, whether they were banks, businessmen, farmers, or state relief agencies, while circumnavigating as best he could a prodigiously conservative, Southern Democratic Congress.

In general, FDR's Depression policies came to be seen by historians as a "holding operation" (as Cambridge University's American scholar Anthony Badger put it in his 1989 recap perspective, The New Deal).

Roosevelt could not have known this in 1933, but what he was holding for was the Second World War, which really did fundamentally alter the relationship between the federal government and the citizenry: war-production full employment, huge profits for big businessmen, the secure entrenchment of trade unions, new job opportunities for women and African Americans, and massive defense spending in the South (and West) that launched a regional face-lift.

I myself tend to view FDR's New Deal as a trifle more radical than Badger and others have, but there's one aspect of it that cannot be disputed: The hard left, at the time, detested much of it as an unconscionable sellout to the powers that be.

Sound familiar?